JAPAN
Ten bodies found on coast
The badly decomposed remains of 10 people have been found on the nation’s coast across the sea from North Korea, along with the wreckage of two boats, officials said yesterday. The discovery comes just days after a group of eight fishermen, who said they were from North Korea, washed up on the same shore. Police said two cadavers were found in separate places on the edge of the surf on Sado Island, about 750km from North Korea across the Sea of Japan. The bodies had begun to putrefy and had nothing to identify them, senior local police official Hideaki Sakyo told reporters. However, he added, there were boxes of North Korean tobacco, as well as boat parts and life jackets with Korean writing on them nearby. A wrecked wooden boat with squid-fishing equipment was also found on the coastline.
TURKEY
Academic detained in probe
Counterterror police detained 10 people, including academic Fikret Baskaya, early yesterday in an operation targeting members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group, state-run Anadolu news agency reported. Baris Yarkadas, a lawmaker from the main opposition CHP, wrote on Twitter that Baskaya, 77, had been detained at his home in the capital, Ankara, at 6:30am and that police had seized some of his personal possessions. Anadolu said arrest warrants had been issued for a total of 17 people on allegations of aiding the PKK and spreading the group’s propaganda on social media. Baskaya is a university lecturer and author.
HONG KONG
Monet glasses get US$50,000
A collection of French artist Claude Monet’s personal belongings, including a pair of round-rimmed wire spectacles, have fetched almost US$11 million at an auction, Christie’s said. The dainty glasses, made from gold-colored metal, on Sunday went to an unnamed Asian buyer for US$51,457, far exceeding the auction house’s estimate of US$1,000 to US$1,500. The sale included other rare items like Monet’s pencil sketches, paintings and Japanese woodblock prints from the French master’s personal collection. A sculpture of a cat from 19th-century Japan’s late Edo or early Meiji period, sleeping curled up and measuring 32.8cm, went under the hammer for US$67,538. “This collection provides an intimate insight into the life of Monet the artist and Monet the collector,” said Adrien Meyer, cochairman of the Impressionist and Modern art department at Christie’s. The top lots sold for well above their estimated price. An oil painting of a cliff face overlooking the sea by Monet, titled Falaises des Petites-Dalles, went for US$4.6 million. More than 75 percent of the lot was snapped up by Asian buyers.
SRI LANKA
Would-be migrants arrested
Police say they have arrested 22 people who were attempting to illegally migrate to Australia by boat. The suspects were arrested on a tip on Sunday at the coastal town of Puttalam, about 120km north of the capital, Colombo, police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara said. They were to appear in court yesterday. Sri Lankan and Australian authorities are cooperating with each other to combat human smuggling. No Sri Lankan asylum seekers have reached Australia by boat since 2013. However, Sri Lankans, Iranians and Afghans are the largest national groups among more than 2,000 asylum seekers living on Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Australia pays those countries to house them, but refuses to resettle any of them.
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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