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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
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