VANUATU
Volcano forces 7,000 to flee
A rumbling, belching volcano that is threatening to blow had forced more than 7,000 people to flee their homes as of yesterday. Authorities have declared an emergency on Ambae Island, where activity at the Monaro volcano has increased recently, raising fears of a major eruption. About 10,000 people live on the island and villagers close to the volcano have been moved to schools and community halls on the island’s less vulnerable eastern and western regions. A ship arrived yesterday carrying food, water and other essential supplies, National Disaster Management Office Director Shadrack Welegtabit said, adding that a second ship was due tomorrow.
PAKISTAN
Minister charged with graft
Minister of Finance Ishaq Daq was yesterday indicted on graft charges after investigators found his assets did not match his reported income. State media report said Dar was present in the courtroom when a judge read the charges against him. Dar denied the allegations. Under the law, Dar can continue to work as a minister until he is found guilty. However, opposition leaders have asked him to resign on moral grounds. Dar has close familial ties to former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who was disqualified from holding office by the Supreme Court for concealing his financial assets in July.
INDIA
Darjeeling strike ends
A strike that shut down the picturesque hill station of Darjeeling — causing violence and disruption to tourism and tea production — was yesterday called off after 104 days, protesters said. The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), a movement demanding the formation of a separate state for ethnic Gorkhas in West Bengal, said it would enter into talks with the government. “After the union home minister Rajnath Singh’s appeal, we had a discussion with senior leaders and decided to withdraw the indefinite strike from Wednesday,” GJM’s Jyoti Rai said. “We are going for talks because of the sacrifices of people in the hills and will wait for the outcome.” Clashes between protesters and police, as well as arson attacks, have rattled the town for months, causing schools and shops to close and thousands of mostly Indian tourists to flee the popular destination. The unrest was triggered by the state government’s announcement the previous month that it was making Bengali mandatory in local schools, angering West Bengal’s Gorkha population, who speak Nepali.
MALAYSIA
Man cited for wearing shorts
A man has been reprimanded by Islamic authorities in the state of Kelantan for “indecent dressing” after he was caught wearing shorts in public on the way to a soccer match, officials and reports said yesterday. Wan Khairul Hayyee Wali had stopped off to buy a burger from a street-side stall in Kota Baru as he drove on Monday to play futsal. Religious enforcement officers spotted the 30-year-old and handed him a notice saying that he had breached Islamic regulations dictating that Muslims should not wear revealing attire. “It came as a shock to me when a religious department enforcement officer gave me a notice saying I have flouted the Shariah Criminal Enactment for exposing my knees,” he was quoted as saying by the Star newspaper. Kelantan state religious enforcement unit deputy director Mohamad Fadzuli Mohamad Zain said 11 people, including Khairul, were given summonses for indecent dressing.” Khairul had been ordered to attend a counseling session and would have to pay a fine of 1,000 ringgit (US$240) if he failed to turn up, Fadzuli said.
UNITED STATES
Trump misfires on launch
When President Donald Trump on Saturday tweeted that Iran had “just test-fired” a missile, he seemed to know something the rest of the government did not. Turns out, he did not. There was no Iranian ballistic missile launch, three officials said on Tuesday. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had used a military parade on Friday last week to display its Khorramshahr medium-range ballistic missile, which is capable of reaching Israel and much of the Middle East. That same day, video of the test firing of a Khorramshahr aired on Iranian state TV. The time or location of the test was not mentioned in the report, and it appears that the video footage was from a failed Iranian missile test earlier this year.
UNITED STATES
Highway paint stains cars
New yellow painted highway lines in the Alaskan Panhandle city of Ketchikan are crooked and the paint that has been used by state transportation officials has stained cars, officials said. The problems emerged after the state Department of Transportation tried out a new line painting system on the Tongass Highway, the Ketchikan Daily News reported on Saturday. Department spokeswoman Meadow Bailey said the paint is “not drying as quickly as it should due to humidity in southeast Alaska.” Bailey said the state will not repaint the yellow lines.
UAE
Matthew pleads not guilty
The British editor-at-large of an English-language newspaper in Dubai has pleaded not guilty to a premeditated murder charge over his wife’s killing. Gulf News editor Francis Matthew is accused of killing his 62-year-old wife, Jane, with a hammer after an argument. On July 3, Dubai police said they were called to Matthew’s home, where they found his wife dead. Police said Matthew initially said his wife had been assaulted by robbers, but later confessed to the slaying.
UNITED STATES
Guggenheim withholds art
The Guggenheim Museum in New York has decided to withdraw three works from a hotly anticipated exhibition on modern China after receiving “repeated threats of violence” related to the staging of live animals. Among the works in the exhibit “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” scheduled to open on Oct. 6, were three involving animals. A central work that is not to go on display is Theater of the World, an octagonal installation inhabited by hundreds of reptiles and insects. The museum is also to exclude the video Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other by Chinese artists Sun Yuan (孫源) and Peng Yu (彭禹). A Case Study of Transference by Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰), which shows two pigs mating, is also to be omitted from the show. A petition launched on the Change.org Web site garnered nearly 700,000 signatures in a bid to send the message that “animal cruelty holds no place in art in the United States.”
MEXICO
Gunmen kill at least 14
At least 14 people were killed and eight injured in a northern area on Tuesday night when an armed group opened fire in a drug addiction rehabilitation center, local police said. In a statement, security officials in the city of Chihuahua said “an armed group entered the Uniting Families rehabilitation center,” attacking those inside with assault rifles. First responders arrived on scene to care for the wounded in the center, where about 25 people were estimated to have been during the attack.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
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