AUSTRALIA
Snorkeler left behind
A US tourist said he was terrified of drowning after realizing his tour boat had left him behind after a snorkeling trip on the Great Barrier Reef. Ian Cole, 28, had to swim to a nearby boat after a mistaken headcount left him stranded off Michaelmas Cay, a reef-ringed sand island near Cairns, on Saturday. He said he panicked when he surfaced to find the boat gone, which was the “worst thing” he could have done. He told the Cairns Post yesterday that he calmed down after seeing the other boat and made his way to the vessel. Tourism operators’ spokesman Colin McKenzie said Cole was left beside a beach and “never in any danger,” but the staff member responsible had been sacked.
CHINA
Mom sentenced for murder
A court has sentenced a mother to a “lenient” five years in prison for murdering her paralyzed twin sons who needed full-time care, in a case that aroused public sympathy, the China Daily said. Han Qunfeng, 37, gave her sons water laced with sleeping pills before drowning them in a bathtub in November. The 13-year-olds had been born prematurely and had cerebral palsy. Han confessed to the murders at a hearing earlier this month. After killing the boys, she attempted to take her own life by drinking a mixture of pesticide and rat poison, the newspaper said. Han’s husband forgave her because the family was almost bankrupt after spending all its savings on treating the twins in hospitals, state media said.
AUSTRALIA
Man jailed over sex death
A man who strangled two of his lovers in sex games that went wrong was jailed yesterday for 22 years after pleading guilty to murder. David Richard Fraser, 36, was jailed for killing 29-year-old Luke Noonan, who was found choked by a belt in Fraser’s bed in Adelaide in 2009. Fraser had been on parole at the time after being convicted of manslaughter for fatally throttling his male partner with a shoelace during a consensual sex act in 2005. South Australian Supreme Court Justice Margaret Nyland said he must have known the risks involved with erotic asphyxia given the earlier case.
NEW ZEALAND
Man pees in ‘plane’ sight
A drunk airline passenger who relieved himself in an airplane aisle, splashing other passengers, was let off with a warning about his behavior, reports said yesterday. The man was travelling on a Jetstar flight from Auckland to Singapore on Monday when he urinated in the aisle about six hours into the 11-hour trip, the New Zealand Herald reported. Passenger Amos Chapple said he heard the sound of running water and other passengers remonstrating with the man before he saw the offender answering a call of nature “waving back and forth.” The man and a companion were “catatonic” after drinking whisky before take-off, Chapple said.
NEPAL
Treasure found in palace
A huge stash of gold and silver ornaments has been discovered by workers renovating a former royal palace in the capital, Kathmandu, the government said on Tuesday. The treasures, thought to be more than 500 years old, were hidden in a store room under the sprawling 16th-century Hanuman Dhoka palace, a UNESCO world heritage site, culture ministry spokesman Jalkrishna Shrestha said. It was not immediately clear how much the haul was worth, but the spokesman estimated that there were about 300kg of treasure hidden in the room.
UGANDA
Lightning kills 18 students
A lightning strike at an elementary school in the west killed 18 students and injured 50, police said yesterday. Lightning on Tuesday hit Runyanya school in Kiryandongo district, about 225km northwest of Kampala, killing 15 girls and three boys, a police spokeswoman said. Local media reported that another 21 pupils were burned on Tuesday after lightning struck at a second school in Zombo district, about 380km north of Kampala. The country is experiencing unseasonably heavy rainstorms and concern about the number of recent lightning strikes has prompted lawmakers to demand an official explanation from government.
RUSSIA
No plan to for Kim meet
President Dmitry Medvedev has no plans to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-il during a trip to Vladivostok, the Kremlin said yesterday. “No such meeting is included in the program for Dmitry Medvedev’s trip to Vladivostok,” Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said by telephone. “We never said that he [Kim] was going to come.” Earlier this week, an official in Vladivostok, 130km from the North Korean border, said preparations were being made for a Kim visit. South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported a summit had been arranged for today or tomorrow. The agency quoted an intelligence source in Moscow as saying the two sides might have ditched the plan because they failed to narrow differences over the agenda. Japan’s Kyodo news agency quoted sources as saying that among the reasons given by Pyongyang was Kim’s health woes.
