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.
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