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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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