INDONESIA
Earthquake strikes off Java
Authorities have said that one person has died of a heart attack and more than 100 houses were damaged after a magnitude 6.8 earthquake hit off Java, swaying buildings as far away as the capital. The US Geological Survey said that Friday night’s quake was centered 151km from Banten Province off the Java’s southwest coast. The National Disaster Mitigation Agency on Saturday that a woman died of a heart attack while fleeing to safety. At least 113 houses and buildings were damaged and about 1,050 people fled to temporary shelters, the agency said.
BULGARIA
Culled pigs to bring payment
Prime Minister Boyko Borissov said the government would compensate owners who voluntarily cull their pigs, as the country works to stamp out an outbreak of the highly contagious African swine fever. Almost 130,000 pigs have been killed on six breeding farms in the past two weeks. Authorities have so far detected 30 incidents of the disease at industrial or backyard farms. In an attempt to stop it from spreading, the Ministry of Agriculture has set up 20km sanitary zones around all registered industrial pig farms, with officials ordering the culling of home-raised pigs in these zones. The government would pay 300 levs (US$170) to every owner who voluntarily culled their pigs, Borissov said, adding that 75 percent of the sum would come from the EU.
AFGHANISTAN
Civilian casualties spike
July saw the highest number of civilian casualties in a single month since 2017, the UN mission said on Saturday. Its preliminary findings indicate that more than 1,500 civilians were killed or wounded, mainly due to a spike in casualties from insurgent attacks. It did not provide a breakdown of deaths and injuries, but said that the overall number was the highest for a single month since May 2017. More than 50 percent of the casualties were caused by bombings, it said.
UNITED STATES
Sliding cliff kills beachgoers
Three people were killed and two more injured after a cliff collapsed onto a popular beach in southern California on Friday, authorities said. The sandstone bluff gave way shortly before 3pm at Grandview Beach in Encinitas, a suburb north of San Diego. The area is highly popular with local residents, surfers and vacationers. A woman died at the scene, and two people died at a hospital, the city reported. The beach was filled with people at the time of the collapse. A KNSD-TV helicopter captured footage of beach chairs, towels, surf boards and beach toys strewn about the sand.
ZIMBABWE
US travel sanctions decried
The government on Friday summoned the US ambassador to Harare to protest US travel sanctions imposed on its envoy to Tanzania over his alleged role in a military crackdown that left six civilians dead last year. Anselem Sanyatwe, former commander of the presidential guard, is accused of commanding soldiers that opened fire on unarmed demonstrators protesting a delay in the release of last year’s election results. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in statement that it had “summoned” US Ambassador Brian Nichols “to express the displeasure” of the government following the US sanctions. “The decision by Washington is regrettable as it comes at a time when government is intensifying the implementation of political and economic reforms,” including recommendations by a commission of inquiry into the killings, the ministry said.
‘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
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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