FRANCE
Protests likely to continue
Protesters angry over high fuel prices were yesterday expected to block access to fuel depots and stop traffic on major roads for a fourth day, incensed by Paris’ refusal to scrap anti-pollution taxes. The “yellow vest” protests have galvanized resistance to President Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies. On Monday, tens of thousands of demonstrators were still manning hundreds of barricades on motorways and gas stations. Oil giant Total said that some of its trucks had been prevented from reaching depots in the south and east of the nation.
UNITED STATES
Elevator drops 84 floors
People rescued from a trapped elevator in one of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers later learned they had dropped 84 floors. The Chicago Tribune on Monday reported that six people, including a pregnant woman, got into the elevator early on Friday after leaving a restaurant on the 95th floor of 875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly the John Hancock Center. They heard noises and experienced a faster and bumpier than expected ride. One of several cables holding the elevator broke and the car fell rapidly, stopping somewhere near the 11th floor. Firefighters broke through a wall more than 10 stories above ground from a parking garage to reach the people inside.
UNITED KINGDOM
London sells water cannons
Three unusable water cannons bought by former London mayor Boris Johnson have been sold for scrap at a net loss of more than ￡300,000 (US$385,973). In one of Johnson’s most humiliating episodes as mayor, then-home secretary Theresa May banned them from use in England and Wales. London Mayor Sadiq Khan had pledged to claw back as much money as possible by selling the vehicles, but after almost two years, his office admitted defeat. The money recouped does not even cover the estimated ￡12,000 bill to insure the vehicles since Khan was elected in May 2016. “This has been another waste of taxpayers’ money by Boris Johnson. Londoners continue to live with his vanity,” Khan said.
UNITED STATES
ISS deliveries set record
The International Space Station (ISS) has received two cargo deliveries in a record 15 hours. A US commercial shipment arrived on Monday, two days after blasting off from Virginia. NASA astronaut Serena Aunon-Chancellor used the space station’s robot arm to grab Northrop Grumman’s capsule. Ice cream and other fresh food were the first things coming out. On Sunday, a Russian supply ship also delivered a full load. NASA said they were the quickest back-to-back shipments for the space station, which yesterday marked its 20th anniversary.
UNITED STATES
Ivanka used private e-mail
Ivanka Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, used a personal e-mail account for government business in breach of federal records rules, the Washington Post reported on Monday. The newspaper, citing anonymous sources, said that the discovery was made by White House officials reviewing e-mails in response to a public records lawsuit. The newspaper quoted Ivanka Trump as saying that she was unfamiliar with the details of the rules. Her father has repeatedly pilloried former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival in the 2016 presidential election, for her use of a private e-mail server for government business while in office.
FIJI
New term for PM
Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama was sworn in for another four years after winning last week’s election with a reduced majority, after earlier lashing out at his opponents. He was affirmed prime minister in a ceremony after his Fiji First Party won just more than one-half of the votes in the election, giving them 27 seats in the 51-seat parliament. Bainimarama first seized power in a military coup in 2006 and refashioned himself as a legitimate leader after winning an election in 2014. The people who “ganged up” against him were the same dishonest politicians from the past whose “lies and deception knew no boundaries,” Bainimarama said in a statement.
CHINA
Wang says US soured APEC
Failure of the APEC representatives gathered in Port Moresby over the weekend to agree on a communique resulted from certain nations “excusing” protectionism, Chinese State Councilor Wang Yi (王毅) said, in a veiled criticism of Washington that further sours the tone of bilateral ties. The inability of the summit to agree to a joint communique was “by no means accidental,” Wang said in comments on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Web site late on Monday. “It is mainly that individual economies insisted on imposing their own texts on other parties, excusing protectionism and unilateralism, and not accepting reasonable revisions from the Chinese and other parties,” the ministry cited Wang as saying.
INDIA
Study shows air top killer
Air pollution, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, is cutting global life expectancy by an average of 1.8 years per person, making it the world’s top killer, researchers said on Monday. The University of Chicago’s Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) shows that people in parts of the world’s second-largest nation by population, could live 11 years less due to high levels of air pollution. “The fact that this AQLI tool quantifies the number of years I and you have lost to air pollution makes me worried,” lawmaker Kalikesh Singh Deo said in a statement.
EGYPT
Holiday sweets go plastic
The Mawlid al-Nabi holiday, which celebrates the Prophet Mohammad’s birthday, started yesterday and is marked by making traditional sweets that are sold in shops and street markets. However, the traditional practices are slowly dying out. Generations of children anticipated the annual arrival of the wedding dolls at marketplaces, breaking them into pieces to indulge in the sweet taste, but in many shops, the edible sugar doll has been replaced with a plastic version. For Mohamed Sayed Farag, who makes the traditional dolls, the two are not the same. “Mawlid without sweets? That can’t be,” he said, adding that he makes a sugar doll with a four-layer dress.
RUSSIA
Firm wins Indian arms deal
The state-owned arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, has emerged as the lowest bidder for India’s US$3 billion tender to source short-range air defense missile systems, the Indian army said on Monday. “The Russian firm has been identified as the L1 bidder,” army spokesman Colonel Aman Anand told reporters. India last month agreed to buy S-400 surface-to-air missile systems, as New Delhi disregarded US warnings that such a purchase could trigger sanctions under US law.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
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
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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