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.
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
The governor of Ohio is to send law enforcement and millions of dollars in healthcare resources to the city of Springfield as it faces a surge in temporary Haitian migrants. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Tuesday said that he does not oppose the Temporary Protected Status program under which about 15,000 Haitians have arrived in the city of about 59,000 people since 2020, but said the federal government must do more to help affected communities. On Monday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost directed his office to research legal avenues — including filing a lawsuit — to stop the federal government from sending
A Zurich city councilor has apologized and reportedly sought police protection against threats after she fired a sport pistol at an auction poster of a 14th-century Madonna and child painting, and posted images of their bullet-ridden faces on social media. Green-Liberal party official Sanija Ameti, 32, put the images on Instagram over the weekend before quickly pulling them down. She later wrote on social media that she had been practicing shots from about 10m and only found the poster as “big enough” for a suitable target. “I apologize to the people who were hurt by my post. I deleted it immediately when I
‘VERY DIRE’: This year’s drought, exacerbated by El Nino, is affecting 44 percent of Malawi’s crop area and up to 40 percent of its population of 20.4 million In the worst drought in southern Africa in a century, villagers in Malawi are digging for potentially poisonous wild yams to eat as their crops lie scorched in the fields. “Our situation is very dire, we are starving,” 76-year-old grandmother Manesi Levison said as she watched over a pot of bitter, orange wild yams that she says must cook for eight hours to remove the toxins. “Sometimes the kids go for two days without any food,” she said. Levison has 30 grandchildren under her care. Ten are huddled under the thatched roof of her home at Salima, near Lake Malawi, while she boils
RSS