MANILA (Dispatches) -- Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr said on Tuesday he wanted his country’s relationship with China to go beyond issues over the South China issue and even include military exchanges. Marcos made the remarks at a news conference ahead of visit this week by Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi. China’s top diplomat Wang Yi will be the first foreign minister to meet President Marcos when he makes an official visit to capital Manila on Wednesday. The visit was announced by Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Huang Xilian on Facebook, with the Chinese State Councilor’s visit “ fully reflecting how China attaches importance” to the two countries’ bilateral relations. Wang is scheduled to arrive in Manila on Tuesday night and meet the Philippine officials on Wednesday.

 

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LONDON (Reuters) -- A former top Foreign Office official accused Boris Johnson’s office on Tuesday of lying over whether the British leader knew about earlier complaints of sexual misconduct made against a minister who resigned over his behavior last week. The claim will pile further pressure on Johnson over what he knew when he appointed Christopher Pincher to a role involved in enforcing discipline and offering pastoral care in the governing Conservative Party, at a time when many of his lawmakers are increasingly frustrated at his scandal-ridden administration. “No 10 keep changing their story and are still not telling the truth,” Simon McDonald, who served as Permanent Under-Secretary to the Foreign Office at the time Pincher was a junior minister there, said on Twitter. McDonald said there was investigation into Pincher in 2019 and that “Mr Johnson was briefed in person about the initiation and outcome of the investigation”. Pincher resigned as Deputy Chief Whip last week saying he had drunk too much, embarrassed himself and “caused upset” to people. British media reported that Pincher had sexually assaulted two male guests at a London club.

 

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AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -- Police agency Europol on Tuesday said around 130 suspects of involvement with human trafficking have been arrested in a joint effort by 22 European countries that took place in the week up to June 13.  Europol said the actions, which involved around 22,500 law enforcement officers, had also led to the identification of more than 100 possible victims of human trafficking. 

 

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BEIJING (AFP) -- A hacker claiming to have stolen personal data from hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens is now selling the information online. A sample of 750,000 entries posted online by the hacker showed citizens’ names, mobile phone numbers, national ID numbers, addresses, birthdays and police reports they had filed.  Advertised on a forum late last month but only picked up by cybersecurity experts this week, the 23-terabyte database -- which the hacker claims contains the records of a billion Chinese citizens -- is being sold for 10 bitcoin (approximately $200,000). “It looks like it’s from multiple sources. Some are facial recognition systems, others appear to be census data,” said Robert Potter, co-founder of cybersecurity firm Internet 2.0.  Some of the leaked data appeared to be from express delivery user records, while other entries contained summaries of incidents reported to police in Shanghai over a span of more than a decade, with the most recent from 2019. The incident reports ranged from traffic accidents and petty theft to rape and domestic violence.

 

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HELSINKI (AFP) -- Ukraine’s Maryna Viazovska on Tuesday became the second woman to be awarded the prestigious Fields medal, known as the Nobel prize for mathematics, alongside three other winners. Viazovska, a 37-year-old Kyiv-born math professor, accepted the award at a ceremony in Helsinki as war raged in her home country on the other side of Europe. The International Congress of Mathematicians where the prize is awarded was initially scheduled to be held in Russia’s second city Saint Petersburg -- and opened by President Vladimir Putin. The other Fields winners were France’s Hugo Duminil-Copin of the University of Geneva, Britain’s James Maynard of Oxford University, and June Huh of Princeton in the United States. The only previous female laureate in the prize’s more than 80-year history was Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, who died of breast cancer in 2017 just three years after winning the award. 

 

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COLOMBO (AFP) -- Sri Lanka is bankrupt and the acute pain of its unprecedented economic crisis will linger until at least the end of next year, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told parliament Tuesday. The island nation’s 22 million people have endured months of galloping inflation and lengthy power cuts after the government ran out of foreign currency to import vital goods. Wickremesinghe said the once-prosperous country will go into deep recession this year and acute shortages of food, fuel and medicine will continue. He said Sri Lanka’s ongoing bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund depended on finalizing a debt restructuring plan with creditors by August.  Sri Lanka is currently almost completely without petrol and the government has shut down non-essential public services in an effort to conserve fuel.