UNITED KINGDOM
Somalis can’t be deported
London will be in breach of the Human Rights Convention if it deports two Somalis convicted of serious criminal offenses to their homeland, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday. The court sided with Abdisamad Adow Sufi, 24, and Abdiaziz Ibrahim Elmi, 42, who were issued with deportation orders and faced an enforced return to Mogadishu after being convicted of burglary, robbery and supplying drugs, among other crimes. The men lodged their appeal to the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights in 2007, arguing that they risked being killed or ill-treated if deported. Seven judges at the court on Tuesday ruled unanimously that deporting the two would breach the Human Rights Convention by not prohibiting inhumane or degrading treatment.
UNITED KINGDOM
Islamist leader arrested
Controversial Arab-Israeli Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Saleh has been arrested in London while on a speaking tour, a spokesman for the Islamic Movement said yesterday. Sheikh Kamal Khatib said it was not clear exactly why Saleh had been detained, but he blamed “the Zionist lobby in Britain” for pushing police to hold him. Saleh, who is the head of the radical northern wing of the Islamic Movement, has had multiple run-ins with the law, including most recently being arrested at the border with Jordan after allegedly striking an interrogator.
UNITED KINGDOM
Bacon painting nears record
Christie’s auction house says a painting by Francis Bacon has sold for £17.96 million (US$28.7 million) at a sale in London. Christie’s says the 1953 oil painting, Study for a Portrait, became the second-most valuable piece to be sold at its postwar and contemporary art auctions in London. It says the highest-selling work in this category was Bacon’s Triptych 1974-77, which sold for £26.3 million in February 2008.
BRAZIL
First gay marriage hailed
The country’s first official gay marriage was celebrated on Tuesday after a court gave its blessing to the couple living together for eight years, local media said. Sergio Kauffman Sousa and Luiz Andre Moresi were wed at a family court in Jacarei, Sao Paulo state. On June 6, they had asked the court to convert their civil union, which was granted in May last year, into a marriage. With the marriage certificate in hand, Sousa and Moresi said that they would ask for new identity documents with the same family name: Sousa Moresi.
MEXICO
Crime up despite spending
The country has increased security spending six-fold in the past five years, but carjackings, kidnappings and other violent crime are rising steadily, an independent study showed on Tuesday. Think tank Mexico Evalua said corruption and poor coordination between authorities had nullified the impact of higher spending, largely under President Felipe Calderon, who sent in the army to crush the country’s drug cartels in late 2006. According to the think tank, public sector spending on security has leaped from an average of less than 20 billion pesos (US$1.7 billion) annually in the first six years of the millennium to more than 120 billion pesos in the last two.
CUBA
Chavez appears on TV
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez appeared on Cuban state television on Tuesday, with former Cuban president Fidel Castro, for the first time since undergoing emergency surgery in Havana. The 56-year-old appeared to have lost weight, but was animated his in speech as usual as he stood alongside Castro, 84, the footage showed. The video also aired in Venezuela to dispel rumors about Chavez’s medical condition. In one scene from the footage, they are shown reading Tuesday’s edition of the Communist Party newspaper Granma.
UNITED STATES
‘RAPEST’ attackers jailed
Four people charged with kidnapping a man, tattooing “RAPEST” (sic) on his forehead and shocking his genitals with a stun gun before beating him unconscious with a baseball bat pleaded guilty to kidnapping and maiming charges during a hearing in the Oklahoma County District Court on Tuesday. The two men and two women were accused of attacking an 18-year-old on April 17. Del City police have said they were punishing him after one of the women accused him of trying to have sex with her, which he denied. Special Judge Stephen Alcorn sentenced the two men to a total of 10 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation, while the two women were each sentenced to five years in prison and five years of probation in the attack a prosecutor characterized as “a brutal case of bullying.”
UNITED STATES
Astronauts take shelter
Six space station astronauts took shelter in lifeboats on Tuesday when a piece of orbiting junk came dangerously close. The unidentified object came within 335m of the space station — closer than any piece of space junk ever, NASA’s space operations chief Bill Gerstenmaier said. Mission Control ordered the astronauts into the two Russian Soyuz capsules parked at the space station on Tuesday morning. NASA got just 14 hours notice of the close approach, not nearly enough time to move the space station out of harm’s way. The time of closest approach was a little after 8am. Mission Control gave the all-clear a few minutes later.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion