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.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
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