UNITED STATES
Boy on stray unicorn saved
A volunteer water rescue team saved an eight-year-old boy who floated away from the North Carolina coast on a raft shaped like a unicorn. News outlets reported that the Ohio boy was at the beach on Oak Island on Monday when a gust of wind blew the raft nearly 0.8km out to sea. Volunteers with Oak Island Water Rescue said that the unicorn float acted as a sail, which caused it to move too fast for the boy to stop. Rescue crews said that family members called 911 and the team used a raft to reach the boy and return him back to shore.
AUSTRALIA
Police seize drug shipment
Police have seized a record amount of drugs hidden in stereo speakers shipped from Thailand, officials said yesterday. Australian Border Force agents found 1.6 tonnes of methamphetamine and 37kg of heroin in vacuum-sealed packages lodged inside the speakers after the shipment arrived in Melbourne, they said. “This is the largest meth bust we’ve ever seen in this country,” force Commander Craig Palmer said. The haul size demonstrates “the brazen nature of those involved in this criminal activity,” he added. No arrests were made in connection with the smuggling operation. Palmer said that the seized drugs had a street value of A$1.2 billion (US$836.4 million).
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Americans’ deaths unrelated
Authorities said that the deaths of a Pennsylvania psychotherapist and an American couple five days later at the same resort appear to be unrelated incidents. Minister of Tourism Francisco Javier Garcia said an autopsy found that Miranda Schaup-Werner, 41, of Allentown, had a heart attack on May 25. Police also are investigating the deaths of a Maryland couple found at another hotel in the same resort on Thursday last week. Officials said that Edward Nathaniel Holmes, 63, and Cynthia Ann Day, 49, appeared to have had respiratory failure and fluid in the lungs.
UNITED STATES
‘Creative’ sentence sought
Attorneys for a Minneapolis police officer convicted of murder in the shooting of an unarmed woman who had called 911 have asked a judge to give him a creative sentence rather than send him to prison. A jury in April convicted Mohamed Noor of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the July 2017 death of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a dual citizen of the US and Australia. Noor’s lawyers said in papers filed ahead of a sentencing hearing yesterday that he should receive probation requiring him to report to a week in county detention on Damond’s birthday and the anniversary of her death. Prosecutors were waiting until the hearing to recommend a sentence.
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