THAILAND
Bangkok blast wounds seven
A bomb hidden near garbage cans in a busy suburban Bangkok shopping area left seven people wounded, police said yesterday. The homemade device exploded at about 9pm on Sunday in Ramkhamhaeng, a university area of the capital, Police Colonel Narongrit Promsawan said. He said none of those hurt was in serious condition. Deputy government spokeswoman Sunisa Lertpakawat said security forces were urgently probing who was behind the blast.
AUSTRALIA
Nurse admits to 11 murders
A man accused of deliberately lighting a deadly blaze that ripped through a Sydney nursing home in 2011, killing 11 elderly residents, pleaded guilty to murder yesterday. Roger Dean, 37, was a nurse at the facility and entered 11 guilty pleas to murder on the first day of his trial in the Supreme Court. He also admitted eight counts of causing grievous bodily harm to other mostly infirm residents of the home, some of whom suffered from dementia or were blind. Three residents perished during the inferno Dean started and eight others died later from their injuries. Dean will be sentenced at a later date.
VIETNAM
Blogger arrested for articles
A prominent blogger has been arrested for posting articles critical of the government, reports said yesterday. Truong Duy Nhat, 49, was arrested on Sunday at his home in Danang and escorted to Hanoi for questioning, the state-run Tuoi Tre newspaper said. He stands accused of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state,” a charge that could result in a maximum seven years in jail, the report said. Nhat, who had worked for the official press, but quit in 2011, writes the popular blog “A Different Viewpoint.”
CHINA
Netizens track teen vandal
A teenaged tourist who defaced an ancient Egyptian monument was hunted down by Internet users, who prompted his parents to apologize, state media reported yesterday. A photograph posted on Sina Weibo showed crudely drawn Chinese characters written over an ancient sandstone panel lined with hieroglyphics, the Global Times newspaper said. According to the China Daily, the vandalism took place in a temple at Luxor, Egypt. Internet users hunted down the perpetrator, a 15-year-old boy named Ding Jinhao (丁錦昊), and hacked the Web site of his school, forcing users to click on a sign parodying Ding’s graffiti before entering. The furor prompted his parents, who said Ding “cried all night” after learning of the cyberattacks, to issue an apology in a local newspaper.
JAPAN
Radiation leak affects 30
The number of researchers exposed to low level radiation in an accident at a nuclear laboratory last week has hit 30, officials said yesterday, with human error likely exacerbating the problem. The accident occurred on Thursday as 55 people were working at a laboratory in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency said. The agency, which had initially said six researchers were exposed to radiation, announced late on Sunday that 24 more people were affected. “None of them required medical attention,” an agency spokesman said. According to the agency, radiation was accidentally released during the experiment “due to overheating, which we suspect was caused by some technical problems.” Radiation then leaked from the facility.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
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