SOUTH KOREA
Police raid aerospace office
Police yesterday raided the head office of Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) in connection with two Indonesian nationals accused of leaking technology related to a fighter jet project, a police official said. The two engineers are accused of breaching the Defense Acquisition Program Act and leaking technology related to the KF-21, a homegrown fighter jet that is partially backed by Indonesia. The raid started on Thursday and was continuing for a second day, an official at the security investigation bureau of Gyeongnam Provincial Police said. A KAI spokesperson said the company was “actively cooperating” to ensure it could provide anything necessary for the police investigation to establish the truth. The KF-21, developed by KAI, is designed to be a cheaper, less stealthy alternative to the US-built F-35, on which Seoul relies. An Indonesian foreign ministry spokesperson last month told reporters that Jakarta was gathering evidence about the allegations.
EL SALVADOR
Bitcoin savings hit US$406m
President Nayib Bukele on Thursday said that his country has stored more than US$400 million in bitcoin in an offline “cold wallet” as the cryptocurrency forges new record highs. “We’ve decided to transfer a big chunk of our bitcoin to a cold wallet, and store that cold wallet in a physical vault within our national territory,” Bukele wrote on X. “You can call it our first bitcoin piggy bank,” he added. The cold wallet protects cryptocurrency investments by keeping them offline to prevent hacking attacks. Bukele shared a screenshot of the investment showing a total of 5,689.7 bitcoin, with a valuation of US$406.6 million. The nation was the first in the world to legally circulate bitcoin as legal tender on par with the US dollar in September 2021. “It’s not much, but it’s honest work,” Bukele said about the cold wallet initiative.
CHINA
US envoy mocks criticism
US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns yesterday said that Beijing’s position on a potential TikTok ban in the US was “supremely ironic” given the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship of online platforms within its borders. The US House of Representatives on Wednesday overwhelmingly approved a bill that would force the short-video app to break with its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban. Beijing called the move Washington’s “bandit” mentality and accused US lawmakers of “unjustly suppressing foreign companies.” During an online seminar by the US-based East-West Center, Burns said Chinese officials “won’t even let TikTok be available to 1.4 billion Chinese.” Many Western platforms, including Google, Facebook and Instagram, are blocked from operating in the country.
SOUTH KOREA
Actor guilty of sex crime
South Korean actor O Yeong-su, who starred in the first season of the hit Netflix series Squid Game, was yesterday convicted on charges of sexual harassment and handed a suspended prison sentence, a court official said. The Seongnam branch of the Suwon District Court sentenced O to eight months in prison, suspended for two years, as well as 40 hours of attendance at a sexual violence treatment program, the court official said by telephone. The 79-year-old actor, who was charged with two counts of sexual harassment in 2017, had denied the accusations. O told reporters he planned to appeal against the decision. He has seven days to appeal or the ruling will be upheld.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
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