SOLOMON ISLANDS
Quake sways buildings
A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Solomon Islands yesterday, swaying buildings, hurling items off shelves and briefly knocking out power in parts of the capital, Honiara. There were no reports of serious injuries or major structural damage. “This was a big one,” said Joy Nisha, a receptionist with the Heritage Park Hotel in the capital. “Some of the things in the hotel fell. Everyone seems OK, but panicky.” At one recently built mall, chunks of cladding were shaken loose, crushing the front of a car and breaking the windshield. The roof of an annex at the Australian High Commission also collapsed, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told parliament in Canberra, adding: “There are no known injuries.” Across Honiara, people fled their homes and workplaces for higher ground, fearing a tsunami. A tsunami warning was issued, but was later withdrawn.
UNITED STATES
Marijuana pardons unveiled
Oregon Governor Kate Brown on Monday said that she is pardoning an estimated 45,000 people convicted of simple possession of marijuana. “No one deserves to be forever saddled with the impacts of a conviction for simple possession of marijuana — a crime that is no longer on the books in Oregon,” said Brown, who is also forgiving more than US$14 million in unpaid fines and fees. President Joe Biden has been calling on governors to issue pardons for those convicted of state marijuana offenses. Biden’s pardon applies to those convicted under federal law and thousands convicted in the District of Columbia. In Oregon, the pardon will remove 47,144 convictions for possession of a small amount of marijuana from individual records. Brown said that removing these criminal records eliminates barriers for employment, housing and educational opportunities.
UNITED STATES
SpaceX postpones launch
SpaceX on Monday said that it postponed the launch of the Eutelsat mission due to additional pre-flight checks. The company is now targeting the liftoff for about noon today Taiwan time. The weather was 20 percent favorable, SpaceX wrote on Twitter. The company was to launch the Eutelsat 10B mission to a geosynchronous transfer orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
FRANCE
Cyberattack hits Guadeloupe
The Caribbean island of Guadeloupe has shut down all its computer networks to protect data after a “large-scale cyberattack,” local authorities said on Monday. “As a security measure, all computer networks have been shut down to protect data and a diagnosis is under way,” the region said in a statement. “A continuity of services plan has been put in place to ensure public services,” the regional authorities said, adding that they had filed a complaint and sent a notification to data protection authority CNIL. The region said it was also collaborating with the national police and the gendarmerie.
JAPAN
Church to be investigated
The government yesterday said that it would begin a probe of the Unification Church, starting a process that could strip the religious group of its legal status. The government would give the church until Dec. 9 to answer questions about its finances and organization, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Keiko Nagaoka told a regular news conference.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
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