AUSTRALIA
Caution from security boss
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Duncan Lewis has told politicians from the ruling Liberal-National coalition to tone down their criticism of Islam because it could pose a national security risk, The Australian newspaper reported yesterday. His reported calls came days after an interview with Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, where he stressed that fueling tensions with the Muslim community could hurt the fight against extremism. Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop yesterday said that she supported Lewis’ reported actions.
INDIA
Grisly death at airport
Airport and airline authorities have begun investigating the death of a technician who was sucked into an aircraft engine at an airport in Mumbai. Air India boss Ashwani Lohani said the accident happened when a plane bound from Mumbai to Hyderbad was being pushed back from an airport gate. A pilot misinterpreted a signal and switched on the plane’s engine. The maintenance crew member standing nearby was sucked into the engine and killed instantly.
INDONESIA
Speaker resigns
Setya Novanto on Wednesday quit as parliament speaker over allegations he tried to extort a stake from a US mining giant. Novanto was recorded demanding shares in the local unit of Freeport-McMoRan in exchange for extending the company’s right to operate in the country, claiming that the stake would be divided between President Joko Widodo and the vice president. His resignation came as a parliamentary ethics council investigating the case was wrapping up its probe and appeared ready to strip him of the post.
UNITED STATES
Carter in e-mail flap
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter used a personal e-mail account for some government business in his first months at the Pentagon, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing White House and Department of Defense officials and copies of the e-mails. Carter used his own e-mail account, contrary to department rules, for at least two months after it became public in March that Hillary Rodham Clinton had used only her personal e-mail account while she was secretary of state, the Times quoted the officials as saying.
FRANCE
Le Pen slammed for tweets
National Front leader Marine Le Pen is under investigation after tweeting graphic images of Islamic State atrocities, including a photograph of the decapitated body of US reporter James Foley. The prosecutor’s office in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre on Wednesday said it had launched an investigation. Foley’s parents John and Diane said they wanted the images removed immediately, accusing Le Pen in a statement of using the “shamefully uncensored” image to her own political ends.
UNITED KINGDOM
Man stabs self at Heathrow
A man was taken to hospital after he repeatedly stabbed himself in the head on Wednesday at London’s Heathrow airport, police and media reports said, triggering panic among passengers. A passenger quoted by the Guardian newspaper, Tamara Lynch, said the man was trying to stab himself in the neck, then opened his jacket to try and stab himself in the chest. “There was blood all the way down the side of his face and down his shirt,” she said. Airline employees disarmed the man before security arrived.
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.