CHINA
Record case count posted
Beijing yesterday recorded its highest number of new COVID-19 cases for a year and a half, as the capital gears up to host the Winter Olympics in five days. The country is to hold the Games in a strict “closed loop” bubble as part of its “zero COVID-19” strategy of targeted lockdowns, border restrictions and lengthy quarantines. The approach has helped the world’s second-largest economy keep the number of cases far lower than many other countries, but it is battling local outbreaks in several cities, as well as in the Olympic bubble. Beijing’s tally of 20 new cases was the city’s highest since June 2020, the National Health Commission said.
IRAQ
Nine ‘terrorists’ killed
Airstrikes on Saturday killed nine suspected terrorists implicated in a deadly Islamic State (IS) group attack on an army base earlier this month, the military said. The Jan. 21 attack, which killed 11 soldiers in Hawi al-Azim in the eastern province of Diyala, was the deadliest claimed by the group in Iraq this year. In a statement released late on Saturday, the military said it had “identified the exact whereabouts in Hawi al-Azim of the terrorist group which perpetrated this criminal act... Three precision strikes by Iraqi F-16s have so far killed nine terrorist elements.” The base attack coincided with a prison break attempt in Syria that has triggered days of clashes between IS fighters and Kurdish forces.
AUSTRALIA
Megachurch head resigns
The founder and global head of Pentecostal megachurch Hillsong, Brian Houston, yesterday announced that he would step down while he faces trial over charges that he covered up his father’s child sexual abuse. Houston said the church’s lawyers had advised him to hand over leadership during his trial. Houston was in August last year charged with concealing information from police about his late father, Frank Houston, who had been accused of sexually abusing a young boy while a preacher at the Assemblies of God Church in the 1970s. Last year’s allegations “came as a shock to me, and it is my intention to vigorously defend them,” Brian Houston said.
HONG KONG
Pet stores reopen
Dozens of pet stores that sold hamsters were permitted to resume business from yesterday, the government said, after being shuttered last week while about 2,200 hamsters were culled over COVID-19 fears. Authorities enraged pet lovers with the cull order after tracing an outbreak to a worker in a shop where 11 hamsters tested positive. Imported hamsters from the Netherlands had been cited as the source. All hamster imports remain banned. Five stores, including the one where the outbreak started, remained shuttered, as they had not yet “passed the virus test,” the government said.
THAILAND
Southern town bombed
Bombers set off at least 13 blasts in a southern town overnight, and police killed two suspected insurgents in a separate raid after a 20-hour siege in a nearby province, authorities said on Saturday. While officials did not link the two incidents directly, the violence came weeks after the government reopened a dialogue with insurgents from a Malay Muslim minority in the southern part of the Buddhist-majority country. Authorities said that in the raid, one volunteer ranger was injured and the two suspects were killed. The explosions in Yala, mostly on roadsides in front of local businesses, injured one person, a police spokesman said.
MEXICO
Villagers clash with soldiers
Inhabitants of a town on the front line of a turf war between rival drug cartels said soldiers fired on them during a clash on Saturday in Michoacan. State police denied the government was responsible for the violence. Jose Alfredo Ortega, the head of state police, said that soldiers were retreating when they came under fire from another direction, and that later someone detonated an explosive device. The clash occurred in an area where the Jalisco cartel is fighting a bloody turf war with gangs from Michoacan. The two sides have used trenches, sharpshooters, bombs dropped by drones and homemade armored vehicles against each other.
UNITED STATES
Seven poisoned in Ohio
Seven people were on Saturday hospitalized in critical condition from carbon monoxide poisoning at a Hampton Inn in Marysville, Ohio, officials said. Marysville Fire Chief Jay Riley told the Columbus Dispatch that the source of the carbon monoxide was unclear, but everyone who was hospitalized had been in the hotel’s pool area. Authorities said they received a 911 call about a two-year-old girl who was found in the pool unconscious. More 911 calls soon followed about unconscious people or others who reported symptoms such as dizziness and a burning in the throat, Marysville Police Chief Tony Brooks said.
UNITED STATES
Nurses charged with forgery
Two nurses in Amityville, New York, are accused of forging COVID-19 vaccination cards and pocketing more than US$1.5 million from the scheme, prosecutors and police said. Julie DeVuono, the owner of Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare and her employee, Marissa Urraro, were charged with felony forgery. Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond Tierney said DeVuono and Urraro handed out fake vaccination cards, charging US$220 for adults and US$85 for children, and entered the false information into the state’s immunization database, he said.
FRANCE
Minister accuses contractor
Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Yves Le Drian yesterday accused Russian private military company Wagner of plundering Mali’s resources. The US Army last week estimated hundreds of Wagner personnel were in the Sahel state, but the country’s ruling army have said this is not true. Le Drian told the Journal du Dimanche that the mercenaries, “former Russian soldiers, armed by Russia and accompanied by Russian logistics,” were “using the country’s resources in exchange for protecting the junta.” The UN, France and local groups say that Wagner group is also present in the Central African Republic.
UNITED STATES
Woman charged over IS ties
A woman who once lived in Kansas has been arrested after federal prosecutors charged her with joining the Islamic State (IS) group and leading an all-female battalion. The US Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, on Saturday announced that Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, has been charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The criminal complaint was filed under seal back in 2019, but made public after Fluke-Ekren was brought back to the US on Friday to face charges. Prosecutors said that Fluke-Ekren wanted to recruit operatives to attack a college campus in the US and discussed a terrorist attack on a shopping mall. She told one witness that “she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” an FBI affidavit said.
‘HYANGDO’: A South Korean lawmaker said there was no credible evidence to support rumors that Kim Jong-un has a son with a disability or who is studying abroad South Korea’s spy agency yesterday said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s daughter, Kim Ju-ae, who last week accompanied him on a high-profile visit to Beijing, is understood to be his recognized successor. The teenager drew global attention when she made her first official overseas trip with her father, as he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Analysts have long seen her as Kim’s likely successor, although some have suggested she has an older brother who is being secretly groomed as the next leader. The South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) “assesses that she [Kim Ju-ae]
In the week before his fatal shooting, right-wing US political activist Charlie Kirk cheered the boom of conservative young men in South Korea and warned about a “globalist menace” in Tokyo on his first speaking tour of Asia. Kirk, 31, who helped amplify US President Donald Trump’s agenda to young voters with often inflammatory rhetoric focused on issues such as gender and immigration, was shot in the neck on Wednesday at a speaking event at a Utah university. In Seoul on Friday last week, he spoke about how he “brought Trump to victory,” while addressing Build Up Korea 2025, a conservative conference
DEADLOCK: Putin has vowed to continue fighting unless Ukraine cedes more land, while talks have been paused with no immediate results expected, the Kremlin said Russia on Friday said that peace talks with Kyiv were on “pause” as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin still wanted to capture the whole of Ukraine. Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that he was running out of patience with Putin, and the NATO alliance said it would bolster its eastern front after Russian drones were shot down in Polish airspace this week. The latest blow to faltering diplomacy came as Russia’s army staged major military drills with its key ally Belarus. Despite Trump forcing the warring sides to hold direct talks and hosting Putin in Alaska, there
North Korea has executed people for watching or distributing foreign television shows, including popular South Korean dramas, as part of an intensifying crackdown on personal freedoms, a UN human rights report said on Friday. Surveillance has grown more pervasive since 2014 with the help of new technologies, while punishments have become harsher — including the introduction of the death penalty for offences such as sharing foreign TV dramas, the report said. The curbs make North Korea the most restrictive country in the world, said the 14-page UN report, which was based on interviews with more than 300 witnesses and victims who had
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