CHINA
Xi gives graft update
President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Friday said that corruption in the country remains severe and complicated even though progress has been made in the battle against graft. The “stubbornness and danger” of corruption cannot be underestimated, China Central Television quoted Xi as saying. He was speaking at a group study session of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee. Xi vowed zero tolerance on corruption, and asked senior government officials to keep themselves and their family and relatives in check. He called for senior cadres to adhere to a moderate and clean relationship between the government and business community. The politburo declared its anti-corruption dragnet of financial institutions a success, Xinhua news agency reported.
PALESTINE
Rocket, strikes exchanged
Militants yesterday fired a rocket toward a city in southern Israel, drawing Israeli airstrikes, the Israeli military said. There were no immediate reports of casualties in Gaza or Israel, which intercepted the rocket that was launched toward Ashkelon, setting off air raid sirens and sending residents to bomb shelters. Israel said that Hamas fired the rocket. “In response to the rocket attack, Israel Defense Forces aircraft struck a number of Hamas terror targets in the Gaza Strip,” the Israeli military said in a statement. A spokesperson for Hamas’ political wing, Hazem Qassem, declined to comment on the Israeli allegations.
PARAGUAY
Man prompts Quds quibble
One of the men aboard a plane grounded near Buenos Aires has ties to Iran’s Quds Force, Paraguay’s head of intelligence said on Friday, despite claims by Argentina that no evidence links the case to Tehran’s overseas intelligence. Minister of Intelligence Esteban Aquino told reporters that Captain Gholamreza Ghasemi did not merely share a name with a member of the force — an arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the US — but is in fact the same man. Argentine Minister of Security Anibal Fernandez said that while the Paraguayan official “has his right to say whatever he wants... I’m not going to talk about conjecture.” Fernandez told AM750 radio: “We abide by due process and according to the official documentation, there is no specific relationship with terrorist organizations, according to all the databases.” The Boeing 747 cargo plane, reportedly carrying car parts, has been held at an Argentine airport since Wednesday last week, with its 14 Venezuelan and five Iranian crew members prevented from leaving the country pending an investigation.
SOUTH KOREA
IE ‘grave’ goes viral
An engineer who built a grave for Internet Explorer (IE) on Friday said that the now-defunct Web browser had made his life a misery. South Korea remained bizarrely wedded to Microsoft’s IE, which was retired by the company earlier this week after 27 years. In honor of the browser’s “death,” a gravestone marked with its signature “e” logo was set up on the rooftop of a cafe in Gyeongju by engineer Jung Ki-young, 38. “He was a good tool to use to download other browsers,” the gravestone’s inscription reads. Images of Jung’s joke tombstone quickly spread online, with users of social media site Reddit upvoting it tens of thousands of times.
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
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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
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