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.
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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