INDONESIA
Sumatra’s Sinabung erupts
Mount Sinabung experienced its biggest eruption of the year this week, spewing clouds of gas and showering ash into the sky, a local official said yesterday. The volcano, which roared back to life in 2010 after four centuries of silence, has been erupting steadily since 2015, displacing more than 3,000 families. Wednesday’s eruption “was the biggest eruption this year, given the reach of the pyroclastic flow and the size of the area covered by the ashes,” local disaster agency chief Nata Nail told reporters. Thousands were affected by the shower of volcanic ashes on the island of Sumatra, but no one was severely injured, because the dangerous zone was vacated earlier, National Board for Disaster Management spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said.
PHILIPPINES
Police wrongly shoot vehicle
Ten police officers who late on Thursday mistakenly shot at a vehicle and killed two of its passengers have been relieved of their duties, Philippine National Police National Capital Region Director Oscar Albayalde said as he ordered an investigation into the incident. Albayalde said the vehicle, which was carrying seven people, including a woman who had been shot earlier that night, was on its way to a hospital when police opened fire after mistaking it for one driven by the woman’s assailant. The police officers from Mandaluyong city might have been given wrong information, because they were told by village officials that the passengers of the vehicle were armed, he said. “We can’t totally blame them,” Albayalde told a media briefing, adding that he relieved the chief of Mandaluyong police of his command pending the investigation. “We are not hiding anything here. We’re not discounting the possibility ... that there may be overkill or violation of our POP [police operational procedures].”
TURKEY
Suspected extremists caught
Police yesterday detained 29 suspected Islamic State members in Ankara, state media said, in a fresh operation after arresting about 120 suspects nationwide a day earlier as security is tightened ahead of the new year. About 500 police officers took part in simultaneous raids across the capital, and many of those detained were foreign nationals, state-run Anadolu agency reported. It said prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 46 people and that materials seized in the raids indicated that some of the suspects had made preparations for an attack over the New Year holiday. During New Year’s celebrations a year ago, a man with an assault rifle shot dead 39 people at an exclusive nightclub in Istanbul. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for that shooting, one of a series of attacks believed to have been carried out by the extremists and also by Kurdish militants in the past couple of years.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
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