While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, June 28
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US President Joe Biden greets supporters outside his hotel, ahead of the first presidential debate of the 2024 election, in Atlanta, Georgia.
PHOTO: AFP
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Savage: Attack ads mark US presidential debate
Giant billboards welcome Donald Trump to Atlanta as a “convicted felon,” while television ads show President Joe Biden falling off a bicycle.
The June 27 debate between the two rivals in the 2024 White House race saw both sides ramp up personal attacks in a campaign already characterised by bitter animosity.
To mark the event in Georgia’s state capital, Mr Biden’s Democratic Party paid for several huge billboards across the city.
“Donald, welcome to Atlanta for the first time since becoming a convicted felon. Congrats - or whatever,” read the sarcastic message under a picture of Trump’s police mugshot.
Bolivia arrests 17 as failed coup deepens instability
REUTERS
Bolivian authorities on June 27 paraded handcuffed detainees in front of the media, announcing 17 arrests after a botched coup d’etat that has deepened political turmoil in a country mired in severe economic crisis.
Tensions have been rising in recent weeks in the Andean nation over surging prices, shortages of dollars and fuel, and a feud between Mr Arce and the powerful former president Evo Morales ahead of 2025 elections.
Riot police kept close watch over government buildings a day after army chief Juan Jose Zuniga deployed troops and tanks to the heart of the capital La Paz, where they tried to break down a door of the presidential palace.
China’s former defence ministers sacked for corruption
PHOTOS: REUTERS
China’s ruling Communist Party has sacked two former defence ministers for corruption, a development that revealed how graft had plagued the top brass of Asia’s largest military.
Li Shangfu, whose public disappearance in 2023 had sparked speculation, was found to have accepted bribes, as did his predecessor Wei Fenghe, according to Chinese state media reports on June 27.
Both men had “gravely hurt the work of the party”, the development of defence and the image of senior leaders, said a report by the Central Military Commission (CMC), China’s top military body, in the first official explanation for Li’s sudden removal.
Five killed as train collides with bus in Slovakia
Five people were killed and five others injured on June 27, when a passenger train and bus collided at a railway crossing in southern Slovakia, rescuers said.
The crash occurred just after 5pm (11pm Singapore time) near the southwestern town of Nove Zamky, the CTK news agency reported.
Railway spokeswoman Vladimira Bahylova told AFP the Eurocity train had been headed from Prague to Budapest.
10 AI-generated women to compete in AI beauty pageant
PHOTO: FANVUE WORLD AI CREATOR AWARDS
Ten women participating in a beauty pageant is nothing new. Some pose candidly, some play to the camera, their beauty forever frozen in this moment in time.
Like many other pageants held in countries around the world, the contestants are young, thin and embody many of the standards defining traditional “beauty.”
But that is where the similarities to a traditional beauty pageant end. None of these women are real - everything about them, even the emotion that flickers across their faces, is generated by artificial intelligence (AI), for the world’s first ever AI beauty pageant.
