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.
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
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
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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