Politics

  Tokyo / AFP Japan’s hawkish defence minister prayed on Thursday at a controversial war shrine in Tokyo the day after accompanying Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on a symbolic visit of reconciliation to Pearl Harbor, drawing condemnation from China and South Korea. Yasukuni Shrine honours millions of mostly Japanese war dead, but is contentious for also enshrining senior military and political ...

Seoul / AFP South Korea’s ambassador to France was grilled by investigators on Thursday over allegations that the government blacklisted thousands of cultural figures deemed critical of impeached President Park Geun-Hye. Ambassador Mo Chul-Min, who served as senior presidential secretary for education and culture from 2013 to 2014, returned home on Wednesday following a summons from a special prosecutor probing ...

  Taipei / AFP A top Taiwanese intelligence official on Thursday urged the island’s former agents not to travel to China, citing safety risks as relations with Beijing grow increasingly tense. Kuo Chung-hsin, deputy director of Taiwan’s National Security Bureau, told reporters in parliament that “the current atmosphere is not suitable” for former and retired intelligence officers to visit China. “China ...

Beijing / AFP Chinese police have shot dead three people who allegedly attacked a Communist Party office in the restive Xinjiang region on Wednesday, state media said, in the bloodiest such incident in months. The three “rioters” drove up to a local party office in Moyu County and “detonated (an) explosive device”, killing two and injuring three others, the official ...

  Pearl Harbor / AFP The leaders of war-time enemies America and Japan made a poignant joint pilgrimage to Pearl Harbor, issuing symbolic declarations about the power of reconciliation and warning against the drumbeat of conflict. Seventy-five years after Japanese pilots brought war to idyllic Hawaii and dragged the United States into World War II, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe offered ...

Berlin / AFP German police on Wednesday detained a Tunisian national on suspicion of having ties to Anis Amri, the suspected Berlin truck attacker gunned down by Italian police last week, prosecutors said. “The deceased suspect Anis Amri had saved the number of this 40-year-old Tunisian national in his phone. The investigations indicate that he could have been involved in ...

  Vienna / AFP International observer body the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) confirmed on Wednesday being the victim of a “major” cyber attack. “Early November the OSCE became aware of a major information security incident,” OSCE spokeswoman Mersiha Causevic Podzic said via email. The attack “compromis[ed] the confidentiality” of the OSCE’s IT network and put “its ...

  Hong Kong / AFP Two ousted pro-independence Hong Kong lawmakers on Wednesday announced they were making a final bid to overturn a controversial Beijing-linked ban preventing them from taking up their seats in parliament. Yau Wai-ching and Baggio Leung were elected in citywide polls in September but deliberately misread their oaths of office during their swearing-in ceremony, inserting expletives and ...

  Dhaka / AFP Four Bangladeshi fishermen were injured when Myanmar’s navy allegedly opened fire on them while they were fishing along the countries’ troubled border in the Bay of Bengal, an official said on Wednesday. A group of 14 fishermen, four of whom have been hospitalised with bullet wounds, told coastguard officials that a Myanmar navy ship had entered ...

  New York / AFP The mother of Juana and Ines Alejandro took a deep breath, put on a brave face and handed her toddlers over to strangers at the Mexican border to be smuggled into the United States. That was 17 years ago. For the mother, going back to the poverty of her village in Oaxaca in Mexico was out ...