VIETNAM
Chinese ship not welcome
The government on Friday accused Beijing of trespassing and demanded a Chinese survey ship in the South China Sea withdraw. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the survey vessel Haiyang Dizhi 8, and its escort ships, of entering its waters in “recent days,” although it did not give exact dates. “This is completely in the sea area of Vietnam,” a statement said, adding that the ministry had contacted Chinese officials multiple times on different diplomatic channels, “to protest” the act. It has “persistently requested them to ... withdraw all these ships from Vietnam’s waters and respect its sovereignty.”
CHINA
Hong Kong actor stabbed
Hong Kong actor Simon Yam (任達華) was yesterday stabbed while attending an event in the country’s south. His injuries are not life-threatening and a suspect has been detained, police said, adding that the motive was unclear. His manager, Lester Mo, said Yam was stabbed in the stomach and also had a cut on his right hand. The 64-year-old actor was undergoing what Mo called a minor operation at a hospital in Zhongshan. Yam has appeared in more than 125 movies and 40 television series. He played the villain Chen Lo in the 2003 Hollywood film Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.
INDIA
Flood death toll hits 152
The death toll in monsoon flooding in South Asia has risen to 152 as millions of people and animals continue to face the brunt in three countries, officials said yesterday. At least 90 people have died in Nepal and 50 in Assam state. A dozen people have been killed in Bangladesh. Ten rare one-horned rhinos have died at the Kaziranga National Park after swirling gray waters of the Brahmaputra River burst its banks and entered the reserve, government official Shiv Kumar said. The Assam Disaster Response Authority said 4.8 million people spread over 3,700 villages across the northeastern state were affected by the floods.
UNITED STATES
Man blasts store for eviction
A man kicked out of a store in Cleveland returned and detonated an explosive, police said. The blast on Friday afternoon damaged a small front window and a parked car’s windshield, they said. A woman was treated for back injuries after she jumped out of her car. Employees of a Family Dollar store asked the man to leave because he was panhandling, Cleveland.com quoted Cleveland Deputy Chief of Police Harold Pretel as saying. He returned and placed an explosive device next to the store window, police said. He was arrested shortly after it went off. Police intelligence and arson units were trying to determine the explosive’s makeup, Pretel said.
INDIA
Pilot chided for hijack alert
The authorities have suspended a pilot for accidentally sending a hijack alert to air traffic control during a domestic flight last month, the aviation authority said. The AirAsia India plane, flying from the capital, New Delhi, to Srinagar, suffered a stalled engine and the captain told first officer Ravi Raj to send an emergency code to alert authorities about the situation. Instead of the appropriate code, 7700, Raj transmitted 7500 — the code for a hijacking — the director general of Civil Aviation said in a statement on Friday. Such a transmission is considered a major security alert across the world.
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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