NORTH KOREA
‘Crucial’ test successful
The government has conducted another “crucial test” at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station, state media reported yesterday, as nuclear negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington remain stalled with a deadline approaching. “Another crucial test was successfully conducted at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station from 22:41 to 22:48 on Dec. 13,” an Academy of National Defense Science spokesman said in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency. The “research successes” would be “applied to further bolstering up the reliable strategic nuclear deterrent” of the nation, the spokesman added.
NEPAL
Suspected bomb kills three
An explosion at a house in a southern town killed three people, including the owner, his son and a police officer who responded to the call about a device, police said yesterday. The explosion just after midnight in Mahendranagar, 200km southeast of Kathmandu, also injured another police officer and the son and daughter of the house’s owner, a local businessman who ran a medicine store. The owner had spotted a suspicious device planted at the entrance gate of his house and called the police. The officers were checking the device when it exploded. Authorities were investigating the explosion, but there were no immediate suspects. No one has claimed responsibility.
QATAR
Malaysia sides with Iran
US sanctions imposed on Iran are in breach of the UN charter and international law, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad told a conference in Doha yesterday. “Malaysia does not support the reimposition of the unilateral sanctions by the US against Iran,” he told the Doha Forum, also attended by Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. Malaysia and other countries have lost a “big market” because of the sanctions on Iran, he said. “Such sanctions clearly violate the United Nations charter and international law; sanctions can only be applied by the United Nations in accordance with the charter,” he added.
UNITED KINGDOM
Johnson to thank the north
Prime Minister Boris Johnson was yesterday heading to northern England to meet newly elected Conservative Party lawmakers in the working-class heartland that turned its back on the opposition Labour Party in this week’s election and helped give him an 80-seat majority. While Johnson was on a victory lap yesterday, Corbyn came under fire from within his own party. Former lawmaker Helen Goodman, one of many Labour legislators to lose their seat in northern England, told BBC radio that “the biggest factor was obviously the unpopularity of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader.”
HONDURAS
Prison director gunned down
A gang of gunmen on motorcycles on Friday killed Pedro Ildefonso Armas, the director of the nation’s maximum security prison. The prison was where a key witness against the president’s brother was killed in October. Armas was seen on a video in October talking to inmate Nery Lopez Sanabria before a masked man opened a door and allowed a gang of prisoners to shoot and stab Lopez Sanabria. Notebooks belonging to Lopez Sanabria were used in a US drug trafficking trial as evidence to convict former congressman Antonio Hernandez, the younger brother of President Juan Orlando Hernandez.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened