MALAYSIA
Airport shooting not terrorism
A man attempting to shoot his wife at Kuala Lumpur International Airport yesterday instead left her personal bodyguard in a critical condition, Malaysian authorities said. Police were investigating the rare shooting in connection to a domestic dispute and said it was not related to terrorism. The shooter, who was thought to be targeting his wife in the arrivals hall, hit her bodyguard and then fled the scene, police said. “The suspect fired two shots before hitting a local man who was a bodyguard, causing the victim to suffer injuries to the abdomen,” Selangor state police chief Hussein Omar Khan said in a statement. Officers were searching for a 38-year-old Malaysian man who had previously been arrested for threatening his wife. Following the threats, the woman hired bodyguards last year, Criminal Investigation Department Director Shuhaily Zain said. The woman, who runs a travel agency, was at the airport to receive Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca, police said.
CHINA
Boat capsizes, killing 12
Two people have been detained following the capsizing of a tourist boat on a river in northeastern China that led to the deaths of 12 people, state media reported yesterday. The incident occurred on Saturday afternoon outside the city of Qinhuangdao near the coast of Hebei Province. Thirty-one people were thrown into the water. The boat was made by local villagers and was not equipped with life jackets or other safety equipment, Xinhua News Agency reported. The boat’s owner and operator were being held while an investigation was under way. The country has powerful rivers and such deadly accidents used to be common before major safety improvements over the past few years.
UNITED STATES
O.J. lawyer to fight payout
The executor of O.J. Simpson’s estate plans to fight to stop families of the late NFL star’s alleged murder victims from receiving funds from a US$33.5 million wrongful death judgement that found him liable for the killings, a report said on Saturday. Simpson, who died on Wednesday at the age of 76, was acquitted in 1995 of murdering ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman in a court case dubbed “The Trial of the Century.” However, a subsequent 1997 civil trial found Simpson liable for the brutal double-slaying and ordered the US football icon-turned-actor to pay US$33.5 million to the victims’ families. The father of Ron Goldman, Fred Goldman, waged a decades-long pursuit of Simpson to force him to make good on the settlement. Simpson is believed to have paid only a fraction of the 1997 figure, with a 2021 report stating that the Goldmans had received just less than US$133,000. Simpson’s long-time lawyer Malcolm LaVergne told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Saturday that he was determined to ensure that the Goldman family not receive anything from Simpson’s estate. “It’s my hope that the Goldmans get zero, nothing,” LaVergne was quoted by the paper as saying. “Them specifically. And I will do everything in my capacity as the executor or personal representative to try and ensure that they get nothing.” LaVergne apparently was angered that the Goldmans at one point had gained control of the manuscript of Simpson’s book If I Did It, and retitled it, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer. The Review-Journal reported that LaVergne was named as executor of Simpson’s estate in court documents filed on Friday.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
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