UNITED STATES
Shooting rocks Dallas
A gunman killed two people and wounded four, including three police officers, before taking his own life on Saturday evening in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, police said. Haltom City Police Detective Matt Spillane yesterday said that all of those wounded in the residential neighborhood shooting had non-life threatening injuries and were expected to recover. Officers returned fire after being shot at while responding to a report of gunshots at a home around 6:45pm, he said. One officer was hit in both legs, and the other two officers were shot in their arms. The suspect died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Texas Rangers — the state’s elite police force — are taking over the investigation, Spillane said. A motive for the shooting was not immediately clear. “The main focus is on how and why this happened,” Spillane said. A woman was found dead inside a house and a man was found dead outside, Sergeant Rick Alexander said at a news conference on Saturday. The older adult woman who had initially called 911 was wounded, he said.
JAPAN
Power failure raises fears
A fire caused Japan’s largest power generator, JERA, to shut down a 500 megawatt unit at its Chiba thermal power station near Tokyo on Saturday, raising fears of an electricity crunch as a prolonged heatwave keeps demand at high levels. The fire broke out at about noon on Saturday near the steam valve of one of the turbines of the gas-fired combined-cycle power station, JERA said on Saturday, adding that the fire was extinguished about an hour later. JERA, a joint venture between Tokyo Electric Power and Chubu Electric Power, was checking all equipment at the unit where the fire occurred, and did not know when a restart would be possible, JERA said. The government expects energy supplies to remain tight during the peak summer season, and issued daily warnings for possible power shortages from Monday to Thursday last week as the country experienced its worst June heat since record-keeping began 147 years ago.
RUSSIA
Scientist held for treason
Russia has detained a second scientist in the space of a few days in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk on suspicion of state treason, the TASS news agency said on Saturday, citing a source close to the investigation. Anatoly Maslov, a chief scientist at an institute of theoretical and applied mechanics in Novosibirsk, a city about 2,800km east of Moscow, was detained and transferred to a prison in the Russian capital after an investigation by the FSB intelligence agency, TASS said. Maslov’s arrest comes in the same week that Dmitry Kolker, a physics and mathematics professor at Novosibirsk State University, was detained on state treason charges for allegedly collaborating with China’s security services.
ISRAEL
Lebanese drones shot down
The Israeli military on Saturday said it shot down three remote-controlled aircraft launched by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah heading toward an area where an Israeli gas platform was recently installed in the Mediterranean Sea. The launch of the aircraft appeared to be an attempt by Hezbollah to influence US-brokered negotiations between Israel and Lebanon over their maritime border, an area that is rich in natural gas. The aircraft were spotted early and did not pose an “imminent threat,” the military said.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
NO MORE LONG LINES: Swift border crossings for people traveling between Russia and areas it occupies in Ukraine show how quickly Moscow is seeking to absorb them To enter Russia from occupied Ukraine, all Tatiana has to do is arrive at the edge of the war-battered Donetsk region, show guards her Russian passport, say “thank you” and cross. Moscow has controlled several key border points since 2014, but the frontier has become more porous since the Kremlin annexed four Ukrainian territories last year, encouraging residents to take up new citizenship. “It’s become more comfortable because we’ve become Russians,” said the 37-year-old, who is from a Russian-occupied town. Tatiana used to have to go through a more arduous procedure to enter Russia: a check run by Moscow-sponsored separatists, then through Russian
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s
RSS