FRANCE
Farmers protest with manure
Farmers protesting against a trade deal with Canada dumped manure overnight outside the office of a lawmaker from President Emmanuel Macron’s La Republique En Marche (LREM) party, the latest example of protesters vandalizing LREM offices to voice their discontent. Monique Iborra, an LREM member of parliament for Haute-Garonne, yesterday wrote on Twitter about the damage to her office. The FDSEA farmers’ trade union claimed responsibility on Facebook. “Two tonnes of manure outside a building where there are also doctors, dentists and other professions which receive members of the public — it’s irresponsible, as well as futile,” Iborra said. Anti-government protests have picked up after parliament approved the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement EU-Canada trade deal, which opponents said undermined the EU’s social and ecological regulations by importing products made under conditions that would not be allowed in Europe.
JAPAN
Two murderers executed
Two men convicted of murder have been hanged, the Ministry of Justice said yesterday, the first executions this year after 15 death row inmates were executed last year. With more than 100 inmates on death row, the country is one of the few developed nations to retain the death penalty and public support for it remains high, despite international criticism, including from rights groups. “I ordered the executions after very careful consideration,” Minister of Justice Takashi Yamashita told reporters. The executed were 64-year-old Koichi Shoji and 50-year-old Yasunori Suzuki, a ministry official told reporters. Shoji was convicted of killing two women and stealing cash in 2001 near Tokyo, while Suzuki was convicting of murdering three women on the streets in southern Japan and stealing cash in 2004, according to media reports. The government last year hanged 15 inmates, matching a 2008 record since the nation started publicly announcing executions in 1998.
SUDAN
Troops detained for violence
Nine soldiers from the Rapid Support Forces have been dismissed and detained in connection with violence in the cities of Omdurman and el-Obeid, the military council’s spokesman said yesterday. Lieutenant General Shams el-Din Kabbashi said that the governor of North Kordofan state and its security council would be held accountable for the killing of six people, including four schoolchildren in the state capital, el-Obeid, on Monday. Hundreds of thousands of people on Thursday took to the streets in response to the killings, and opposition medics said that four protesters were killed and many injured by gunfire in Omdurman.
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
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
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
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