AUSTRALIA
Dreamworld to reopen
The nation’s biggest theme park yesterday announced its reopening six weeks after four people were killed on a malfunctioning water ride, with the all-clear given following a rigorous safety review. Two women and two men died when rafts on the Thunder River Rapids ride at the hugely popular attraction on the Gold Coast collided on Oct. 25. Ardent Leisure, which owns the park and initially came in for heavy criticism for the way it handled the tragedy, said it would resume operations on Saturday next week with all funds from the opening weekend going to charity. Ardent Leisure previously announced the Thunder River Rapids ride would be demolished and a permanent memorial to the victims erected.
CHINA
More detained over collapse
Six more people were detained over the deaths of 74 workers in the collapse of a platform in a cooling tower at a power plant, one of the nation’s worst work safety disasters in recent years. A total of 15 people have been reported by state media to be in detention after the collapse last week in Jiangxi Province. Xinhua news agency said the latest detentions on Tuesday included two people accused of “selling shoddy products,” but did not detail what those products were. The board chairman of the engineering firm building the plant was already detained, as well as top engineers on the project. Workers were building a circular cooling tower when the interior scaffolding collapsed, causing a large amount of steel, concrete and wooden planks to cave in. President Xi Jinping (習近平) said local governments should learn from the accident and hold accountable anyone responsible. No formal charges have been announced against the 15 people detained.
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