PHILIPPINES
Quake sparks evacuations
People yesterday evacuated buildings in the capital, Manila, after a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck off Luzon, according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology and images shared by media on social media. The agency wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that it did not expect damage, but warned of aftershocks. It recorded the earthquake with a depth of 79km. Images shared by local media on X showed government workers leaving senate, presidential palace and justice ministry buildings. Students also vacated universities.
INDONESIA
More hikers found
Rescuers searching the hazardous slopes of Mount Marapi found more bodies among the climbers caught by an eruption two days ago, raising the number of confirmed and presumed dead to 23. More than 50 climbers were rescued after the initial eruption on Sunday, and 11 others were initially confirmed dead. Another eruption on Monday spewed a new burst of hot ash as high as 800m into the air and temporarily halted search operations. Meanwhile, Volcanological Survey of Indonesia head Hendra Gunawan said the agency had since 2011 warned that the volcano was unsafe to climb.
JAPAN
Remains of US crew found
US and Japanese dive teams found the remains of five more crew members from a V-22 Osprey aircraft that crashed off Yakushima Island on Wednesday last week, the Pentagon said on Monday. Eight crew were aboard the tilt-rotor aircraft when it crashed during a routine training mission. Prior to this week’s discovery, one body had been recovered. Two crew members remain unaccounted for.
UNITED KINGDOM
No nuclear site hack: UK
No records or evidence has been found to suggest that networks at the Sellafield nuclear site were the victim of a successful cyberattack by state actors, the government said on Monday following a report by the Guardian. The newspaper reported that Sellafield, which carries out nuclear fuel reprocessing, nuclear waste storage and decommissioning, had been hacked by cybergroups closely linked to Russia and China. “Our monitoring systems are robust and we have a high degree of confidence that no such malware exists on our system,” the government said. “This was confirmed to the Guardian well in advance of publication, along with rebuttals to a number of other inaccuracies in their reporting.”
JAPAN
Driver held over pigeon death
A Tokyo taxi driver was arrested for deliberately driving into a flock of pigeons and killing one, police said yesterday. Atsushi Ozawa, 50, “used his car to kill a common pigeon, which is not a game animal,” last month, and was arrested on Sunday for contravening wildlife protection laws, a Tokyo police spokesman said. Ozawa sped off from a traffic light when it turned green, ploughing his taxi into the bevy of birds at a speed of 60kph, local media said. The sound of the engine reportedly prompted a surprised passersby to report the incident. Tokyo police had a veterinarian perform a postmortem on the bird and determined its cause of death as traumatic shock, local media said. “Roads belong to humans, so pigeons should have dodged out of the way,” Ozawa was quoted by local media as telling investigators. “Wow, can you get arrested for running over a pigeon?” a user wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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