SYRIA
Turkey bombs Kurdish forces
Turkish warplanes yesterday conducted a barrage of airstrikes on Kurdish positions in the northeast of the country, leaving several fighters dead, Kurdish forces and a monitor said. The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) said the strikes hit their positions near the border town of al-Malikiyah at 2am. “Turkish planes carried out a broad offensive on a YPG base that houses media and communication centers and some military installations,” the YPG statement said. “The treacherous attack killed and wounded fighters,” it added, without giving a toll. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Turkey carried out “dozens of simultaneous airstrikes” on YPG positions in Hasakeh Province overnight, confirming that a media center was hit.
SWITZERLAND
UN hosts Yemen conference
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and senior government officials from dozens of countries yesterday met to drum up funds for war-torn Yemen, considered the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis. Guterres and top diplomats from Switzerland and Sweden cohosted the conference in Geneva, aimed at helping raise US$2.1 billion in a UN relief appeal. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said “an alarming 18.8 million people are in need of humanitarian or protection assistance” in Yemen. War in the country has killed more than 10,000 civilians and pushed the nation to the brink of famine.
KENYA
Bus, tanker crash killing 27
A crash on Monday between a passenger bus and a tanker ferrying cooking oil killed 27 people along the main highway connecting Nairobi and the port city of Mombasa, police said. The accident occurred in the Kibwezi area at about midnight as the bus driver was trying to overtake another vehicle, but collided with the oncoming truck, Kibwezi police chief Leonard Kimaiyo said. “Twenty adults and three children died on the spot, while one adult died later in hospital,” Kimaiyo said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Wiki to combat ‘fake’ news
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has launched a Web site aimed at countering the spread of fake news by bringing together professional journalists and a community of volunteers and supporters to produce news articles. The new platform, called Wikitribune, will be free to access and carry no advertising, Wales said. “The news is broken, but we’ve figured out how to fix it,” he said in a promotional video posted on the Web site’s homepage. Wales said that because people expected to get news for free on the Internet, news sites were reliant on advertising money, which created strong incentives to generate so-called “clickbait,” to attract viewers.
CHINA
West Bank work banned
Beijing is not allowing its construction crews to work in the West Bank because it opposes Israeli settlements in what it considers occupied Palestinian territory. Israel officials on Sunday said that they had signed a deal with the government to bring construction crews to Israel. They would not address reports that the work would be restricted to only some areas. A Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman on Monday confirmed the West Bank restrictions. Spokesman Geng Shuang (耿爽) said the government values its relationship with Israel, but “opposes the construction of Jewish settlements on Palestine’s occupied territory.”
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
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