Investigations were under way yesterday into who lobbed Vegemite sandwiches at Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard as she toured a Queensland school.
Gillard tried to play down the prank on Wednesday at Brisbane’s Marsden State High School.
“One kid thought he might just be a little bit naughty,” she said.
However, the sandwich “whodunnit” hit the headlines.
“I didn’t see a sandwich in the air,” Gillard told the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) radio yesterday. “I did see half a sandwich on the ground. What I actually saw was screaming, over-excited and enthusiastic kids being very warm and very friendly.”
School principal Alan Jones and his staff quickly identified a culprit and suspended him for two weeks.
However, Kyle Thomson, 16, told reporters he was “not the one that threw the sandwich” and urged the school to “get its facts right.”
Two sandwiches were in fact thrown.
TV footage showed a first bounce off another student in a noisy crowd, but a second only just missed, falling behind Gillard’s back.
Thomson told Channel Nine he tried to block the sandwiches covered with Australia’s favorite sticky paste.
“I hit the sandwich out of the kid’s hands because he threw it and there was another one so I hit it out of his hand,” he said.
Brisbane’s local radio described the incident as “sandwich-gate” and interviewed Gillard and Kyle, who told the prime minister he was innocent.
“It’s not my job to be saying something different,” she said, offering her sympathy.
Gillard laughed when asked if there would be a parliamentary pardon, saying it was a matter for the school principal.
“Hopefully the truth will come out,” Thomson said.
His mother, Anna, said she believed her son and the incident had been blown out of all proportion.
“I honestly wonder if he would have been suspended on the first day without all the investigations being done if it wasn’t the prime minister,” she said, adding that she wanted all TV footage shot of the incident reviewed as part of the inquiry.
“I’m sure she’s had more thrown at her than a sandwich throughout her life,” the mother said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RSS