World briefs

TAIWAN refused to allow two Chinese airlines, Xiamen Airlines and China Eastern Airlines, to expand service to the island during the Lunar New Year holiday, a news agency reported yesterday after Beijing angered Taiwan’s government by approving new air routes. 

CHINA-JAPAN Chinese Premier Li Keqiang will travel to Tokyo for his country’s first joint summit with Japan and South Korea since 2015, the clearest sign yet of improving ties between the three neighbors.

PHILIPPINES The defense chief has recommended that villages in a danger zone around erupting Mount Mayon be turned into a permanent “no man’s land” to avoid evacuating thousands of residents each time the country’s most active volcano explodes. President Rodrigo Duterte expressed support for the recommendation.

CAMBODIA Ten foreigners, including five Britons, charged with producing pornographic photos during a party near famed Angkor Wat temple complex have denied any wrongdoing, a prosecutor said. Still, there is “enough evidence to prove that they violated the law, and therefore, they must face charges,” Siem Reap provincial court prosecutor said. The 10 people jailed Sunday include five from the United Kingdom, two from Canada and one each from Norway, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

USA A jealous ex-boyfriend opened fire and killed four people at a car wash yesterday (Macau time) in Pennsylvania, while a woman hiding in the back of a pickup truck suffered only minor injuries, according to police and the wife of one of the victims. Timothy Smith, 28, was armed with a semi-automatic rifle, a .308-caliber rifle and a handgun and was wearing a body armor carrier.

BREXIT Britain’s point person on Brexit said the country’s status with the European Union during a post-departure transition period will be “not exactly the same as membership — but it’s very, very similar.” Brexit Secretary David Davis told a House of Lords committee that Britain will continue to be bound by EU rules and the EU court during the transition period, but without a seat on the bloc’s decision-making bodies.

DAVOS U.S. President Donald Trump said he would take a “tougher” attitude toward Brexit negotiations than the approach now being used by British Prime Minister Theresa May. “Would it be the way I negotiate?” he said, “I would have said that the European Union is not cracked up to what it’s supposed to be.”