AUSTRALIA
Qantas CEO gets pie in face
Qantas Airways chief executive Alan Joyce yesterday proved he was no cream puff, keeping his cool after a man smeared a cream pie in his face during a business breakfast in Perth. Joyce was speaking at the event when a man in a business suit walked onto the stage, reached around to rub the pie in his face and calmly walked away, 7 News television showed. The unidentified man’s motive was unclear, but he was soon apprehended by security guards. State police later confirmed that officers had been called to an assault at a Perth hotel and that one person was in custody. Joyce at first appeared stunned by the incident, but quickly regained his composure to tell the audience he did not know why he had been targeted, local media reported, before leaving the stage to clean up. He later told reporters he had been unable to identify what flavor pie he had been hit with.
FRANCE
Photo bomber revealed
A burly bearded man wearing a cap and a purple sweatshirt who loomed over president-elect Emmanuel Macron as he celebrated his victory on Sunday night has been revealed as a pizzeria owner from Brittany. Morgan Simon, 31, became a social media star after appearing on stage behind Macron and his wife, Brigitte, at the climax of his victory party outside the Louvre museum in Paris. A visual contrast in his large sweatshirt and cap, compared with the sharply dressed Macron and his wife, Simon on Monday talked about how he found himself on the stage. He was one of the more than 250,000 people who signed up to Macron’s En Marche political movement, founded in April last year, and had knocked on doors and campaigned for the independent centrist. “At the moment of the Marseillaise [French national anthem], they asked us to go on stage,” he told Le Parisien newspaper. “I was with a friend and we were among the first on stage so we stood near him, not realizing that we’d be in the line of the cameras.”
UNITED STATES
Pepe the Frog killed
Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character hijacked by the far right and turned into a symbol of racial hatred, has been killed off by its horrified creator. The cartoon amphibian started out life in 2005 as a harmless character in Matt Furie’s online Boy’s Club strip, but was adopted by white supremacists and extreme-right hate groups, who depicted the frog dressed as Adolf Hitler and as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Furie published a short strip that showed a deceased Pepe lying in an open casket, being mourned by other figures from the original Boy’s Club series. Furie had lamented the hijacking of his cartoon character — whom he once described as a “blissfully stoned ... peaceful frog-dude” — by the so-called alt-right, who turned it into their own mascot both online and at demonstrations.
UNITED STATES
Stew thief not charged
A New Mexico man arrested for breaking into his mom’s house to steal her traditional New Mexican stew will not face charges after all. Last week, a state district judge dismissed charges against Jonathan Carlos Ray, who was charged in 2015 for the theft of his mother’s posole. The judge said the only witnesses to the alleged crime were Ray and his mother. According to a criminal complaint, Ray sent his mom a text message saying he wanted some of her posole. She told him no. The complaint says the mother later found her gate and garage broken and a pot of the posole missing.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema