French diplomats are demanding to know why it took Australian immigration officials five months to tell them that a 74-year-old French national was being held in an immigration detention center. \nThe illegal immigrant died of a brain hemorrhage 10 days after French officials were told he was in the Sydney detention center. \nFrench diplomat Olivier Bove yesterday said consular officials were questioning Australia's immigration department over its decision to hold Marc Thao -- a former shopkeeper who was born in Laos -- for five months before notifying the embassy. \nLast month, the embassy received a notice from the immigration department that one of its citizens was to be deported but no name was provided, Bove said. \nAnother week passed before French officials received a phone call from an Australian doctor treating Thao, who had been admitted to hospital in a critical condition. \nThao died on Aug. 29 from a cerebral hemorrhage. \nIn a newspaper report yesterday, French officials expressed outrage over immigration practices in Australia. \n"Frankly, we are appalled at the way our citizen was treated," a spokesman for the embassy told the Australian newspaper. The paper did not identify the spokesman. \nAustralian Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone yesterday said that Thao had told officials he did not want the French government to be notified about his detention. \n"In this case, in a record of interview, the gentleman was asked whether the embassy should be notified and specifically instructed that they should not be," Vanstone said. "That is the right of the person that is being detained to do so." \nImmigration officials opted to notify the embassy once Thao was admitted to hospital, Vanstone said. \nThao left New Caledonia in 1999 to live with his stepdaughter in Sydney. After his three-month tourist visa expired, Thao continued to live in Australia as an illegal immigrant. \nHis status went undetected until March this year, when police were called to his home to resolve a domestic dispute. \nThao's stepson told police about the man's illegal status, and he was taken to Sydney's detention center in the suburb of Villawood. \nFrench officials said they are awaiting a response from the Australian immigration department before deciding whether any further action will be taken.
China is racing to quash a new COVID-19 flareup that risks spilling over into one of its most economically significant regions, raising the specter of disruptions that could roil global supply chains for solar panels, medicines and semiconductors. Infections have surged in Si County in the eastern province of Anhui, with officials reporting 287 cases for Sunday and nearly 1,000 since late last week. Authorities locked down Si and a neighboring county late last week to try and stop the virus from spreading to Jiangsu Province, the second-biggest contributor to China’s economic output and a globally important manufacturing hub for the
A flight test of a hypersonic missile system in Hawaii on Wednesday ended in failure due to a problem that occurred after ignition, the US Department of Defense said, delivering a fresh blow to a program that has experienced stumbles. It did not provide details of what took place in the test, but said in an e-mailed statement that “the department remains confident that it is on track to field offensive and defensive hypersonic capabilities on target dates beginning in the early 2020s.” “An anomaly occurred following ignition of the test asset,” Pentagon spokesman US Navy Lieutenant Commander Tim Gorman said in
OPPOSITION PROTESTS: Many people in Myanmar suspect China of supporting the military takeover, while Beijing has refused to condemn last year’s army power grab China’s top diplomat on Saturday arrived on his first visit to Myanmar since the military seized power last year to attend a regional meeting that the Burmese government said was a recognition of its legitimacy and opponents protested as a violation of peace efforts. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) is to join counterparts from Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in a meeting of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation group in the central city of Bagan, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The grouping is a Chinese-led initiative that includes the countries of the Mekong Delta, a potential source of regional tensions
CERN UPGRADES: ompared with the collider’s first run that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, this time around there would be 20 times more collisions Ten years after it discovered the Higgs boson, the Large Hadron Collider is about to start smashing protons together at unprecedented energy levels in its quest to reveal more secrets about how the universe works. The world’s largest and most powerful particle collider started back up in April after a three-year break for upgrades in preparation for its third run. From today it will run around the clock for nearly four years at a record energy of 13.6 trillion electronvolts, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced at a news conference last week. It is to send two beams of protons
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