INDIA
Nuclear sub plans approved
The Cabinet on Wednesday approved plans to construct two of a new class of nuclear-powered attack submarines among the six the navy plans to make, two defense officials said on condition of anonymity, in a project estimated to cost about 450 billion rupees (US$5.4 billion). Faster, quieter and capable of longer underwater stays than conventional diesel-powered craft, which makes them more difficult to detect, nuclear-powered attack submarines rank among the most potent naval weapons in the world. Only a handful of nations make them, including China, France, Russia and the US. The new submarines are to be built at the government’s shipbuilding center in the port of Visakhapatnam. Conglomerate Larsen and Toubro is also expected to join the project, one of the officials said.
EGYPT
Cairo rejects Sudan claims
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied allegations by Sudanese paramilitary chief Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, at war with the army since April last year, that its military has been involved in the conflict. The war between Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces and the regular military, led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has killed tens of thousands and caused the world’s largest displacement crisis. In a video posted online on Wednesday, Daglo accused the Egyptian air force of carrying out strikes targeting his forces near Jebel Moya, a key area south of Khartoum. In a statement issued later that day, the ministry denied the allegations “regarding the participation of the Egyptian air force in the battles taking place in brotherly Sudan,” it said.
MALAYSIA
Death penalty commuted
A former police officer convicted of murdering a Mongolian translator yesterday won an appeal against his death penalty, with the federal court commuting the sentence to 40 years in jail. Azilah Hadri, 48, was one of two bodyguards to then-
minister of defense Najib Razak convicted of shooting in 2006 Altantuya Shaariibuu, and then blowing up her body with military-grade explosives near Kuala Lumpur. His accomplice, Sirul Azhar Umar, fled to Australia in 2015, where he was held in immigration detention until his release in November last year. Azilah had filed the appeal after the nation passed a law last year that allows judges to commute death penalty sentences. Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat noted that Azilah’s appeal for a lighter sentence was also backed by the victim’s father, as she revised the penalty to 40 years behind bars and 12 strokes of the cane. Altantuya’s killing was linked to a scandal that allegedly saw kickbacks doled out during a 2002 deal to purchase French submarines, on which the Mongolian national worked as a translator.
JAPAN
Nuclear reactor to shutter
Kansai Electric Power Co yesterday said it would shut a nuclear reactor after finding a “tiny” hole in a pipeline, threatening to increase fossil fuel requirements to fill any electricity shortfall. The No. 3 reactor at the Mihama nuclear power plant in Fukui Prefecture was to be closed for inspection, the utility said in a filing, which did not provide a timeline for the shutter or restart. The hole was discovered in a pipe used to release water to the sea from the cooling system. Kansai Electric has canceled a tender to sell a cargo of liquefied natural gas for December delivery following the incident, traders with knowledge of the matter said. The tender was to close yesterday.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack