SOUTH KOREA
Embassy deletes video
The Israeli embassy removed a video showing an imaginary scenario in which Koreans are attacked by masked assailants in Seoul, a reference to Hamas, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The ministry said in a statement that the video was deemed “inappropriate” and that it had asked the Israeli embassy to take it down. The video, which is no longer available on the embassy’s social media, depicted a distressing scenario in which a South Korean woman in the capital is abducted by an armed assailant on Christmas Day and forcibly separated from her young daughter, a clip published by South Korean broadcaster YTN showed. The Israeli embassy wrote, alongside the now-removed video posted on its Facebook account on Tuesday: “On October 7th, Israel was attacked by Hamas terrorists. 1,200 men, women and children were killed, and over 240 people were taken hostage in Gaza. Imagine if it happened to you. What would you do?”
UNITED STATES
Decades-old body identified
Remains found by hikers in a shallow grave 47 years ago near a lake on the border of Arizona and Nevada have been identified. The man was Luis Alonso Paredes, who was from El Salvador, but might have been living or working in the Las Vegas area at the time of his death, the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office announced on Tuesday. The remains were discovered on Nov. 23, 1976, in a desert area in northwestern Arizona, just east of Lake Mohave. An autopsy at the time revealed that the victim was likely in his early to mid-30s and had been shot in the head at close range, the sheriff’s office said. However, despite authorities collecting fingerprints during the autopsy, the case soon went cold and the victim remained nameless for close to five decades.
AUSTRIA
Inventor of Glock guns dies
Gaston Glock, the Austrian developer of the handgun that bears his name, died on Wednesday. He was 94. The Glock company announced his death, the Austria Press Agency reported. Glock, a reclusive engineer, founded the company in 1963 in Deutsch-Wagram, near Vienna. It has since expanded worldwide, including a US subsidiary founded in 1985. Glock handguns are used by police and some countries’ military forces, as well as private customers. The weapon was significantly lighter, cheaper and more reliable than the models available when it was created. Glock said on its Web site that its founder “not only revolutionized the world of small arms in the 1980s, but also succeeded in establishing the Glock brand as the global leader in the handgun industry.”
RUSSIA
Plane lands on frozen river
A Soviet-era Antonov 24 aircraft carrying 30 passengers landed on a frozen river near an airport in Russia’s east yesterday because of pilot error, transport prosecutors said. The Polar Airlines An-24 landed safely on the Kolyma River near Zyryanka in the Yakutia region, the prosecutors said. “According to preliminary information, the cause of the aviation incident was an error by the crew in piloting the aircraft,” a spokesperson for the Eastern Siberian transport prosecutor said in a statement. Prosecutors published pictures of the aircraft on a frozen river. The Izvestia newspaper published pictures of passengers disembarking. “The An-24 aircraft landed outside of the runway of the Zyryanka airport,” Polar Airlines said in a short statement. “There were no casualties.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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