INDONESIA
Crew finds birds in bottles
Dozens of parrots stuffed into plastic water bottles have been discovered on a ship docked in the Papua region, authorities said yesterday. Police in the town of Fakfak said that the vessel’s crew reported hearing noises coming from a large box where 64 live black-capped lories and another 10 dead birds were found on Thursday morning. Black-capped lories are a type of parrot native to New Guinea and nearby smaller islands. No arrests had been made so far and the birds’ intended destination was unclear, local police spokesman Dodik Junaidi said.
CHINA
Truck hits procession, kills 9
Authorities said that nine people were killed after a truck plowed into a funeral procession early yesterday morning. The accident in Henan Province’s Huabin County left another four people injured, a county government statement said. Authorities were investigating why the truck failed to avoid the procession, which was moving along a local highway at around 5am, it said. The Chinese Public Security Ministry sent a team to look into the incident, in an apparent show of concern over its potential effect on public order in the province, one of the most populous with more than 100 million people, the release said.
AUSTRALIA
Lie led to lockdown
South Australia’s six-day “circuit-breaker” lockdown would be cut short, officials said yesterday, blaming a pizza parlor worker who misled contact tracers about how he contracted COVID-19. South Australia Premier Steven Marshall said that a tough lockdown for almost 2 million people would end late today, at least two days earlier than planned. Marshall said that a man who claimed he was a customer at a pizza parlor — leading authorities to believe the strain was virulent enough to be transmitted via a takeaway box — in fact worked there. “One of the close contacts linked to the Woodville pizza bar deliberately misled our contact-tracing team,” Marshall said. “Their story didn’t add up. We pursued them. We now know that they lied.” It is unlikely the man will face charges, police said. Red-faced authorities said that the costly lockdown had still been necessary.
INDIA
Nation hits 9 million cases
The total number of COVID-19 cases since the pandemic began crossed 9 million yesterday. Nevertheless the country’s new daily cases have seen a steady decline for weeks and the total number of cases represents 0.6 percent of the nation’s 1.3 billion population. The Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfar reported 45,882 new infections and 584 fatalities in the past 24 hours yesterday. The death toll since the pandemic began is more than 132,000.
UNITED STATES
Firebomb plot busted
A Nebraska pharmacist and a Maryland drug dealer each face a decade or more in prison for a convoluted plot to firebomb a competing pharmacy so that they could divert more prescription narcotics to the black market. William Burgamy, of Hanover, Maryland, and Hyrum Wilson of Auburn, Nebraska, each pleaded guilty in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Prosecutors in April arrested Burgamy and charged him with running a Dark Web market space that sold hundreds of thousands US dollars’ worth of illicit drugs. Authorities later discovered a plot to firebomb a rival business of Hyrum’s Family Value Pharmacy.
RUSSIA
Spy handed 13-year term
Authorities sentenced a man to 13 years in prison for trying to pass military secrets about the country’s Northern Fleet to the US, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said yesterday. The agency said in a statement that a court in Bryansk, southwest of Moscow, on Tuesday found Yuri Eschenko guilty of state treason. Eschenko pleaded guilty, the FSB said, adding that he held a job servicing radio-electronic systems used by the Northern Fleet. The FSB said that he from 2015 to 2017 copied secret documents with intent to sell them to a third party and last year made contact with the CIA.
ETHIOPIA
Millions of children in need
The outbreak of fighting in the the country’s Tigray Region has left 2.3 million children in urgent need of assistance, UNICEF said yesterday. Tigray has been rocked by intense fighting since last week , when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced the launch of military operations against the regional government. “Restricted access and the ongoing communication blackout have left an estimated 2.3 million children in need of humanitarian assistance and out of reach,” UNICEF executive director Henrietta Fore said.
MEXICO
COVID-19 death toll climbs
Authorities on Thursday said that the country’s COVID-19 death toll has risen to more than 100,000, becoming the world’s fourth country to pass the grim milestone. “Today in Mexico we have 100,000 people who have lost their lives due to COVID-19,” Deputy Secretary of Prevention and Health Promotion Hugo Lopez-Gatell told a news conference. Authorities announced 576 more deaths in its daily update, taking the total to 100,104, behind only the US, Brazil and India. The overall number of infections stands at 1,019,543 in the nation of more than 128 million, up 4,472 from the previous day.
UNITED STATES
N Korea businesses blocked
The Department of the Treasury on Thursday placed two entities that either send or help send North Korean workers to Russia on its sanctions blacklist for involvement in what it called “forced labor.” The Treasury placed sanctions on Korea Cholsan General Trading Corp, a North Korean company operating in Russia, and Russian construction company Mokran. The two had “engaged in, facilitated, or been responsible for the exportation of forced labor from North Korea, including exportation to generate revenue for the Government of North Korea or Workers Party of Korea,” the Treasury said in a statement. The sanctions block any assets that the firms might hold under US jurisdiction and ban US entities from doing business with them.
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
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
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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
RSS