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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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