CHINA
Ivanka’s proverb confounds
Social media users were scratching their heads over a “Chinese proverb” Ivanka posted on Twitter on Monday: “‘Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it.’ -Chinese Proverb.” “Our editor really can’t think of exactly which proverb this is. Please help!” the news channel for Sina Weibo wrote on its official account. Thousands of users offered suggestions without arriving at a consensus. “She saw it in a fortune cookie at Panda Express,” one user wrote. “One proverb from Ivanka has exhausted the brain cells of all Chinese Internet users,” another said.
ITALY
Medical charity protests
Doctors Without Borders yesterday protested the government’s plans to make 629 migrants sail to Spain, rather than let them disembark immediately in the face of an approaching storm. Spain on Monday agreed to take in the migrants, who were picked up off the Libyan coast on Saturday after both Rome and Malta denied them access to ports. Doctors Without Borders said the government wanted to transfer some of the migrants onto Italian vessels and then head together to Valencia. “This plan would mean already exhausted rescued people would endure 4 more days travel at sea,” the group said on Twitter. “[We] call for people’s safety to come before politics.”
ARGENTINA
Money-tosser on trial
The trial of a former deputy minister for public works Jose Lopez and a nun who helped him hide bags stuffed with more than US$9 million in cash and jewels at a monastery opened yesterday in Buenos Aires. Lopez in 2016 was caught on security cameras tossing 160 suitcases and duffel bags filled mostly with US dollars, as well as euros, yuan and Argentine pesos, all in small bills, over a wall into the garden of an old monastery outside the capital. Celia Ines, an 80-year-old nun, was his accomplice, according to prosecutors.
UNITED STATES
Kudlow suffers heart attack
National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow has suffered a “very mild” heart attack, the White House said on Monday night. He was being treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in Singapore, adding that Kudlow was in good condition and “doing well.”
? UNITED STATES
Russian firms sanctioned
The Department of the Treasury on Monday slapped sanctions on five Russian companies and three businessmen from one of them for engaging in cyberattacks and assisting Russia’s military and intelligence services with other malicious activities. The sanctions freeze any assets that they may have in US jurisdictions and bar Americans from doing business with them. The department said the sanctions were a response to a number of cyberattacks as well as intrusions into the energy grid and global network infrastructure.
QATAR
Complaint filed with ICJ
The government on Monday accused the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of racial discrimination, filing suit with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that its neighbor has contravened a UN treaty that forbids such discrimination. It asked the court to grant provisional measures barring the UAE from limiting the freedom of speech and movement of Qataris and inciting hatred against them.
‘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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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