JAPAN
Tokyo scrambles fighter jets
Tokyo scrambled fighter jets after Russian bombers flew over international waters around the nation, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi said yesterday. “We confirmed that Russian military bombers and fighter jets flew over the high seas of the Sea of Okhotsk and the Sea of Japan yesterday, and we scrambled Air Self-Defense Force fighter jets” in response, he told reporters. “It is difficult to say clearly what the purpose of the flight was ... but the Russian military has been active on an ongoing basis in areas surrounding Japan,” he said. The Russian defense ministry reportedly announced that its long-range strategic bombers flew over international waters in the Sea of Japan and the Sea of Okhotsk.
MYANMAR
State of emergency extended
The military junta has extended a state of emergency for another six months, state media reported yesterday, a day ahead of the four-year anniversary of a coup that plunged the country into chaos after a decade of tentative democracy. The nation has been locked in a civil war triggered by the military’s overthrow of the elected civilian government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. The junta plans to hold an election this year, which critics have derided as a sham to keep the generals in power through proxies. “There are still more tasks to be done to hold the general election successfully. Especially for a free and fair election, stability and peace is still needed,” state-run MRTV said on its Telegram channel in announcing the extension of emergency rule.
GUINEA
Sleeping sickness beaten
Sleeping sickness, a parasitic disease which is generally fatal without treatment, has been eliminated as a public health problem in the nation, the French Research Institute for Development (IRD) said on Thursday. The disease, also known as human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), is spread by infected tsetse flies and is endemic in sub-Saharan Africa. The Trypanosoma parasite enters the central nervous system, causing symptoms including behavior changes, confusion, poor coordination and sleep cycle disturbance. The nation has fallen “below the threshold for the elimination of the disease as a public health problem (less than one case per 10,000 inhabitants in the three endemic areas),” the IRD said in a statement cosigned by the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative and the Institut Pasteur in Guinea.
UNITED STATES
Priest fired over ‘salute’
A Michigan priest had his license revoked by the Anglican Catholic Church after he mimicked a straight-arm gesture performed by Elon Musk during a speech earlier this month that some have interpreted as a Nazi salute. Calvin Robinson, who is listed as the priest-in-charge of St Paul’s Anglican Catholic Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, performed the gesture at the end of a speech at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington on Saturday last week. On Wednesday, the Anglican Catholic Church posted a statement that said Robinson’s “license in this Church has been revoked” after he made a “gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute.” “While we cannot say what was in Mr Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition,” it said. “We believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late