THAILAND
Hospital bomber jailed
A court yesterday jailed a former engineer for 27 years for planting a pipe bomb in an army-run hospital in protest against the junta. At least 21 people were injured — one seriously — when the nail-filled device detonated in the waiting room of King Mongkut hospital in Bangkok on May 22, the third anniversary of a coup that ousted an elected civilian government in 2014. Wattana Phumret, 62, confessed to planting the device in a vase due to his “hatred for governments that come from military coups.” The court said the evidence “proved without doubt” the suspect’s guilt on several charges, but he avoided a life sentence due to his confession.
FRANCE
Rock icon Hallyday dies
Johnny Hallyday, the rocker icon who packed sports stadiums and was the nation’s top rock star for decades, has died at 74. President Emmanuel Macron’s office announced his death in a statement early yesterday, saying “he brought a part of America into our national pantheon.” Hallyday had long suffered from lung cancer and had repeated health scares recently. His glitzy stage aura was clearly fashioned around stars like Elvis Presley and his musical inspiration came from the likes of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly.
UNITED KINGDOM
Woman in spy scandal dies
Christine Keeler, the woman at the center of a 1960s love triangle between a minister and Soviet naval attache that produced the nation’s biggest political sex scandal, has died at the age of 75. Keeler’s committing adultery with then-minister of war John Profumo shocked the socially conservative nation in the early 1960s and created a furor that contributed to the resignation of then-prime minister Harold Macmillan. Revelations that Keeler was also romantically involved with a Soviet naval attache, Yevgeny Ivanov, turned a sex scandal into a political and diplomatic firestorm. Her son, Seymour Platt, said that Keeler died late on Tuesday evening and the scandal had profoundly affected her.
UNITED STATES
Delta makes bathroom stop
A Delta Air Lines flight from New York City to Seattle had to make a stop in Billings, Montana, after the plane’s toilets stopped working and passengers could not hold it any longer. The Billings Gazette reports that the direct flight diverted hundreds of kilometers south on Saturday last week to make the emergency bathroom stop. Delta said that upon landing in Billings, the plane had to taxi to a cargo area because a gate was not available. Delta said ground crews rolled a stairway to the airplane so passengers could “disembark to find relief of built-up pressures.”
AUSTRALIA
Dogs deployed in research
Dogs are being trained to sniff out the droppings of endangered animals in a scheme that offers greater understanding of threatened species through the less-intrusive method of canine tracking. Emma Bennett, a doctoral candidate at Monash University in Melbourne, is working with environmentally conscious dog owners who have volunteered their pets in a rainforest region of Victoria state to track the scats, or droppings, of the endangered tiger quoll, a small marsupial. “Scats contain DNA, so you can identify the individual animal,” Bennett said yesterday. “They also contain information about diet distribution.” Using canines to obtain feces sample is a “non-invasive” alternative to traps, reducing the risk of injury or stress, she said.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of
A prominent Christian leader has allegedly been stabbed at the altar during a Mass yesterday in southwest Sydney. Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was saying Mass at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley just after 7pm when a man approached him at the altar and allegedly stabbed toward his head multiple times. A live stream of the Mass shows the congregation swarm forward toward Emmanuel before it was cut off. The church leader gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing a large online following, Officers attached to Fairfield City police area command attended a location on Welcome Street, Wakeley following reports a number