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.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home