SOUTH KOREA
Officials blamed for tragedy
Police are seeking charges of involuntary manslaughter and negligence against 23 officials, including law enforcement officers, for a lack of safety measures that resulted in a crowd surge that killed nearly 160 people, said Son Je-han, who led an investigation into the incident. Despite anticipating a crowd of more than 100,000 for Halloween celebrations on Oct. 28 last year, Seoul police had assigned only 137 officers to the capital’s nightlife district Itaewon on the day of the crush. Those officers were focused on monitoring narcotics use and violent crime, which experts said left few resources for pedestrian safety. Two of six people who have been arrested include Park Hee-young, mayor of Seoul’s Yongsan district, and the district’s former police chief, Lee Im-jae. The investigation said that police and public officials in Yongsan ignored phone calls placed to police hotlines that warned of a swelling crowd hours during Halloween celebrations before the surge turned deadly.
THAILAND
Army kills five in jungle raid
The military killed five suspected drug traffickers in a jungle shootout in the north, officials said yesterday. It was the third such deadly clash in two months. The incident happened in the early hours of Thursday morning in Chiang Rai Province, near the infamous “Golden Triangle” border region between Thailand, Laos and Myanmar — long a lucrative hub for the drug trade. A patrol encountered a group of five suspected smugglers with backpacks who refused to be searched and then began shooting, the military said. The clash lasted five minutes, the military said. About 500,000 methamphetamine pills and a gun were seized.
UNITED STATES
Haitians swim ashore
A group of 25 Haitians swam ashore in Miami on Thursday. The migrants, who had traveled by sailboat from Port-de-Paix, Haiti, swam ashore at Virginia Key, a small island southeast of downtown Miami, and were taken into the custody of US Customs and Border Protection, agency spokesman Michael Selva said. Some of the island’s beachgoers helped some of the migrants ashore with small boats and jet skis, Selva said. Dozens of additional migrants still aboard the sailboat were processed by federal officials at sea, which typically results in a return to their home countries. Increasing numbers of Cuban and Haitian migrants have attempted the risky Florida Straits crossing in recent months to illegally enter the Keys Island chain and other parts of the state, as inflation soars and economic conditions deteriorate in their home countries.
PERU
Big protest targets president
Thousands of people on Thursday took to the streets of the capital, Lima, in a peaceful protest against the new government and president, after weeks of bloody clashes triggered by the ousting of former president Pedro Castillo left at least 42 dead. “Why are you turning your back on the people? There are so many deaths, for God’s sake, stop this massacre,” said protester Olga Espejo, calling on Peruvian President Dina Boluarte, previously Castillo’s vice president, to resign. “Ms. Boluarte, they are using you,” Espejo said. Protesters carried cardboard coffins and photographs of the victims along the streets. The march, organized by trade unions and leftist groups, took place without incident. The clashes that began last month marked Peru’s worst outbreak of violence in more than 20 years.
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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