VIETNAM
To Lam elected president
The National Assembly elected Minister of Public Security To Lam as the new president, the legislature said yesterday. Lam, 66, was deputy head of the Communist Party’s anti-corruption committee before taking on the second-most important position in the nation’s political hierarchy. He becomes Vietnam’s third president in less than two years after his two immediate predecessors resigned for “violations” that were possibly detected by the ministry that Lam oversaw. “This is a great honor and responsibility, also an opportunity for me,” Lam said in a speech after taking his oath at the National Assembly.
ITALY
Gerard Depardieu accused
A well-known Italian paparazzi photographer on Tuesday accused French film star Gerard Depardieu of punching him in Rome, media reported, with the actor’s lawyer saying he had been defending a companion. Daily Il Messaggero quoted the photographer Rino Barillari as saying the 75-year-old actor punched him three times in the face when he tried to photograph the star. Barillari, 79, dubbed the “king of paparazzi,” told the paper he approached the actor and a woman at Harry’s Bar on the chic Via Veneto on Tuesday afternoon. “Mamma mia, he is fat. He punched me three times in the face,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “First I’m going to hospital, then I’m going to deal with him. I’m going to file a complaint to the police.” He said the woman, Depardieu’s partner Magda Vavrusova, initially tried to block him from taking photographs. In a statement released later, the couple’s lawyer Delphine Meillet cited Vavrusova as saying the photographer had pushed her violently and touched her chest with his arm.
UNITED STATES
Biopic angers Trump
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign called The Apprentice, a film about the former president in the 1980s, “pure fiction” and vowed legal action following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. However, director Ali Abbasi is offering to privately screen the film for Trump. Following its premiere on Monday in Cannes, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement that the Trump team would file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.” “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Cheung said. The central relationship of the movie is between Trump and Roy Cohn, the defense attorney who was chief counsel to former senator Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Senate investigations of suspected communists. Asked about the Trump campaign’s statement on Tuesday in Cannes, Abbasi told reporters: “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” However, Abbasi at the film’s festival news conference offered to screen The Apprentice for Trump and talk it over.
UNITED STATES
Actor Perry’s death probed
Police on Tuesday said they are investigating the ketamine overdose death of Friends actor Matthew Perry, who died at his luxury Los Angeles home last year. Perry was found unresponsive in his pool at the age of 54, sparking a global outpouring of grief from fans and colleagues. An autopsy found the cause of his death was “the acute effects of ketamine,” a controlled drug which the recovering addict was understood to be taking as part of supervised therapy. Just how the actor obtained the drug is now the subject of a legal investigation.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant