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Biden on Tuesday said that Saule Omarova’s nomination to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency would be withdrawn, as her candidacy faced resistance, with senators criticizing her vision for banking regulation and her birthplace in the former Soviet Union.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.
The rivalry between Asia’s two biggest countries has extended into outer space. After India’s landing of its Chandrayaan-3 rover on the moon last month — becoming the first country to put a spacecraft near the lunar south pole and breaking China’s record for the southernmost lunar landing — a top Chinese scientist has said claims about the accomplishment are overstated. Ouyang Ziyuan (歐陽自遠), lauded as the father of China’s lunar exploration program, told the Chinese-language Science Times newspaper that the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, at 69 degrees south latitude, was nowhere close to the pole, defined as between 88.5 and 90 degrees. On Earth,
A cat wearing a black and yellow security vest strolls nonchalantly past security guards lined outside a Philippine office building waiting to receive instructions for their shift. Conan, a six-month-old stray, joined the security team of the Worldwide Corporate Center in the capital, Manila, several months ago. He is one of the lucky moggies unofficially adopted by security guards across the city, where thousands of cats live on the street. While the cats lack the security skills of dogs — and have a tendency to sleep on the job — their cuteness and company have endeared them to bored security guards working 12-hour
NEW ENERGY: Mark Lambert, the next deputy assistant secretary for China and Taiwan, is to head China House, which has been criticized for slowing policymaking Washington on Friday named veteran diplomat Mark Lambert as its top China policy official at the US Department of State at a time when ties between the two strategic rivals remain fraught over issues including Taiwan, trade and US curbs on Beijing’s access to US technology. Lambert is to be deputy assistant secretary for China and Taiwan, and is to head the Office of China Coordination, informally known as China House, the State Department said in a release. The division was created late last year to unify and better coordinate China policies across regions and issues, but has faced criticism for adding
TEMPORARY HITCH? Biden said the US ‘cannot ... allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,’ and he expects House Speaker McCarthy to come up with a solution The threat of a federal government shutdown suddenly lifted late on Saturday as US President Joe Biden signed a temporary funding bill to keep agencies open with little time to spare after the US Congress rushed to approve the bipartisan deal. The package dropped aid to Ukraine, a White House priority opposed by a growing number of Republican lawmakers, but increased federal disaster assistance by US$16 billion, meeting Biden’s full request. The bill would fund the US government until Nov. 17. After chaotic days of turmoil in the US House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy abruptly abandoned demands for steep spending cuts
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