SOUTH KOREA
Arrivals to be quarantined
Every person arriving from overseas would be required to undergo two weeks of quarantine to prevent the spread of COVID-19, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said yesterday. The country confirmed 105 new cases as of Saturday, bringing the total to 9,583, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday. Of the new cases, 41 were travelers arriving from overseas, including 40 South Korean citizens and one foreigner, the agency said. The new mandatory isolation for all arrivals would go into effect on Wednesday, Chung said at a government meeting. The policy would also apply to South Korean citizens.
SINGAPORE
Man’s passport canceled
The city-state canceled the passport of one of its citizens who was found to have breached a requirement to quarantine himself after returning from overseas. The man arrived by ferry from Batam, Indonesia, on March 19, and left again for Indonesia the same day, despite being issued a notice to stay home for 14 days, the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority said in an e-mail. He returned on Tuesday last week and was issued a second notice.
CAMBODIA
Entry rules tightened
The country yesterday reported one new case of COVID-19, bringing the total to 103 as it prepares to tighten entry requirements for foreign nationals to try to curb the spread of the virus. The new case is a 30-year-old woman who worked in a karaoke club in the northwestern Banteay Meanchey Province, the Ministry of Health said in a statement. A total of 21 patients have recovered since January, it said. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Friday said that it would cancel visas on arrival for foreign nationals for one month, effective midnight today, to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
VIETNAM
Hospital locked down
Officials ordered one of the nation’s largest medical centers to be locked down and demanded that thousands of employees and people who recently visited Hanoi’s Bach Mai Hospital be tested for COVID-19 after nurses and food workers contracted the disease. The country, which has 179 confirmed cases and no reported deaths from the virus, has tied most recent infections to people arriving from Europe and other countries. The government, which is isolating foreigners and Vietnamese citizens entering the country from abroad, has quarantined or placed under monitoring 75,085 people. It has also suspended most international flights, restricted domestic travel and closed the majority of businesses across the country.
THAILAND
Virus cases reach 143
The country has 143 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the total to 1,388, the spokesman of the government’s Center for COVID-19 Situation Administration said yesterday. The country also recorded one new fatality, bringing the total deaths to seven. The latest victim was a 68-year-old man from Nonthaburi Province who had attended a crowded boxing match in Bangkok, where there had been a cluster of infections, the spokesman said. Authorities have imposed a lockdown in the southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, while authorities on the resort island of Phuket have asked people to stay home between 8pm to 3am in a new restriction on movement to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the