Japan attack: Child among three dead in Kawasaki stabbing

A knife-wielding man has attacked a group of schoolchildren waiting for a bus in a Japanese city near Tokyo.

At least 18 people were injured on a residential street in Kawasaki. Two of them, a 12-year-old girl and a 39-year-old man, are dead.

A suspect, a man in his 50s, stabbed himself in the neck after his rampage and later died in hospital.

Violent crime is rare in Japan and the motive for the attack is unknown.

The suspect was holding knives in both hands as he attacked the victims – sixteen of whom were schoolgirls.

European elections: triumphant Greens demand more radical climate action

Europe’s Greens, big winners in Sunday’s European elections, will use their newfound leverage in a fractured parliament to push an agenda of urgent climate action, social justice and civil liberties, the movement’s leaders say.

“This was a great outcome for us – but we now also have a great responsibility, because voters have given us their trust,” Bas Eickhout, a Dutch MEP and the Greens’ co-lead candidate for commission president, told the Guardian.

“Our voters, especially the younger generation, for many of whom we are now their first choice, are deeply concerned about the climate crisis, and they are pro-European – but they feel the EU is not delivering. They want us to change the course of Europe.”

Democracy ten years after the financial crash

Not the world order we wanted

The globalised economy was just about saved in 2008 by state interventions, at the cost of impoverishing most of their citizens. The ensuing resentment, then anger, has since reshaped national politics.

by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert

Budapest, 23 May 2018. Wearing a jacket a bit big for him and a purple shirt, Steve Bannon addressed an audience of prominent and starchy Hungarians: ‘The fuse that lit the Trump revolution started September 15 at nine in the morning [in 2008, when] Lehman Brothers was kicked into bankruptcy.’ Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald Trump, had also been an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and knew that the crisis had hit Hungary hard: ‘The elites bailed themselves out, totally socialised the risk. Did the average person get a bail-out like that?’ Even though many of his current political activities have been paid for by hedge funds, he berates a ‘socialism for the rich’ that provoked ‘a really populist revolt’ around the world. ‘In 2010 Viktor Orbán was voted back into power in Hungary’: Orbán was ‘Trump before Trump.’

Libya: Flight data places mysterious planes in Haftar territory

Al Jazeera Arabic investigation tracks suspicious cargo flights into military bases controlled by Khalifa Haftar.

Cargo planes were discovered flying clandestinely into bases controlled by renegade Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar and dropping off unidentifed payloads at the time his forces attacked Tripoli last month, an Al Jazeera Arabic TV investigation found.

Satellite images and flight data show two Russian-made Ilyushin 76 aircraft registered to a joint Emirati-Kazakh company called Reem Travel made several trips between Egypt, Israel, and Jordanbefore landing at military bases controlled by Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) in early April, just as it attempted to seize the capital.

Facebook says Zuckerberg and Sandberg will defy Canadian subpoena, risking contempt vote

By Donie O’Sullivan and Paula Newton, CNN Business

Trump expects Japan’s military to reinforce U.S. in Asia and beyond

U.S. President Donald Trump said he expects that Japan’s military will reinforce U.S. forces throughout Asia and elsewhere, he said on Tuesday, as the key U.S. ally upgrades the ability of its forces to operate further from its shores.

Trump’s comments followed his inspection of Japan’s largest warship, the Kaga, a helicopter carrier designed to carry submarine-hunting helicopters to distant waters.

The vessel, which will soon be upgraded to handle F-35B short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) jets, sailed to India on a flag-flying mission last year, going through the contested South China Sea, much of which is claimed by Beijing.