World briefs

UK President Donald Trump’s order barring U.S. entry to people from seven majority Muslim nations is “divisive, discriminatory and wrong,” British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said. But he rebuffed calls for cancelling Trump’s planned state visit to the U.K. 

USA Trump has fired the acting attorney general after she questioned the legality of his immigration ban. Sally Yates (pictured), who was appointed by Barack Obama, ordered justice department lawyers not to enforce the president’s executive order. A White House statement accused Yates of “betraying” the justice department and being “weak on borders”.

PHILIPPINES The United States is not building any weapons depots in the Philippines, the U.S. ambassador says, denying the basis on which President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to abrogate a 2014 defense pact that allows U.S. forces to temporarily base in local camps. 

PHILIPPINES The Philippine Supreme Court yesterday prohibited a group of police officers from entering a slum community to prevent them from threatening villagers who have accused them of ruthlessly killing four residents in an anti-drug raid, in the latest setback for the president’s bloody crackdown on drugs.

MYANMAR The daughter of an assassinated Myanmar legal adviser says his family worried about his activities and warned him to be careful, but he pursued his work for Myanmar’s people, regardless of who they were or what religion they believed. Ko Ni, a prominent adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi and the ruling party, was shot to death at the Yangon airport Sunday.

INDONESIA’s tsunami detection system, made up of seafloor sensors that communicate with transmitting buoys on the surface, has been rendered useless by vandals and lack of funding. Now Indonesian and U.S. scientists say they’ve developed a way to dispense with the expensive buoys and possibly add crucial extra minutes of warning.

NEW ZEALAND A Dutch tourist aboard a cruise ship near Antarctica who suffered a suspected stroke is successfully evacuated to a U.S. base on the frozen continent.

AUSTRALIA A sixth person has died in a hospital 10 days after a man with a history of mental health and drug issues drove a car through a lunch-time crowd in a pedestrian-only street in Australia’s second largest city.

EU The European parliament is asking France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen to start repaying hundreds of thousands euros it says were wrongly paid to legislative aides. An EU parliament letter to le Pen published by Challenges magazine gives yesterday as the deadline to begin repayment of about 300,000 euros.