NEW ZEALAND
Unique traffic law binned
Wellington yesterday scrapped a unique 35-year-old “give way” experiment on the nation’s roads which has for decades bamboozled visiting overseas drivers. The outgoing road rule, introduced in 1977, required motorists turning with the kerb at an intersection to give way to a vehicle turning across the intersection. The Australian state of Victoria flirted with a similar law, but abandoned it as unworkable in 1993. The government launched an advertising blitz in a bid to educate drivers about the change and avoid potential mayhem as the law is rescinded. However, the media blitz was “too little, too late,” Dog and Lemon car-review guide editor Clive Matthew-Wilson said.
MYANMAR
Aung San Suu Kyi falls ill
Aung San Suu Kyi was forced to cancel a stop on her by-election campaign trail yesterday after being taken ill while traveling in a remote part of the south of the country. The Nobel laureate was put on a drip after her boat got stuck on a sandbank for several hours on Saturday during a trip to the town of Myeik in the far south of the country, according to her personal doctor Tin Myo Win. Aung San Suu Kyi was scheduled to give a speech in Myeik late yesterday and Tin Myo Win said it was hoped that would still go ahead.
AUSTRALIA
Labor lose in Queensland
The Labor Party suffered a crushing defeat in an election in the state of Queensland, handing the conservative Liberal National Party (LNP) coalition the biggest majority in the state’s history. The result will worry Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Labor Party which holds a one-seat majority in the federal parliament with the backing of the Greens and two independents. With about 70 percent of the vote from Saturday’s poll counted, the LNP, led by former Brisbane lord mayor Campbell Newman, had won 78 of the state’s 89 parliamentary seats, while the Labor government led by Queensland Premier Anna Bligh saw its representation slashed from 51 to seven. Labor has governed Queensland for 20 of the past 22 years.
ALBANIA
Party slams homosexuality
A small coalition party has said it considers homosexuality a “vice, misfortune and a curse” and backed its leader who allegedly said that gays should be beaten up if they went ahead with plans for the first public gay pride celebrations in May. The Legality Movement Party turned down a call from the parliamentary ombudsman who urged party leader and Deputy Defense Minister Ekrem Spahiu to issue a quick apology over his alleged comments. The gay community, which will celebrate International Day Against Homophobia in Tirana on May 17, has sought Spahiu’s prosecution under anti-discrimination laws. Albania legalized same-sex civil weddings in 2009.
UNITED KINGDOM
Queen crashes wedding
Queen Elizabeth II made an impromptu visit moments after the nuptials of John and Frances Canning at Manchester Town Hall on Friday. The newlyweds said on Saturday that the queen and her husband Prince Philip, chatted and posed for wedding photographs. The royal couple were visiting the venue for lunch when the wedding took place. The 48-year-old groom knew beforehand that the queen would be visiting the town hall, and jokingly wrote to Buckingham Palace to invite the monarch, the Sun newspaper reported. He received a polite reply declining the invitation, but palace officials secretly arranged the meeting, the paper said.
CHILE
Crashed plane found
Searchers have found a plane that went missing last week with eight people aboard in the remote southern Aysen region. No one appears to have survived. General Carlos Bertes, combat chief of the Chilean Air Force, told a news conference on Saturday that a search helicopter spotted the crashed plane in remote woods and there appear to be no survivors. Bertes says the recovery operation will be conducted by air because the area is too remote to be accessed by land, and it could take several days.
UNITED STATES
No charges over NATO raid
The US military has decided that no service members will face disciplinary charges for a NATO airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, The New York Times reported late on Saturday. A Pentagon investigation found late last year that both US and Pakistani troops were responsible for the exchange of fire, but it noted that the Pakistanis had fired first from two border posts not on coalition maps, and that they kept firing even after the US tried to warn them that they were shooting at allied troops. Pakistan rejected these conclusions. The US military launched a second inquiry to determine whether any US military personnel should be punished. This recently completed review had come up with a negative conclusion, the Times reported, citing three unnamed military officials. Officials said the US troops fired in self-defense, the report said, and any other mistakes had been the result of battlefield confusion. “We found nothing criminally negligent on the part of any individual in our investigations of the incident,” the Times quoted one senior US military official as saying.
UNITED STATES
A day to remember
Talk about a memorable day: On Saturday mountaineer Nelson Dellis won the USA Memory Championship for the second year in a row. The Florida man and mountaineering enthusiast outlasted seven other finalists, known in contest circles as mental athletes, at a packed event in New York. Contestants’ hyper-fit brains performed serious gymnastics, including remembering 99 names and faces, a 50-line poem, and the order of a shuffled deck of cards. Dellis, 27, turned in an unforgettable performance, even smashing his own record in the random numbers category, in which he managed to memorize an amazing 303 figures in five minutes.
UNITED STATES
Dick Cheney gets new heart
Former US Vice President Dick Cheney underwent a heart transplant on Saturday and is recovering in a Virginia hospital, a spokeswoman for Cheney said in an e-mail. Cheney, 71, a Republican who served as vice president in the administration of former US president George W. Bush, has had a long history of heart trouble. The spokeswoman said Cheney was recovering in the intensive care unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia, a suburb of Washington. The statement said Cheney and his family do not know the identity of the donor, but “they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift.” Cheney, who has suffered five heart attacks, the first at age 37, had a heart pump implanted in 2010 to compensate for worsening congestive heart failure. He said after the operation that he was considering whether to seek a full heart transplant. Cheney had bypass surgery in 1988 and later two angioplasties. In 2001, he had a defibrillator implanted in his chest.
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