World briefs

CHINA Starbucks and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group announced a coffee delivery venture, joining the growing competition in China’s booming delivery industry.

JAPAN A Tokyo medical university faced a new allegation after a newspaper report yesterday that the school has allegedly discriminated against female applicants on grounds they tend to quit as doctors after starting families, causing staffing shortages. 

US-N.KOREA President Donald Trump, in a tweet, thanked Kim Jong Un “for keeping your word & starting the process of sending home the remains of our great and beloved missing fallen! I am not at all surprised that you took this kind action.” 

GOLAN HEIGHTS U.N. peacekeepers returned to patrol the frontier between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, years after an escalation in fighting and abduction of U.N. troops had prompted them to withdraw, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced. For the first time, Russian forces joined the peacekeepers — a sign of Russia’s deepening involvement as a mediator between Israel and Syria.

IBERIAN PENINSULA Hot air from Africa is bringing a new heatwave to Europe, prompting health warnings about Sahara Desert dust and exceptionally high temperatures that are forecast to peak at 47 degrees Celsius in some southern areas. The torrid weather meant public services were put on alert in the Iberian Peninsula.

US Just a month into the budget year, the state has already spent more than one-quarter of its annual fire budget, at least USD125 million, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said. More than 13,000 firefighters are battling fires with the help of crews from as far away as Florida.

HEMINGWAY “A Room on the Garden Side,” written in 1956, is being published for the first time. The brief, World War II-era fiction appears this week in the summer edition of The Strand Magazine, a literary quarterly which has released obscure works by Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck and others. “Hemingway’s deep love for Paris as it is just emerging from Nazi occupation is on full display, as are the hallmarks of his prose,” editor Andrew F. Gulli wrote.