AUSTRALIA
Drivers first flood fatalities
Two men trapped in vehicles have become the first fatalities of flooding on the east coast. A car got trapped in floodwater northwest of Sydney at dawn on Wednesday and emergency services later recovered it with a body inside, officials said. The body, believed to be that of a 25-year-old Pakistani national, has yet to be formally identified. An emergency crew later retrieved the body of David Hornman, 38, from an upturned pickup truck in a flooded creek near Gold Coast city in Queensland state, police said. Most rivers had peaked by yesterday, but 20,000 people were still evacuated from their homes, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.
GREECE
Nation’s ‘rebirth’ celebrated
The nation yesterday marked 200 years since the start of its independence war with the Ottoman Empire. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Wednesday said that the “rebirth of Greece” was “a special moment for all Hellenism.” The nation fought for nearly a decade for its independence from an empire that extended through the Balkans and modern-day Turkey to northern Africa, coming out victorious thanks to military intervention by Britain, France and Russia. Parades of tanks, artillery and overflying jets marked the occasion in the capital Athens, alongside mounted troops in traditional costumes from the 1821 conflict.
UNITED KINGDOM
Revenge porn spikes: survey
The number of residents who have been a victim of so-called “revenge porn” has almost doubled in the past two years, researchers said yesterday. About 15 percent of residents aged 18 to 45 surveyed by law firm Slater and Gordon said that intimate sexual pictures of them had been shared without their consent, up from 8 percent in 2019. The firm said it was also shocked that nearly one in 10 people admitted that they had shared or threatened to share an explicit image — more than twice the number in 2019.
UNITED KINGDOM
Benin bronze to go home
The University of Aberdeen yesterday said that it would return a Benin bronze to Nigeria “within weeks,” one of the first public institutions to do so. University Museums and Special Collections head Neil Curtis said that the sculpture of an oba, or ruler, of the Kingdom of Benin, purchased in 1957, had been “blatantly looted.” Nigerian National Commission for Museums and Monuments Director-General Abba Isa Tijani said the importance of displaying the bronze inside Nigeria was inexpressible. “It’s part of our identity, part of our heritage ... which has been taken away from us for many years,” Tijani said. British soldiers seized thousands of sculptures from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897.
MEXICO
Seized vaccines doubted
Prosecutors on Wednesday said that they remain unsure about whether the supposed COVID-19 vaccines seized last week are real or fake. The Attorney General’s Office said that the government’s medical safety commission still has not said what was in 1,155 vials found in false bottoms of ice chests aboard a private plane bound for Honduras. Initially, the distributor said that they were not real Sputnik V vaccines, but later, the Customs Service head said that they appeared to be real — now prosecutors say that they do not know. The vials containing more than 5,700 doses were found inside two coolers packed with ice and sodas during an inspection at an airport in the state of Campeche.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees