Pang Nop was pedalling his bicycle home through a light drizzle when he paused to pick up some stones for his slingshot. As he did, the sky flashed and he fell to the ground, dead.
“Suddenly we saw him lying down,” said Uy Saroeurn, the boy’s uncle, who was planting rice in a nearby field.
The 14-year-old had died instantly, a big bruise on the back of his neck.
Pang Nop had become one of 95 Cambodians killed by lightning last year, more than double the 2007 total of 45 lightning fatalities and the highest-ever annual tally in the country.
“Most of the people killed are farmers who continue to work in rice paddies or herd cattle during rainstorms,” says Long Saravuth, a weather expert at Cambodia’s Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology. “Those people should be highly alert to the problem, but they don’t try to find shelter when it rains.”
The tropical country of lazy rivers and lakes is particularly prone to cloud formations that generate intense lightning storms, Long Saravuth said.
These formations can hover just 50m above the earth, and anyone underneath is vulnerable to lightning strike.
As the country’s rainy season drew to a close, local newspapers seemed to carry reports on new lightning deaths nearly every day — farmers, fishermen and soccer players have all recently been hit.
Worried Cambodians hope this year will offer respite. The country only began compiling lightning statistics two years ago after an increase in reports of deaths.
Some Cambodians have searched science and religion to explain the phenomenon, with many of the country’s 14 million people believing lightning is connected to supernatural forces.
“The lightning last year was more fierce than ever before. I’m worried I might be the next victim — but I believe if we do good deeds, we avoid lightning and bad luck,” said Cheng Chenda, a housewife in Phnom Penh.
In his office at the Buddhist Institute, advisor on mores and customs Miech Ponn said many Cambodians believed people with moles on their calves were susceptible to lightning strikes, as were people who had broken promises.
Cambodians also use mystical cures for those who have been struck.
When he found Pang Nop’s body, Uy Saroeurn carried it to the boy’s mother who quickly covered her son with a white cloth in the hope that it would revive him.
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS