UNITED STATES
Flags ordered to half-mast
President Barack Obama on Tuesday ordered flags to be flown at half-mast until Saturday in honor of five servicemen who died in a shooting rampage in Tennessee last week. Four marines and one sailor were killed when 24-year-old Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez opened fire on two military centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The gunman died in a shootout with police. Obama ordered the flags lowered “as a mark of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence.” He said: “I hereby order that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half-staff at the White House and upon all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the federal government.” He also ordered flags at embassies, consulates, military facilities and naval vessels abroad to be flown at half-mast. The directive is in place until sunset on Saturday. “Our thoughts and prayers as a nation are with the service members killed last week in Chattanooga. We honor their service,” Obama said. Investigators are looking into motives behind the killings, with authorities probing Abdulazeez’s travel abroad and his communications and activities on social media. Authorities have said they are treating the case as an “act of terrorism.”
UNITED STATES
Swift gets nods from MTV
Taylor Swift led nominations for the MTV Video Music Awards, but was embroiled in controversy when rapper Nicki Minaj suggested she was passed over because of racial bias. The premier music video event announced on Tuesday that Swift was in the running in nine categories for two hits from her blockbuster album 1989. The host of the Aug. 30 gala in Los Angeles is to be singer Miley Cyrus. Minaj, one of the top female stars in hip-hop, criticized MTV’s choices and hinted that she herself was ignored for Video of the Year as she is a fulsome African-American woman. She said that her video for Anaconda broke what was then a record for first-day views and turned into a popular meme for Halloween costumes. “When the other girls drop a video that breaks records and impacts culture, they get that nomination,” she wrote on Twitter. “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year,” she tweeted. “Black women influence pop culture so much but are rarely rewarded for it,” she wrote. Anaconda was nominated in three categories, including Best Female Video and Best Hip-Hop Video.
UNITED STATES
John Kasich enters race
Ohio’s John Kasich, a blunt Republican governor known for defying his party, on Tuesday became the 16th notable Republican contestant to enter next year’s presidential race. A veteran representative as well as second-term governor, Kasich told voters that he is the only Republican candidate with experience in three broad areas of political leadership — the federal budget, national security and state government. He also spent nearly a decade at Lehman Brothers. “I have the experience and the testing,” he said. “The testing which shapes you and prepares you for the most important job in the world, and I believe I know how to work and help restore this great United States.” Kasich ran for president once before, briefly seeking the 2000 nomination after he helped seal a federal balanced-budget deal as House Budget chairman in 1997. Since then he put in nearly a decade as an investment executive and more than four years of strong-willed and often abrasive leadership as governor of a swing state. Kasich was at the bottom of early national polls.
CHINA
Air pollution levels fall
Air pollution levels in the cities improved in the first six months of this year, environmental campaign group Greenpeace said yesterday, but remained far worse than global and domestic standards. Average levels of PM2.5 — airborne particulates small enough to deeply penetrate the lungs — declined 16 percent in 189 cities that were ranked both this year and last, Greenpeace said in a press release. Only 18 cities showed increases, it added, on the basis of local government air quality readings it compiled. In Beijing, PM2.5 levels fell 15.5 percent in January-June from the same period a year earlier, it said — but they still averaged 77.8 micrograms per cubic meter. The WHO’s recommended maximum annual average is 10.
JAPAN
Zoo does cockroach PR
A zoo is trying to do the impossible — improve the image of cockroaches, putting on an exhibition of one of the world’s most hated insects. With a whopping — and disgusting — 4,000 species around the planet, the hardy creature can survive almost anywhere, but is most commonly encountered by city-dwellers in grubby corners of the kitchen, or roaming around the floor at night. Staff at Shunanshi Tokuyama Zoo in Yamaguchi say the cockroach gets a bad press, and actually performs a vital job. “They have such a negative image,” a zoo spokeswoman said. “But they’re actually playing an important role in the food chain.” Important, but not very pleasant sounding: eating rotting carcasses and dead plants on forest floors. One highlight of the exhibition will be a five-way race among cockroaches, where visitors can watch the worryingly speedy bugs whizz down a track. If that is not entertainment enough — hard to credit — the zoo is offering the chance to get your hands on a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach, which can grow as long as 7cm.
AUSTRALIA
Bardot slams feral cat cull
French actress Brigitte Bardot has condemned a plan to cull 2 million feral cats to stop them harming native animals, a proposal animal rights groups said yesterday was unlikely to be successful. Feral cats have been identified as the main culprit behind Australia’s high rate of mammal extinction, with more than 10 percent of species wiped out since Europeans settled there two centuries ago. Minister of the Environment Greg Hunt has said the advice he has received is that the cats number 20 million across the country and devour countless native animals every night. “They are tsunamis of violence and death for Australia’s native species,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp last week. Hunt said a target of eradicating 2 million feral cats had been set for 2020, in addition to creating feral-free enclosures to aid the recovery of birds and mammals among other measures.
PAKISTAN
Court to hear ‘blasphemer’
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to hear an appeal by a Christian woman against her death sentence for blasphemy, lawyers said, in a case that has drawn criticism from rights campaigners. Asia Bibi, a mother of five, has been on death row since 2010 after being convicted of insulting the Islamic Prophet Mohammed during a row over drinking water with Muslim women with whom she was working in a field. Bibi’s death sentence was confirmed in October last year by the high court in Lahore. She denies the charges against her and in November last year appealed against the death sentence.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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