CHINA
Pakistan upgrade pledged
Beijing is willing to work with Islamabad to build an upgraded version of an economic corridor linking the two countries, President Xi Jinping (習近平) told visiting Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday. Sharif pledged to ensure the safety of Chinese workers in Pakistan, according to a report on by state broadcaster China Central Television. Sharif offered his government’s condolences for the deaths in March of five Chinese engineers in a suicide bombing in Pakistan, the report said. The economic corridor includes building and improving roads and rail systems to link the western Xinjiang region to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian sea. Earlier in the day, Xi met with Brazilian Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, who expressed hope that many Chinese companies would participate in a Brazilian government infrastructure program that includes railways, energy, port and airport projects.
VIETNAM
Island building picks up
Hanoi has been increasing its dredging and landfill work in the South China Sea, creating almost as much new land as in the previous two years combined, setting the stage for a record year of island-building, US researchers said on Friday. Since November last year, when the Washington-based think tank issued its last report, Vietnam has created 280 hectares of land, compared with 163.5 hectares in the first 11 months of last year and 140 hectares in 2022, the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative said in a report.
DR CONGO
Coup suspects face death
Three US suspects in what the Congolese army called an attempted coup in Kinshasa last month committed acts “punishable by death,” a court heard on Friday as their trial opened. Marcel Malanga and Taylor Christian Thomson, both 21, and 36-year-old Benjamin Reuben Zalman-Polun are among 50 defendants in the case and were the first to stand before the judge to hear the charges against them. “These acts are punishable by death,” the presiding judge of the Kinshasa-Gombe military court, Freddy Ehume, told the three in Kinshasa. Western diplomats, journalists and lawyers were present for the trial, which is set to resume on Friday.
UNITED KINGDOM
Cameron talks to hoaxer
Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs David Cameron exchanged messages and held a video call with someone purporting to be former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, but the interactions were later determined to be a hoax, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said on Friday. “Whilst the video call clearly appeared to be with Mr Poroshenko, following the conversation the Foreign Secretary became suspicious,” the foreign office said in a statement. “The department has now investigated and confirmed that it was not genuine and that the messages and video call were a hoax.” The statement gave no details of what was discussed during the exchanges, other than to say that the caller asked Cameron for others’ contact details. “Whilst regretting his mistake, the Foreign Secretary thinks it important to call out this behavior and increase efforts to counter the use of misinformation,” the foreign office said. It did not say who it believed was responsible for the hoax.
‘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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