THAILAND
Tourist shot by off-duty cop
A French tourist early yesterday was gunned down by an off-duty police officer after a drunken bar fight in a seedy Bangkok district, police said. The 41-year-old Parisian was shot dead at a downtown apartment block after an altercation with the police sergeant major who had approached the man’s Thai girlfriend. “They were drunk ... they started to argue and then had a fist fight, but the policeman couldn’t fight back,” Immigration Police Chief Surachate Hakpan said. “The policeman followed him back to his place and shot him twice.The officer has been arrested and “will be fired ... and prosecuted on a murder charge.”
GERMANY
SWAT team in mix-up
An 88-year-old woman received a scare when a police SWAT team bashed in her door and set off a stun grenade after accidentally mistaking her apartment for that of a biker gang member. Deutsche Presse-Agentur on Tuesday reported that the raid in Luedenscheid was part of a coordinated crackdown on biker gang violence. The heavily armed police unit apparently got the building number mixed up and barged in on the woman at 6am on Thursday last week. Prosecutors in nearby Hagen said the woman had recovered from her initial shock and the damage had been fixed.
GERMANY
Road gets chocolate coating
A street got a repaving worthy of fictional candy maker Willy Wonka when a tonne of chocolate flowed out of a factory and solidified. Soester Anzeiger on Tuesday reported that a “small technical defect” involving a storage tank caused the sweet and sticky spill from the DreiMeister chocolate factory in Westoennen. After hitting the chilly pavement, the milk chocolate quickly hardened. About 25 firefighters got the job of prying the coating off with shovels, hot water and torches. Company boss Markus Luckey said that if the spill had happened closer to Christmas, “that would have been a catastrophe.”
UNITED STATES
Nationalist faces life in jail
Jurors in Charlottesville, Virgina, on Tuesday told a judge that life in prison is appropriate for a man who rammed his car into counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally on Aug. 12 last year, capping a trial laced with the emotional testimony of survivors and troubling details of the self-proclaimed Hitler admirer’s long history of mental illness. James Alex Fields Jr, 21, stood stoically with his hands folded in front of him as a court clerk read the verdict. The jury recommended a sentence of life for first-degree murder in the killing of Heather Heyer and also recommended a total of 419 years for other convictions.
UNITED STATES
NASA invites skeptic Curry
Three-time NBA champion Stephen Curry on Tuesday signaled that he is willing to take NASA up on its offer to tour its lunar lab in Houston after his pronouncement this week that he does not believe humans ever walked on the moon. During the “Winging It” podcast released on Monday, Curry asked fellow players Vince Carter and Kent Bazemore whether they believed humans had ever been to the moon. The players said they did not, to which Curry replied: “They’re gonna come get us. I don’t think so either.” The 30-year-old’s statement created a commotion on social media and led NASA to extend an invitation to Curry to visit and see evidence of the moon landing for himself. Curry responded on Twitter to a story that included NASA’s statement with a smiling emoji wearing sunglasses.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese