UNITED STATES
Senator cashes in on assault
A jury on Wednesday awarded Republican Senator Rand Paul more than US$580,000 over an attack by a neighbor that left him with broken ribs and fluid in his lungs, media reported. Rene Boucher, who assaulted the junior senator from Kentucky in 2017, owes US$375,000 in punitive damages, US$200,000 for pain and suffering and US$7,834 for medical expenses, local media reports said. “This lawsuit wasn’t about me. It was about all of us and what we find acceptable as a society. We need to send a clear message that violence is not the answer — anytime, anywhere,” Paul wrote on Twitter. Boucher was arrested in 2017 after Kentucky State Police responded to a reported assault at Paul’s Warren County home. The New York Times, citing neighbors and Republican lawmakers familiar with the incident, reported that the assault stemmed from a landscaping dispute.
UNITED STATES
Texas man put to death
The US on Wednesday carried out its first execution for the year, putting to death a Texas man convicted of murdering a police officer 30 years ago during an attempted robbery. Robert Mitchell Jennings, 61, was pronounced dead at 6:33pm at a prison in Huntsville. Jennings gunned down Elston Howard in a Houston adult bookstore on July 19, 1988, according to a court filing and local media. Howard, 24, was in the middle of arresting an employee of the bookstore for illegally showing pornographic movies when Jennings entered, having just robbed a neighboring adult movie theater. Jennings walked up to Howard and shot him twice. After the officer fell, Jennings fired again. He then demanded money from the store clerk before fleeing to his getaway vehicle, where he told an accomplice he had shot a “security guard.”
UNITED STATES
Toddler escapes rhino pen
A toddler who fell into a rhinoceros exhibit at a Florida zoo earlier this month suffered bruises to her chest, stomach, back and behind her right ear after being bumped by two rhinos. A report on the incident released on Wednesday shows the 21-month-old girl also had a bruised lung and lacerated liver. The report by state wildlife investigators says the 12kg girl fell through the bars at a rhinoceros enclosure during a private tour with two employees at the Brevard Zoo in Melbourne, Florida, on New Year’s Day. The report says two rhinoceros pressed the girl into the enclosure’s metal poles with their snouts before she was removed by family members and zoo staff.
UNITED STATES
Seals take over beach
A colony of elephant seals took over a beach in Northern California during the government shutdown when there was no staff to discourage the animals from congregating in the popular tourist area, an official said. Now they are not going anywhere. About 60 adult seals that gave birth to 35 pups took over a beach in Point Reyes National Seashore, knocking down a fence and moving into the parking lot, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Wednesday. The park north of San Francisco is home to a colony of about 1,500 elephant seals that tend to frequent another beach, said park spokesman John Dell’Osso. “Sometimes you go out with tarps and you shake the tarps and it annoys them and they move the other direction,” he said. However, nobody was at work to address the seal migration. Officials have no plans to move the animals while some of them nurse their pups.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the