NEW ZEALAND
PM Ardern has COVID-19
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tested positive for COVID-19 with moderate symptoms, her office said in a statement yesterday. Ardern had been symptomatic since Friday evening, returning a weak positive at night and a clear positive yesterday morning using a rapid antigen test, it said, adding that she had been in isolation since Sunday, when her partner Clarke Gayford tested positive. She would be required to isolate until Saturday morning, undertaking what duties she can remotely.
AUSTRALIA
Spy ship did not break law
A Chinese intelligence ship tracked off the west coast within 50 nautical miles (93km) of a sensitive defense facility did not breach international maritime laws, Canberra said yesterday. Over the past week, the spy ship sailed past Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt at Exmouth, which is used by Australian, US and allied submarines. Asked about whether the vessel’s conduct was a “red line,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said freedom of navigation is permitted around the world and the ship had not broken maritime laws. However, he added that the issue highlighted challenges Australia faced from China “seeking to impose its will across the region.”
GEORGIA
Region might join Russia
The leader of the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia on Friday announced that a referendum would be held in July on joining Russia. Russia has exercised effective control over the region since fighting a brief war with Georgia in 2008. Russia and a handful of other countries recognize South Ossetia as an independent state, but most of the world still considers it to be part of Georgia. “We did it!” South Ossetian President Anatoly Bibilov wrote on Telegram on Friday in announcing that he had signed a decree setting the referendum for July 17. “In legalese, we fulfilled yet another important legal requirement, and in normal language, we took a life-changing step — we are going home, we are going to Russia,” he said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Pub stands up to ‘Vogue’
The Star Inn at Vogue has received a message from Vogue magazine’s owner asking for it to change its name, because a link between the two businesses “is likely to be inferred.” In a cease-and-desist letter delivered to the couple, Conde Nast chief operating officer Sabine Vandenbroucke said that the company was the proprietor of the Vogue mark, not only for the magazine first published in 1916, but “other goods and services offered to the public by our company.” At first, the pub’s landlords, Rachel and Mark Graham, were surprised, but it did not take long for their shock to dissolve to humor. “If someone had obviously taken the time to look us up, it wouldn’t have taken five minutes to say: ‘Oh, there’s a place called Vogue,’” Rachel Graham said. The Star Inn has been in the small village of Vogue, near St Day, for hundreds of years, Mark Graham wrote in his reply. “I presume that at the time when you chose the name Vogue in the capitalized version you didn’t seek permission from the villagers of the real Vogue. I also presume that Madonna did not seek your permission to use the word Vogue (again the capitalized version) for her 1990s song of the same name,” he wrote. His answer to the request was a “categorical no.”
A glimpse of a possible Picasso in the home of Imelda Marcos filmed during a visit by her son after his presidential election win has set off a flurry of speculation in the Philippines, where the family that once plundered billions is set to return to power. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, the son and namesake of the late dictator, won a landslide victory in Monday’s presidential election, an outcome that has appalled those who survived his father’s regime. Images released by the family showed Marcos Jr visiting the home of his mother, who had displayed Picasso’s Femme Couche VI (Reclining Woman VI),
The images of a besuited Ferdinand Marcos Jr, clad in a top hat and leaning nonchalantly on a Rolls-Royce, dating from his time in Britain in the 1970s, are as you might expect from the playboy scion of a kleptocratic dictator. Yet as the Marcos family returns to power in the Philippines after a landslide presidential victory by Marcos Jr, he is facing calls to stop misrepresenting the circumstances of his studies at the University of Oxford. The university has confirmed that he did not complete his degree in philosophy, politics and economics after enrolling in 1975. “According to our records, he did
HATE CRIME: Officials were investigating a detailed ‘manifesto’ posted online before the livestreamed shooting, in which the suspect outlined his reasoning and plans A heavily armed 18-year-old white man on Saturday shot 10 people dead at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a “racially motivated” attack that he livestreamed on camera, authorities said. The gunman, who was wearing body armor and a helmet, was arrested after the massacre, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told a news conference. Gramaglia put the toll at 10 dead and three wounded. Eleven of the victims were African Americans. The gunman shot four people in the parking lot of the Tops supermarket, three of them fatally, then went inside and continued firing, Gramaglia said. Among those killed inside the store was
‘UNITED AS ONE’: Photos showed people working on farms or walking in a North Korean town, indicating that a lockdown does not require people to stay home North Korea yesterday imposed a nationwide lockdown to control its first acknowledged COVID-19 outbreak after saying for more than two years that it had a perfect record keeping out the virus that has spread to nearly every place in the world. The size of the outbreak was not immediately known, but it could have serious consequences, because the country has a poor healthcare system and its 26 million people are believed to be mostly unvaccinated against COVID-19. Some experts say that the North, by its admission of an outbreak, might be seeking outside aid. The North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said that
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