AUSTRALIA
Croc takes night-swimmer
A woman is feared dead after being seized by a crocodile during a nighttime swim with a friend at a beach in the north of the nation. The women went for a stroll on Thornton Beach on Sunday evening in the far north of Queensland State before making a fateful decision to take a dip in an area known to be infested with the reptiles. “The woman was swimming with a female friend, also in her 40s, at 10:30pm when the incident occurred,” police said in a statement. Nine News cited witnesses as hearing the woman yell: “A croc’s got me, a croc’s got me.” Senior Constable Russell Parker said the women — Australians visiting the area — were in the water when one of them was grabbed, with her friend desperately trying to drag her to safety. “Her friend raised the alarm with a nearby business and they subsequently contacted the police,” Parker said. A rescue helicopter was sent up with thermal imaging equipment, but was unable to find the missing woman. Marine police also failed to do so when the search resumed yesterday. Parker added that the surviving woman was “very, very shaken and shocked” but appeared to have escaped with only grazes.
INDIA
Police arrest alleged rapists
Police have arrested two men over the gang rape of a teenage girl whose body was found hanging from a tree. The girl, reportedly 15 and from one of the low social castes, was strangled — allegedly by three men — on Friday night outside her village in the state of Uttar Pradesh. Her body was found the next morning hanging by her scarf from a tree about 1km from her home in Bahraich district, police Superintendent Salik Ram Verma said. Two men were arrested and “the third accused is on the run,” Verma told reporters. The girl had left her sleeping family to secretly meet one of the men, only to discover that he had brought along two of his friends, who attacked her. “When the girl resisted their bid, she was raped and later strangled. To make it look like a case of suicide, they hung her body from a tree and left the spot,” Verma told reporters. Four police constables have also been suspended after an initial lack of action over the incident sparked outrage.
SOUTH KOREA
Ban denies interest in top job
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon yesterday denied that his current visit to the nation is testing the waters for a presidential bid, saying his comments on the subject had been exaggerated. Ban arrived in his home country last week for a six-day visit that has been dominated by speculation over a possible run for the presidency next year, after he steps down from his UN post at the end of this year. An initial statement that he might seek “advice” on what to do when he returns home as an ordinary citizen, was jumped on by local media as the clearest indication yet that he is considering the role. However, Ban yesterday said he was “baffled” by the “exaggerated” spin put on his remarks.
UGANDA
N Korean ties cooled
The nation promised to halt military cooperation with old ally North Korea after a visit to Kampala by South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Sunday. North Korea has for many years sent military trainers to the nation, but Minister of Foreign Affairs Sam Kutesa said the relationship would now end. “We are disengaging the cooperation we have with North Korea as a result of UN sanctions,” Kutesa said. “Our policy is that we do not support nuclear proliferation.”
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.