ARMENIA
Return Azerbaijan land: PM
The nation might face a war with Azerbaijan if it does not compromise with Baku on returning some strategic Azerbaijani territories that Armenia has controlled since the early 1990s, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said during a meeting on Monday with residents of border areas in the Tavush region, close to a string of deserted Azerbaijani villages that Yerevan has controlled since the opening phases of the countries’ three decade-long conflict in the early 1990. Pashinyan has repeatedly signaled weeks that he is willing to return the villages to Azerbaijan, which are important for Yerevan, as they control its main road northwards to the border with Georgia. Baku has said that the return of its lands is a necessary precondition for a peace deal to end three decades of conflict over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan retook in September last year.
JAPAN
Chinese academic missing
Hu Shiyun (胡士云), a Chinese literature and linguistics professor at Kobe Gakuin University, has been missing for about six months since his trip home last year, raising concerns about his safety, the institution said yesterday. His apparent disappearance comes as Beijing has sharpened its focus on its nationals abroad in recent years. The university was first notified in September last year by Hu’s family in Japan that he had been unreachable since his return in or after August to his homeland, university spokesman Yoichi Takamura said. At the urging of the family, the university initially took no action, but it finally asked the Chinese consulate general in Osaka earlier this month to investigate his whereabouts. “We’re worried. We hope to hear from him,” the spokesman said, adding that the school had not received any update.
SOUTH KOREA
Ex K-pop star leaves jail
Former K-pop star Jung Joon-young left prison early yesterday after completing a five-year term for gang rape and illicit filming, in one of the nation’s high-profile spycam scandals. Jung was found guilty of rape on two occasions in 2016, and of filming himself having intercourse with other women without their knowledge and sharing the footage without their consent. Another K-pop star and a former member of boyband BIGBANG, Seungri, was found to have received Jung’s videos and was later separately found guilty of multiple charges linked to a sex and drugs scandal at his “Burning Sun” nightclub. Wearing a black hat and mask, Jung, 35, walked out of the prison in Mokpo, without talking to waiting press, News1 agency reported. Jung rose to fame in 2012 when he came third in the audition show Super Star K and had a number of solo hits before the spycam scandal emerged in early 2019, when he announced his retirement from the entertainment business.
SOUTH KOREA
Marriages end long-term fall
South Korean marriages last year ticked up for the first time in about a decade — a rare sign of improvement in a factor behind the nation having the world’s lowest fertility rate. About 193,000 couples tied the knot last year, up 1 percent from a year earlier, ending a decline that began in 2012, data released by Statistics Korea yesterday showed. Couples who had postponed weddings during the COVID-19 pandemic helped drive up the number, Statistics Korea said in a separate briefing. Marriages between Koreans and foreigners also increased, it said. Meanwhile, the age at which people got married for the first time rose further to 33.97 for men and 31.45 for women.
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
‘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
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
RSS