The Star Online: Metro: Central
The Star Online: Metro: Central |
| One dead in shooting at Thai protest site Posted: 15 Apr 2014 02:04 AM PDT Bangkok (AFP) - One person was shot dead on Tuesday at the site of an anti-government rally in the Thai capital Bangkok, emergency services said, in the latest in a string of violent attacks. The 40-year-old man was killed by an unknown attacker in the early hours of the morning near the rally stage in Lumpini Park, according to the city's Erawan emergency centre. He was working as a security guard for the anti-government movement, according to rally spokesman Akanat Promphan. "We don't know who was responsible," he added. Police said they had no information about the incident and had not visited the scene of the shooting. Access to the protest site is usually restricted by the rally guards, who have fraught relations with the police. The area near where the attack happened has been thronged with revellers celebrating the traditional Thai New Year water festival this week. Opposition demonstrators have staged more than five months of mass street protests seeking to force Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra from office. Grenade attacks and shootings linked to the unrest have left 25 people dead and hundreds wounded in recent months, including many protesters. The violence has eased somewhat since the rallies were scaled back at the start of March, when demonstrators abandoned their occupation of major intersections in Bangkok and converged on Lumpini Park. The protesters want Yingluck to step down and make way for an unelected interim government to oversee reforms aimed at curbing the political dominance of her billionaire family. Thailand has seen years of political conflict and rival street protests by opponents and supporters of her brother, former premier Thaksin Shinawatra. He was ousted from office by a coup in 2006 and lives overseas to avoid jail for a corruption conviction. |
| Xi urges China to build up joint space and air power Posted: 15 Apr 2014 01:35 AM PDT Beijing (AFP) - Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged further integration of air and space defence capabilities, in what experts described Tuesday as a response to the militarisation of space by rivals including the United States. China says its ambitious space programme is peaceful, but such claims were first questioned in 2007 when the military used a ground-based missile to destroy one of its own satellites in orbit. According to several specialist websites, China last May also tested part of a new anti-satellite ballistic missile. Xi told the country's air force to "speed up airspace integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities", the official Xinhua news agency said late Monday in a report which did not elaborate on how this should be done. The state-run China Daily newspaper on Tuesday quoted Wang Ya'nan, deputy editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine in Beijing, as saying the move was in response to the "need of the times". "The United States has paid considerable attention and resources to the integration of capabilities in both air and space, and other powers have also moved progressively toward space militarisation," Wang was quoted as saying. "Though China has stated that it sticks to the peaceful use of space, we must make sure that we have the ability to cope with others' operations in space." The China Daily article said "the idea of combining air and space capability is not new to the Chinese air force". But China's space programme has previously focused more on commerce and science rather than defence. Beijing sees the programme as a symbol of its rising global stature and technological advancement, as well as of the Communist Party's success in reversing the fortunes of the once-impoverished nation. |
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