UKRAINE
EU membership form done
The nation on Sunday completed a questionnaire that will form a starting point for the EU to decide on membership for Kyiv, said Ihor Zhovkva, deputy head of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s office. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen handed the questionnaire to Zelenskiy during her visit to Kyiv on April 8. The European Commission will need to issue a recommendation on Ukraine’s compliance with the necessary membership criteria, Zhovkva said. “We expect the recommendation ... to be positive, and then the ball will be on the side of the EU member states.”
SPAIN
Garcia Marquez honored
A new library in Barcelona’s Sant Marti de Provencals District has been named in honor of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “The plan for the new library was under way when Garcia Marquez died in 2014, so it was decided to name it in his honor because he and many other Latin American authors had a close relationship with the city,” chief librarian Neus Castellano said. “It’s a nod towards the role Barcelona has played in Latin American literature.” Garcia Marquez lived in Barcelona from 1967 to 1975, arriving shortly after the publication of his groundbreaking magical realism novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
UNITED KINGDOM
Video shop turns 40
Against the odds, 20th Century Flicks, a DVD and VHS rental store in Bristol, England, has reached a landmark — its 40th anniversary — and is marking the moment with a festival showing films from the year of its opening, 1982. “It does feel like a milestone,” said one of the owners, Dave Taylor, who began working at the shop two decades ago when renting videos and DVDs was as routine as clicking on a Netflix or Amazon Prime film is now. “It’s changed a lot, but there is still a demand for what we do. People who use our service really value it and Bristol really loves its film. There are enough people in the city wanting to watch the stuff that we have,” he said.
UNITED STATES
‘Ever Forward’ refloated
After two unsuccessful attempts to dislodge it and the subsequent removal of about 500 of the 5,000 containers it was carrying, the Ever Forward was refloated in the Chesapeake Bay just before 7am on Sunday by two barges and five tugboats. A full moon and high spring tide helped provide a lift to the salvage vessels, as they pulled and pushed the ship from the mud, across a dredged hole and back into the shipping channel. Once refloated, the Ever Forward was weighed down again by water tanks to ensure safe passage under the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on its way to an anchorage off Annapolis, the Baltimore Sun reported.
UNITED STATES
Florida rejects math books
Florida’s education department has rejected 54 mathematics textbooks from next year’s school curriculum, citing alleged references to critical race theory (CRT) among a range of reasoning for some of the rejections, officials announced. The department said in a news release on Friday that some of the books had been rejected for failure to comply with the state’s content standards, Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, but that 21 percent of the books were disallowed “because they incorporate prohibited topics or unsolicited strategies, including CRT.” Critical race theory is an academic practice that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.
SOUTH KOREA
Russian paintings stranded
Dozens of paintings by renowned Russian artists are stuck in Seoul after an exhibition due to flight sanctions imposed over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, organizers said yesterday. The paintings by about 50 Russian artists — including Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko, among others — have been on display at the Sejong Museum of Art since December. The art works were loaned by four Russian institutions for the exhibition, the organizers said, including the Nizhny Novgorod State Art Museum and the Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts.
SOUTH KOREA
Most precautions lifted
The government yesterday lifted almost all of its COVID-19 precautions. A midnight curfew on restaurants and other businesses was scrapped, along with a cap of 10 people allowed to gather. From next week, people are to be allowed to eat snacks in cinemas and other indoor public facilities such as stadiums. However, people are still required to wear masks, with the government planning to review whether to ease mask rules in two weeks. The relaxation of the rules came as the number of COVID-19 cases in the country yesterday fell to the lowest since Feb. 9.
LEBANON
IS vows ‘revenge’
The Islamic State (IS) group on Sunday vowed “revenge” over the killing of its former leader. “We announce, relying on God, a blessed campaign to take revenge” over the death of Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi and the group’s former spokesman, an audio message attributed to the group and circulated on Telegram said. The group’s new spokesman, Abu-Omar al-Muhajjir, also called on supporters to resume attacks in Europe, taking advantage of the “available opportunity” of “the crusaders fighting each other” — in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
TURKEY
New offensive launched
The military has launched a new ground-and-air offensive against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, Minister of Defense Hulusi Akar said yesterday. Fighter jets and artillery struck targets belonging to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, before commando troops crossed into the region by land or were airlifted by helicopters, Akar said in a video posted on the ministry’s Web site. The jets “successfully” struck shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels, ammunition depots and headquarters belonging to the PKK, he said. “Our operation is continuing successfully, as planned,” Akar said. “We are determined to save our noble nation from the terror misfortune that has plagued our country for 40 years.”
SAUDI ARABIA
Yemen leader ‘pushed out’
The government earlier this month pushed Yemeni President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi to step down, and officials have confined him to his home and restricted his communications, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. Hadi announced his resignation on April 7, handing his powers to a new leadership council. Citing anonymous Saudi and Yemeni officials, the Journal said that Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman gave Hadi a written decree delegating his powers to the council, which consists of eight representatives of different Yemeni groups. According to the officials, some Saudi officials had threatened to publicize what they said was evidence of Hadi’s corruption in their efforts to convince him to step down, the Journal wrote.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
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