AUSTRALIA
Shark kills swimmer
Several Sydney beaches, including the iconic Bondi and Bronte, were shut yesterday after a swimmer was killed in a shark attack, the first such fatality at the city’s beaches in nearly 60 years. Drum lines, which are used to bait sharks, have been set up near the attack site, while drones have been deployed as officials search for the shark. A video shared online showed a shark attacking a person on Wednesday afternoon off Little Bay beach, about 20km south of Australia’s largest city and near the entrance to Botany Bay.
HONG KONG
Xi expresses concerns
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) directed Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng (韓正) to express to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) the concerns that Chinese Communist Party leaders have about the territory’s COVID-19 situation, Wen Wei Po reported yesterday. Xi said that the local government’s “overriding task” was to control the situation. Hong Kong is facing its worst outbreak of the pandemic, topping 2,000 new COVID-19 cases each day this week. The Caritas Medical Center on Wednesday was treating some patients in beds outside the building. “The reason why our society has become chaotic like this today is all because of this [“zero COVID-19”] policy. The organizational skill of the government has made Hong Kong people feel so hopeless,” said Daisy Ho, a 70-year-old homemaker.
INDIA
Thirteen die at wedding
Thirteen women and girls died while singing and dancing at a wedding as a concrete slab covering an abandoned village well collapsed under their weight, an official said yesterday. Ten other people were injured as they also fell into the well and were hospitalized in Kushinagar District in Uttar Pradesh on Wednesday, Magistrate S. Rajalingam said. The well is more than 15m deep, said Muralidhar Singh, a rescuer.
CANADA
Bodies recovered from ship
Rescuers recovered bodies from a Spanish fishing ship that sank in rough seas off Newfoundland, raising the confirmed death toll to nine, but the search for 12 missing sailors was called off on Wednesday. Lieutenant Commander Brian Owens, spokesperson of the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax, said that all search and rescue craft were returning to base and civilian vessels had been released from their obligation to contribute to the effort. The Villa de Pitanxo fishing boat, which operated out of northwest Spain’s Galicia region, sank early on Tuesday, tossing its 24 crew members into icy seas.
UNITED STATES
Republicans doubt result
Only 13 of the 143 Texas Republican candidates for Congress say they believe US President Joe Biden’s election win was legitimate, a newspaper reported on Wednesday. Hearst Newspapers sent questions about the election and searched campaign Web sites and social media pages of the Republicans running for Congress in Texas. Of 86 with discernible positions, at least 42 have outright said that Democrats stole the 2020 election, called the results illegitimate, or said they would have voted not to certify. Another 11 candidates have said there was enough fraud or irregularities to cast doubt on the results. “We’ve seen across the board, the Democrats have always cheated,” said Jonathan Hullihan, a candidate in the state’s 8th Congressional District.
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
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the