INDIA
Violence spurs new polls
The government is to rerun voting at 11 polling stations in the northeastern state of Manipur today after reports of violence and damage to voting machines in the state torn by months of ethnic clashes. Election authorities declared the voting void at the locations and ordered the fresh poll, the chief electoral officer of Manipur said in a statement late on Saturday. The main opposition Indian National Congress party had demanded a rerun at 47 Manipur polling stations, saying that booths were captured and elections were rigged.
CHINA
Province braces for flooding
Major rivers, waterways and reservoirs in Guangdong Province are threatening to unleash dangerous floods, forcing the government yesterday to enact emergency response plans to protect more than 127 million people. Calling the situation “grim,” local weather officials said sections of rivers and tributaries at the Xijiang and Beijiang river basins are reaching peak water levels that only happen once in 50 years, state broadcaster China Central Television said. The province has seen torrid downpours for several days and strong winds due to severe convective weather over the past few weeks. Almost 20,000 people have been evacuated in Qingyuan, and some power facilities in Zhaoqing were damaged, state media said. “Please look at Zhaoqing’s Huaiji county, which has become a water town. The elderly and children at the countryside don’t know what to do with power outages and no signal,” said one user on the social media site Sina Weibo.
SOUTH KOREA
Seoul protests offerings
Seoul yesterday protested Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s offering to Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine with “deep disappointment” and urged Japanese leaders to show repentance for the country’s wartime past. The shrine is seen by Beijing and Seoul as a symbol of Japan’s past military aggression because it includes 14 Japanese wartime leaders convicted as war criminals by an Allied tribunal among the 2.5 million war dead honored there. Kishida and some Cabinet members sent ritual offerings to the shrine yesterday, Yonhap news agency reported, citing Japanese media. “The government expresses deep disappointment and regret that Japanese leaders again sent offerings to or visited the Yasukuni Shrine, which glorifies Japan’s war of aggression and enshrines war criminals,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
UNITED STATES
Driver hits home, kills 2
A young brother and sister died and several people were injured, some of them seriously, when a vehicle driven by a suspected drunk driver on Saturday crashed into a young child’s birthday party at a boat club, a Michigan sheriff said. An eight-year-old girl and her five-year-old brother died at the scene in the crash, when a 66-year-old woman drove 7.6m into the building at about 3pm at the Swan Creek Boat Club in Berlin Township, Monroe County Sheriff Troy Goodnough said. “The scene was described by the first responders as extremely chaotic, with high level of emotions of those directly involved and those who witnessed this horrific incident,” he said. Three children and six adults were taken to area hospitals by two helicopters or ambulances with life-threatening injuries, he said. The woman driving the vehicle was taken into custody on suspicion of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated causing death, Goodnough said.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant