A jockey balances on a wooden plow adapted for a race, sometimes holding and biting the tails of two bulls to steer them through a flooded paddy field, during “Pacu Jawi,” a traditional bull racing event, in Simabur in Indonesia’s West Sumatra province on Saturday.
The leader of a South Korean church was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of election influence as authorities widened an investigation into allegations that he illegally recruited thousands of followers into the People Power Party. The Shincheonji Church has denied the accusations against Lee Man-hee, 95, a self-proclaimed messenger of Jesus who founded the congregation in the 1980s. The church says it has about 200,000 members. Since January, a special team of prosecutors and police has been investigating alleged ties between religious groups such as Shincheonji and the Unification Church, and politicians. The inquiry is part of broader investigations under South Korea’s government into
Japanese airlines canceled more than 100 flights yesterday, as two tropical storms barrelled toward the archipelago, with authorities advising evacuations in some areas because of possible flooding and landslides. Severe tropical storm Mekkhala was downgraded from a typhoon, but still carried gusts of up to 144kph, forecasters said, with heavy rain already pounding parts of southern and western Japan. The weather system was expected to skirt the islands of Kyushu and Shikoku over the weekend and potentially converge with tropical storm Higos, which was also swirling further out in the Pacific. That could result in the atmospheric phenomenon known as the
