MONTH IN BRIEF – November 2024
MONTH IN BRIEF
Beijing’s ‘warning’ to Taiwan
China has launched fresh military drills around Taiwan, sending jets and warships in a ‘warning’ to ‘separatists’ on the self-ruled island. The October 14 manoeuvres are the latest show of force by Beijing, which regards Taiwan as its territory and has sworn to take it back – by force if necessary. A National Day speech by Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te Lai, in which he vowed to ‘resist annexation’, provoked anger in Beijing, which insisted the drills were ‘a legitimate and necessary operation for safeguarding state sovereignty and national unity’.
Calls for ouster of Bangladeshi president
Bangladeshi President Mohammed Shahabuddin is facing mounting pressure to resign from leaders of the revolution that toppled former prime minister Sheikh Hasina in August.
The leaders of the revolution argue that Mr Shahabuddin, 74, widely known as ‘Chuppu’, was Ms Hasina’s appointee. He was elected by Parliament in 2023 by Ms Hasina’s now ousted Awami League. The post is largely ceremonial but his potential removal from the role has sparked fears of a constitutional vacuum.
Women’s record win in Japanese election
A record number of women have been elected to Japan’s House of Representatives, projections showed on October 28, but at less than 16 per cent, they remain a minority.
Public broadcaster NHK projected that women had won 73 of 465 Lower House seats up for grabs, figures expected to be confirmed in official results.In Japan’s 2021 general election, 45 women were elected to the Lower House.But Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s 20-strong Cabinet includes just two women, while female leaders are still rare in business and politics in Japan, which ranked 118th out of 146 in the 2024 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap report.
Oz faces rise in online radicalisation
A string of terrorist attacks or plots have been conducted or exposed in Australia in 2024 and all had one thing in common: the attacker or alleged plotter was a young man aged between 14 and 21 whose online activities were crucial to his decision to carry out an attack.
This worrying trend was revealed in a stark assessment of the risks of social media by Australia’s domestic spy chiefMike Burgess, at a summit on Oct 11, during which he said individuals are now being self-radicalised online in a process that can take days and weeks rather than months and years.
BLA denies mine attack
The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), a militant separatist group in Pakistan, has denied any involvement in an attack that killed at least 21 mine workers in the Junaid Coal Company, situated in the restive province of Balochistan that borders Afghanistan and Iran. Dozens of assailants stormed the group of small private coal mines on October 11, armed with guns, rockets and hand grenades, killing some of the miners in their sleep and shooting others after lining them up. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, the worst in weeks, which happened just days before Pakistan’s hosting ofasummit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Sri Lankan cybercrime arrests
Sri Lankan police have detained more than 230 Chinese men accused of targeting international banks in online scams, with the assistance of security officials sent by Beijing, the foreign minister has announced. Recent police raids also seized 250 computers and 500 mobile phones used in the alleged scams, with investigations into how much has been stolen still underway.China’s embassy in Colombo said they had sent a ‘working group’ of security officials to carry out ‘special operations’ with Sri Lankan police, resulting in a‘large number of criminal suspects’ being arrested.
Nobel prize for South Korean author
A South Korean author has become the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.Novelist and short story writer Han Kang – best known overseas for her Man Booker Prize-winning The Vegetarian, her first novel translated into English – was chosen for the prestigious prize ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life’, the Swedish Academy said. More than a million copies of Kang’s books have sold locally since the honour was announced, bookstores have reported, and her win has also dramatically boosted the sales of South Korean literature as a whole.
Fatal tiger attack
A 54-year-old local man has been found dead after a tiger attack in Gerik, in the Perak district of Malaysia. Perak police said the incident occurred before dawn on Oct. 15 near a kongsi (shared residence). The Gerik District Control Centre was informed that the man, an operator of heavy machinery, was attacked by a tiger while on his way to the toilet of the Bagan Balak shared residence, and suffered severe neck and leg injuries.The Malayan tiger, which is native to the jungles of Peninsular Malaysia, is today critically endangered due to habitat loss, illegal poaching and a decline in prey.