CHINA
Live fire in Gulf of Tonkin
The coast guard launched live-firing exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin yesterday, the latest in a series of military drills that come amid renewed tensions among disputants to territory in the South China Sea. The Maritime Safety Administration said ships and boats were barred from the area between its southern island province of Hainan and the northern coast of Vietnam from yesterday through Wednesday. The navy and air force have held a series of drills in surrounding waters since an international arbitration panel in The Hague, Netherlands, issued a ruling last month invalidating Beijing’s claim to virtually the entire South China Sea.
JAPAN
First lady visits Pearl Harbor
First Lady Akie Abe visited the US’ Pearl Harbor to pay tribute to the victims of the Japanese attack 75 years ago. Abe yesterday said on Facebook that she offered flowers and a prayer at the Arizona Memorial. She did not elaborate on her visit that comes amid looming speculation about a similar visit by her husband, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga acknowledged that the first lady was in Hawaii to attend an environmental conference. Speculation about Shinzo Abe’s possible visit to Pearl Harbor has grown since US President Barack Obama paid tribute in May to the victims of the US atomic bombing in Hiroshima. No serving Japanese prime minister has visited Pearl Harbor.
CAMBODIA
Police crack down on cheats
The nation deployed 1,570 police at high-school exam test sites across the country yesterday as part of a government crack down on bribery and corruption in the education system. Testing sites were cordoned off in the capital Phnom Penh and students were patted down by officials to check for cheat sheets and mobile devices as their relatives waited outside. “We are doing all of this to guarantee transparency and quality in the education system,” Ministry of Education spokesperson Ros Salin told reporters. In past years, students brought mobile phones and cheat sheets into exam rooms and bribed teachers to ignore cheating. Advocacy group Affiliated Network for Social Accountability Cambodia representative San Chey said cheating was deep-rooted in the education system. “Before, bribes in exams and test leaks were done openly, which helped to push up the pass rates,” he said. The government blitz on cheating has seen exam pass rates drop in recent years. In 2014, the Grade 12 exam pass rates was cut in half to 40.67 percent and last year it fell to 55.87 percent, according to Education Ministry figures.
NETHERLANDS
Militant admits guilt at trial
The trial of a Muslim militant over the destruction of holy sites in Timbuktu during Mali’s 2012 conflict began in The Hague yesterday, the first at the International Criminal Court to cite destroying cultural artifacts as a war crime. Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi pled guilty to ordering the 2012 attacks on the fabled city of Timbuktu, becoming the first person to plead guilty at the world’s only permanent war crimes court. “Your honour, regrettably I have to say that what I heard so far is accurate and reflects the events. I plead guilty,” Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi told the International Criminal Court after the solo charge of cultural destruction was read to him.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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