FRANCE
Khashoggi suspect arrested
A suspected killer of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi was arrested at Roissy airport near Paris on Tuesday as he was about to board a flight to Riyadh, sources said. A police source named the man as Khaled Aedh al-Otaibi, a former Royal Guard of Saudi Arabia, who is mentioned in US and British sanctions lists as one of the killers, and was also on wanted lists in France.
UNITED STATES
Napoleon’s sword auctioned
The dress sword carried by Napoleon Bonaparte when he staged a coup in France in 1799 and five of his firearms sold at auction for US$2.87 million, auctioneers said on Tuesday. The lot, which was put up for sale by Illinois-based Rock Island Auction Co, was sold on Friday last week via telephone to a buyer who has remained anonymous, Rock Island Auction president Kevin Hogan told reporters. The sword and five ornamented pistols had initially been valued at US$1.5 million to US$3.5 million. With the sale, “the buyer of the Napoleon Garniture is taking home a very rare piece of history,” Hogan said. The sword, with its scabbard, was the “crown jewel” of the collection, the auctioneers said. The weapon was made by Nicolas-Noel Boutet, who was director of the state arms factory in Versailles. After being crowned emperor, Napoleon is believed to have presented the sword to French general Jean-Andoche Junot, but the general’s wife later sold it to pay off debts. It was then recovered by a London museum. A US collector was its last owner, but the man recently died, the auction house said.
UNITED STATES
Saule Omarova withdraws
President Joe Biden on Tuesday said that Saule Omarova’s nomination to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency would be withdrawn, as her candidacy faced resistance, with senators criticizing her vision for banking regulation and her birthplace in the former Soviet Union. Biden said in a statement that he accepted a withdrawal request from Omarova, a law professor at Cornell University who was born in Kazakhstan when it was part of the Soviet Union and immigrated to the US in 1991. In Senate committee hearings last month, she addressed questions about greater government oversight of the financial sector. That led Senator Pat Toomey to say that her ideas were a “socialist manifesto,” while Senator John Kennedy said: “I don’t know whether to call you ‘professor’ or ‘comrade.’”
UNITED NATIONS
Report warns over piracy
The surge of maritime piracy in Africa’s Gulf of Guinea is not just a threat to foreign ship and cargo owners, but also carries significant costs for the coastal nations, a new UN report said on Tuesday. The newest hot spot for piracy saw 106 incidents last year, with 623 seafarers affected by kidnapping, the Pirates of the Gulf of Guinea: A Cost Analysis for Coastal States report said. Most of the direct costs of the kidnappings and ship seizures would be borne by foreigners, with about US$5 million paid last year for kidnappings of mostly non-African ship crew members, said the report, which the Stable Seas research group contributed to. The countries along the Gulf of Guinea coast would pay far more than that to deal with the rise in piracy, from expanded patrols to rescue missions to greater security costs in ports, it said. Those costs could be more than US$1.9 billion annually, diverting important resources from other crucial needs, it said.
China is racing to quash a new COVID-19 flareup that risks spilling over into one of its most economically significant regions, raising the specter of disruptions that could roil global supply chains for solar panels, medicines and semiconductors. Infections have surged in Si County in the eastern province of Anhui, with officials reporting 287 cases for Sunday and nearly 1,000 since late last week. Authorities locked down Si and a neighboring county late last week to try and stop the virus from spreading to Jiangsu Province, the second-biggest contributor to China’s economic output and a globally important manufacturing hub for the
A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii on Wednesday ended in failure due to a problem that occurred after ignition, the US Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has experienced stumbles. It did not provide details of what took place in the test, but said in an e-mailed statement that “the department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.” “An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesman US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman said in
OPPOSITION PROTESTS: Many people in Myanmar suspect China of supporting the military takeover, while Beijing has refused to condemn last year’s army power grab China’s top diplomat on Saturday arrived on his first visit to Myanmar since the military seized power last year to attend a regional meeting that the Burmese government said was a recognition of its legitimacy and opponents protested as a violation of peace efforts. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) is to join counterparts from Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in a meeting of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation group in the central city of Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The grouping is a Chinese-led initiative that includes the countries of the Mekong Delta, a potential source of regional tensions
CERN UPGRADES: ompared with the collider’s first run that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, this time around there would be 20 times more collisions Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run. From today it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a news conference last week. It is to send two beams of protons
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