News Headlines - 16 June 2020

▽North Korea demolishes inter-Korean liaison office at Kaesong | NK News

North Korean authorities on Tuesday demolished an inter-Korean liaison office in the border city of Kaesong, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification (MOU) and North Korean state media confirmed.
The demolition took place around 14:50, and comes amid heightened inter-Korean tensions in the past week prompted in part by North Korean anger at the South’s failure to stop activists sending anti-regime leaflets into the North.
North Korean state media reported that the office had been destroyed in a “terrific explosion.”... The move, it said, had come in response to widespread public anger over anti-regime leaflets sent by defectors in the South, and in accordance with the “mindset of the enraged people to surely force human scum and those, who have sheltered the scum, to pay dearly for their crimes.”

▽India says three soldiers killed in clash on Chinese border | The Japan Times

Three Indian soldiers have been killed in a “violent face-off” on the Chinese border, the Indian Army said Tuesday following weeks of rising tensions and the deployment of thousands of extra troops from both sides.
Brawls and face-offs flare on a fairly regular basis between the two nuclear-armed giants over their 3,500-kilometer (2,200-mile) frontier, which has never been properly demarcated, but it is the first deadly confrontation between the two Asian giants since 1975.
The Indian Army said that there were “casualties on both sides,” but Beijing made no mention of any deaths or injuries as it swiftly laid the blame squarely on India for the incident.

▽Ex-justice minister, wife plan to leave LDP over election scandal

A former Japanese justice minister and his wife who are at the center of an election scandal have decided to quit the ruling Liberal Democratic Party led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, party sources said Tuesday.
Katsuyuki Kawai, a lower house member, and his wife Anri, an upper house member, are suspected of buying votes in the House of Councillors election in July 2019. Anri Kawai won her seat in the poll.

▽With 350,000 Signatures, MOF Official's Widow Demands Fair Moritomo Scandal Probe - JIJI PRESS

Lawyers for the widow of a self-slaughtered Ministry of Finance official presented to the Cabinet Secretariat Monday more than 350,000 signatures calling on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to launch reinvestigation into a high-profile document-tampering scandal involving the ministry and school operator Moritomo Gakuen.
According to the lawyers including Tadashi Matsumaru, the proxy for the wife of late Toshio Akagi, the number of signatures solicited online since March 27 reached 352,659 on Sunday. The Change.org website showed that the figure kept growing on Monday.
The widow demands that a panel of third-party experts be set up and find out why her husband, then an official at the ministry's Kinki Local Finance Bureau, had to kill himself on March 7, at age 54.

▽London Zoo reopens after lockdown, but with limits in place - Reuters

London Zoo reopened to only a fraction of the normal number of visitors on Monday as the world’s oldest scientific zoo welcomed guests for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic forced it to close nearly three months ago.
The zoo, which is nearly 200 years old, normally shuts just once a year, on Christmas Day, but closed its doors on March 21 as Britain entered a lockdown designed to stop the spread of COVID-19.