Thu, Jun 22, 2023 page6

• World News Quick Take

  • Agencies
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  ISRAEL

  Four killed in attack

  Two Palestinian attackers on Tuesday opened fire at a restaurant and gas station near an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, killing four Israelis and wounding several other people before they were shot dead, authorities said. The military said it was sending reinforcements to the West Bank and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “settle the score with the murderers.” “I want to tell all those who seek to harm us — all options are open,” he said in a video statement. “We will continue to fight terror with all our might.” Military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said the Palestinian shooters, affiliated with Hamas, drove to the scene from the Palestinian village of Urif in the northern West Bank. A civilian bystander shot one of the assailants repeatedly, killing him. Hamas identified him as 26-year-old Mohannad Faleh. After an hours-long manhunt, security forces caught the second shooter in the West Bank town of Tubas, shooting and killing him when he tried to run out of his car.

  AUSTRALIA

  Tibet CTA head warns of war

  The head of an India-based organization known as Tibet’s government-in-exile yesterday said that a destabilizing economic downturn in China could prompt Beijing to attack Taiwan or India, and this dynamic should be closely watched. Penpa Tsering, known as the Sikyong of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), was speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra, and compared Chinese policies to move Tibetan children into boarding schools, and DNA collection, to Australia’s past disgraced policy of removing indigenous children from families. Tsering said that Beijing kept flash points burning with India, Taiwan and in the South China Sea, but its priority was the economy, which was in a downturn with rising youth unemployment. “China is very insecure today so we have to keep watching the dynamism and see, because right now my analysis is if there is a threat to the survival of the [Chinese] Communist Party then they will definitely attack one of these places,” he said in response to reporters’ questions.

  JAPAN

  Eugenics report slammed

  Campaigners yesterday slammed a government report into the sterilization of thousands under a eugenics law in place until 1996, saying it failed to take responsibility for the procedures. The 1,400-page report submitted to parliament this week details how about 16,500 people — including some as young as nine — were sterilized without their consent under the law in force from 1948. About 8,500 more were sterilized after their consent was obtained, though campaigners have cast doubt on how freely agreement was given. The law allowed doctors to sterilize people with heritable intellectual disabilities, to “prevent ... poor quality descendants.” In 2019, lawmakers passed legislation offering each victim government compensation of ￥3.2 million (US$22,533) — an amount campaigners called insufficient given the damage inflicted. Lawmakers also commissioned the report made public this week, which Koji Niisato, a lawyer who has represented victims of the policy, said fell short. It is “largely a compilation of what has been investigated and reported” which merely confirms “that it was an extremely terrible law,” he told journalists yesterday. However, “it lacks a summary of why this terrible law was enacted and existed for 48 years, and fails to mention why the government didn’t take responsibility even after the law was amended,” he said. “That is extremely regrettable.”
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