PAKISTAN
Teen youngest to summit K2
A 19-year-old Pakistani has become the youngest person to summit K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, the Alpine Club of Pakistan said yesterday. Shehroze Kashif reached the 8,611m summit at 8:10am yesterday. Kashif, who began climbing in his early teens, scaled the world’s 12th-highest mountain, 8,047m Broad Peak, at the age of 17. In May, he became the youngest Pakistani to scale Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. He now holds an additional record as the youngest person to have summitted K2 and Everest. On Monday, sherpas affixing ropes for climbers about 300m below an obstacle known as the Bottleneck discovered the bodies of Pakistani mountaineering legend Muhammad Ali Sadpara, Iceland’s John Snorri and Chile’s Juan Pablo Mohr. “We are now focusing on a strategy to bring the bodies to a point from where they could be airlifted,” club official Ayaz Shagri said.
AUSTRALIA
Man jailed over UN breach
An Australian man was sentenced to more than three years in prison after attempting to help sell North Korean missile parts and other goods in contravention of UN sanctions, authorities said yesterday. Choi Chan-han, 62, from Sydney, was charged in 2017 with offenses including seeking to broker deals between North Korea and Indonesia. After initially denying the charges, he pleaded guilty in February to breaching sanctions by brokering the sale of arms and related materiel from Pyongyang in exchange for petroleum products and attempting to export coal from North Korea to Indonesia. Choi, a civil engineer born in South Korea who moved to Australia in the 1980s, was last week sentenced to three years and six months in prison, capping what the Australian Federal Police described as a complex investigation with a unique international span.
JAPAN
Tokyo asks for more beds
Olympic host city Tokyo has asked hospitals to prepare more beds for COVID-19 patients as the city grapples with a rise in infections, broadcaster TBS said yesterday. Daily infections in the capital, which has seen an influx of overseas visitors for the Tokyo Games, doubled to 1,429 on Monday from a week earlier. That was the highest number for a Monday since the pandemic began and followed a similar record set on Sunday. Infection numbers tend to dip following weekends and holidays when testing capacity shrinks so experts and policymakers were closely watching yesterday’s numbers. With hospitals admitting growing numbers of patients, Tokyo aims to raise the number of beds to 6,406 by early next month from 5,967, TBS said.
CHINA
Sandstorm engulfs city
A wall of sand more than 100m high swallowed a city on the fringes of the Gobi desert in scenes reminiscent of a disaster film. Dunhuang, a tourist draw with a colorful history as a Silk Road outpost, momentarily disappeared in the dust clouds as the storm hit on Sunday. A resident, surnamed Zhang, told local media Jimu News that the sandstorm came abruptly and swept through the city in five or six minutes. “I couldn’t see the sun,” he said, adding that the city in Gansu Province had not experienced such a sandstorm in several years. “At first I was enveloped in the sandstorm’s yellow dust, then it turned red and finally black.” Sandstorms are common in the region each spring, but rare in the summer, state-run China News Service said.
ISRAEL
Gantz to visit France
Minister of Defense Benny Gantz is to travel to France this week to discuss spyware sold by NSO Group that was allegedly used to target French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron’s phone number was on a list of targets that were possibly under surveillance by Morocco, which used NSO Group’s Pegasus software, Le Monde reported. Macron has called for an investigation. Gantz is to meet French Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly today, an official statement said. “Gantz will discuss the crisis in Lebanon and the developing agreement with Iran. He will also update the minister on the topic of NSO,” it said. A global investigation published last week by 17 media organizations said that Pegasus had been used in attempted and successful hacks of smartphones belonging to journalists, government officials and human rights advocates.
UNITED STATES
Mike Enzi dies aged 77
Former senator Mike Enzi has died, according to an announcement on his Twitter page. He was 77. The former senator had sustained serious injuries while riding a bicycle, his family said in a statement earlier on Monday. Enzi was elected to the Senate in 1997, after narrowly defeating John Barrasso in a Republican primary — Barrasso would later win his own Senate seat — and then winning the election with 54 percent of the vote. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday, following news of Enzi’s bike accident, praised Enzi’s “generosity and kindness” during his time in the Senate, as well as his legislative accomplishments. “I know members on both sides are very much thinking of Mike at this time. We are praying for his health and for the entire Enzi family,” McConnell said.
HAITI
Security chief arrested
Police on Monday said that they had arrested the head of former president Jovenel Moise’s security team as part of the ongoing investigation into the president’s July 7 assassination. Security chief Jean Laguel Civil is suspected of involvement in the plot that saw Moise killed at his home in the middle of the night by armed commandos who bypassed the president’s guards without firing a shot. Civil had already been placed in solitary confinement at a prison in Delmas, near Port-au-Prince. “I can confirm that Jean Laguel Civil was arrested Monday by police as part of the investigation into the assassination of president Jovenel Moise,” police spokeswoman Marie Michelle Verrier said. Police on Monday also issued a warrant for Wendelle Coq Thelot, a judge in the highest court in the nation who had been fired by Moise.
UNITED STATES
New petition in Spears case
An attorney for Britney Spears has asked a Los Angeles court to name a new conservator to oversee the pop singer’s finances following testimony that she wanted her father ousted from the role, the New York Times reported on Monday. In a court filing, lawyer Matthew Rosengart requested that accountant Jason Rubin be named the conservator of Spears’ estate, a post held by her father, Jamie Spears, the Times reported. The newspaper said that Rosengart also filed a petition to remove Jamie Spears as a conservator, but that document was not made public. Britney Spears had told the court that she wanted her father immediately removed and wanted to charge him with conservatorship abuse. The 39-year-old was placed under a conservatorship that controls both her personal and financial affairs in 2008 after she suffered a mental health breakdown.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
A group of Uyghur men who were detained in Thailand more than one decade ago said that the Thai government is preparing to deport them to China, alarming activists and family members who say the men are at risk of abuse and torture if they are sent back. Forty-three Uyghur men held in Bangkok made a public appeal to halt what they called an imminent threat of deportation. “We could be imprisoned and we might even lose our lives,” the letter said. “We urgently appeal to all international organizations and countries concerned with human rights to intervene immediately to save us from
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
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