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Hard Numbers: Britain seeks bricklayers, Pentagon loses secrets to a typo, Cameroon separatists attack, where has Qin Gang gone?
British PM Rishi Sunak holds a brick next to a bricklayer during a local election campaign in Hartlepool when Sunak was chancellor of the exchequer.
8: The UK has added eight more jobs to its list of “shortage occupations,” which means that migrants with the appropriate skills in these areas can benefit from cheaper visas and looser employment restrictions. So if you are a bricklayer, a mason, a roofer, a roof tiler, a slater, a carpenter, a joiner, or a plasterer, now’s the time to head to the UK, which is suffering from acute labor shortages in a number of areas since leaving the EU. And if you are a German, now’s the time to remind post-Brexit Brits what “Schadenfreude” means.
117,000: Since January, a typo has caused at least 117,000 US military emails meant for addresses ending in “.MIL” to wind up in servers belonging to the government of Mali, where the country domain is “.ML.” Some of the emails contained highly sensitive information. For the past decade, the “.ML” domain has been managed by a Dutch contractor, but this week it reverts to the control of the Malian government, which is closely allied with … Russia.
3: Where in the world is Qin Gang? The outspoken Chinese foreign minister known for his hardline views on Taiwan hasn’t been seen in public for three weeks and has missed a number of high-profile meetings. The foreign ministry cited “health reasons” for a missed regional summit last week. But there’s a long tradition of Chinese officials suddenly going missing and then reemerging weeks later under arrest or investigation. #justsayin
10: Separatists dressed up in official military uniforms killed at least 10 people in an attack in northwestern Cameroon over the weekend. The violence is part of a larger, ongoing conflict between the government of Cameroon, which is predominantly French-speaking, and rebels seeking independence for the country’s two English-speaking regions, which are located along the country’s western border with Nigeria.