NORTH KOREA
Kim apologizes for killing
Leader Kim Jong-un yesterday apologized for the killing of a South Korean official near the nations’ disputed sea boundary, saying that he is “very sorry” about the incident that he called unexpected and unfortunate, South Korean officials said. The extremely unusual move could de-escalate tensions between the countries as it is expected to ease anti-North Korean sentiment in South Korea over the man’s death as well as mounting criticism of South Korean President Moon Jae-in. “Comrade Kim Jong-un, the State Affairs Commission chairman, feels very sorry to give big disappointment to President Moon Jae-in and South Korean citizens, because an unexpected, unfortunate incident happened” at a time when South Korea is grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korean National Security Office Director Suh Hoon cited the North Korean message as saying. On Thursday, South Korea accused North Korea of fatally shooting one of its public servants who was likely trying to defect and burning his body after finding him on a floating object in North Korean waters on Tuesday.
TURKEY
Warrants issued for 82
Authorities yesterday issued arrest warrants for 82 people, including a mayor, over pro-Kurdish protests six years ago, officials and local media said. The warrants relate to October 2014 protests in Turkey sparked by the seizure by Islamic State jihadists of the mainly Kurdish Syrian town of Kobane. Police were on the hunt for the suspects in Ankara and six other provinces, the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement. The office did not specify what offences they are alleged to have committed, but said the crimes committed during the protests included murder, attempted murder, theft, damaging property, looting, burning the Turkish flag and injuring 326 security officials and 435 citizens.
UNITED KINGDOM
London officer killed
A police officer was yesterday shot dead inside a London police station while detaining a suspect, London’s Metropolitan Police force said. The officer was shot at the Croydon Custody Center in the south of the city, it said. The 23-year-old man being detained also sustained a gunshot wound and is in critical condition in a hospital. No police weapons were fired, police said. “When a colleague dies in the line of duty the shockwaves and sadness reverberates throughout the Met and our communities,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick said. “Policing is a family, within London and nationally, and we will all deeply mourn our colleague.” The police have launched a murder inquiry and the independent police watchdog is also investigating.
UNITED STATES
No threats to vote: FBI
Security agencies have said that they are not aware of any cyberthreats that could change vote tallies or “manipulate votes at scale” in the Nov. 3 presidential election, a public service announcement released on Thursday said. “The FBI and CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency] have not identified any incidents, to date, capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies for the 2020 elections,” it said. CISA is a division of the Department of Homeland Security that focuses on digital security issues.
BRAZIL
Carnival indefinitely delayed
Rio de Janeiro’s parades for carnival became the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic as officials on Thursday announced that they were indefinitely postponing the February edition. Rio de Janeiro’s festival, the world’s biggest, is an epidemiologist’s nightmare, as tightly packed crowds dance through the streets and flock to the city’s iconic Sambadrome for massive parades featuring scantily clad dancers, small armies of drummers and all-night partying at close quarters.
UNITED STATES
Senators blacklist Chinese
Five Republican senators have urged Netflix to reconsider plans to adapt a Chinese science-fiction book trilogy into a TV series because they said that the author has defended the Chinese government’s treatment of Uighurs. The Three-Body Problem and two sequels were written by Chinese author Liu Cixin (劉慈欣). Netflix earlier this month announced that it would turn the books into a live-action, English-language TV series led by D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, the creators of HBO megahit Game of Thrones. In a letter to Netflix, the senators pointed to comments by Liu to the New Yorker last year about China’s clampdown on ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang. “If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty,” Liu said.
RUSSIA
Moscow seniors stuck inside
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin yesterday ordered elderly people to stay at home and recommended that employers allow remote working after the capital saw a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases. Sobyanin’s message came after the transmission rate, which had remained steady for several months, climbed steeply over the past few days in Moscow, where case numbers are the highest since late June. Muscovites aged 65 or older should stay at home from Monday and shop rarely, although walks outside remain unrestricted, Sobyanin said.
UNITED STATES
Missouri city bans dancing
While bars and nightclubs are limiting capacity and closing early in St Louis, Missouri, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, neighboring establishments in St Charles are seeing so many unruly crowds that the city is taking a cue from the 1984 movie Footloose and banning dancing. City leaders on Wednesday met with restaurant, bar and club operators and then announced a temporary ban on “music activities” after 11pm from yesterday. The ban includes dancing and the DJ music that accompanies it. “I feel a little bit like the movie Footloose, but that’s not what this is about,” St Charles Mayor Dan Borgmeyer told KTVI-TV. The temporary suspension is in response to crowds that have been spilling into the streets, resulting in fights and creating enough concern that police presence downtown at night has tripled over the past five months.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
RSS