Bindi Irwin, daughter of late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, wed on Wednesday at her family’s Australia Zoo, in an event that spurred online protest as it came just hours before a ban on ceremonies with more than two witnesses.
Bindi Irwin posted a wedding photograph with husband Chandler Powell on social media late on Wednesday, saying: “We held a small ceremony and I married by best friend.”
“We’ve planned this beautiful day for nearly a year and had to change everything, as we didn’t have guests at our wedding. This was a very difficult decision but important to keep everyone safe,” she wrote.
OUTRAGE
Images of a wedding dress glimpsed from under a huddle of umbrellas at the zoo in Queensland state were broadcast on TV less than 24 hours after Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison imposed a limit of just five people at weddings — the couple, a celebrant and two witnesses — from yesterday to rein in the spread of COVID-19.
Ahead of her tweets, when images of the wedding first appeared, outraged netizens complained that Bindi Irwin was setting a bad example amid a nationwide lockdown.
“How many people will get #COVID-19 from this wedding?” one netizen wrote on Twitter.
Powell said on social media that he had met Bindi Irwin at the zoo, where he now works, six years ago.
“After almost a year of planning, we changed everything so we could have safe & small private ceremony at our home, Australia Zoo,” he wrote in a post early yesterday.
TRAGIC DEATH
Bindi Irwin rose to fame as a child when her quirky conservationist father, whose television programs were popular around the world, died in 2006 after a stingray’s barb pierced his heart while he was filming off the Great Barrier Reef.
Bindi Irwin won reality TV show Dancing with the Stars in the US in 2015, when she was 17.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not