MALI
Explosion kills five soldiers
Five soldiers were killed on Friday and four others wounded in the nation’s north when their vehicles were hit by an explosion, authorities said. “Two vehicles from the Malian armed forces were blown up by an improvised explosive device causing the death of five Malian soldiers and wounding four others,” an army statement said. The government pledged in the statement that “everything will be done to locate and bring those responsible to justice” for the attack between the localities of Ansongo and Indelimane.
VENEZUELA
Poll outlines shortages
More than 80 percent of basic consumer products, including food and medicine, are now in short supply, a poll showed. Stores are facing greater shortages than households, pollster Datanalisis president Luis Vicente Leon said on Friday. The company’s latest study, with data from last month, saw a jump in that index as the oil-rich country grapples with political and economic crisis. “The deterioration has been exponential over the last two months,” Leon said. “We are seeing indices worsen in a really dramatic way.” Datanalisis said inflation would reach 450 percent and predicted purchasing power would drop by at least 40 points compared with last year. The latest official inflation figures from December last year reported a 180.9 percent increase in prices. The study surveyed 800 people in eight major cities of varying socioeconomic status. The margin of error was 3.46 percent.
EGYPT
Black-box hunters hired
The government on Friday hired a private firm to help in the hunt for the black boxes from the EgyptAir plane that crashed on May 19 en route from Paris to Cairo, authorities said. Civil aviation officials said in a statement that they had signed an agreement with Deep Ocean Search (DOS) to carry out the search and retrieval process of the two data recorders. EgyptAir Flight MS804 crashed in the Mediterranean Sea south of the Greek island of Crete with 66 people onboard, including 30 Egyptians and 15 French nationals. DOS says it can operate in depths of up to 6,000m and has a robot that is capable of mapping the seabed.
BULGARIA
Blast hits weapons maker
A blast at the nation’s biggest weapons maker, Arsenal, in the center of the Balkan country killed one person on Friday night, the Ministry of the Interior said yesterday. A ministry’s spokeswoman told reporters that the accident, which killed a 52-year-old man, occurred at 10:20pm at Arsenal’s production unit in the town of Muglizh, 250km east of the capital, Sofia. “There are no other injured people,” she said. Prosecutors have opened an investigation into the incident, which is normal procedure in an incident when someone is killed or seriously hurt.
SRI LANKA
Buried people assumed dead
About 100 people still missing following landslides last week are believed dead, authorities said yesterday after failing to find signs of life under tonnes of mud. The Disaster Management Center said that 67 bodies had been recovered from the worst-hit central district of Kegalle, where 99 people were still listed as missing following the rain-triggered disaster on May 17. “The military is keeping up a search, but there is no hope of finding anyone alive now,” center spokesman Pradeep Kodippili told reporters.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
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