Australian Hanabeth Luke remembers like yesterday crawling through burning rubble and thick acrid black smoke after a bomb exploded at a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, 20 years ago.
A total of 202 people, including 88 Australians, as well as Taiwanese Eve Kuo (郭惠敏), 24, and four members of a Taipei-based rugby club — Australian James Hardman, 28; Englishman Daniel Braden, 28; and Godfrey Fitz, 39, and Craig Harty, 35, both of South Africa — were killed when a car bomb exploded on Oct 12, 2002, outside the Sari Club and from another blast less than a minute earlier at Paddy’s Bar across the road.
It remains the single largest loss of life from an act of terror in Australian history. The country is today holding a memorial service for the victims at the parliament house in Canberra.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“We can’t bring those people back, but we can live the most, the best versions of our lives,” Luke said.
Luke, then 22 years old, escaped the burning building through the collapsed roof and scaled a 3m wall over electrical wires to jump to safety, frantically searching for her then-partner, Marc Gajado, amongst the chaos outside.
Gajado, who did not survive the blast, was walking toward the front of the building when the bomb exploded.
Photo: AFP
As she searched for Gajado, Luke came across badly injured 17-year-old Tom Singer, helping lift him to his feet.
“I said, mate I don’t care if both of your legs are broken, you’re going to get up and we’re going to use both of our strengths and get you out of here,” Luke said.
A photo of Luke helping the severely burnt Singer, who died one month later in hospital, was splashed across newspapers globally after the tragedy, with some calling her the “Angel of Bali.”
“The nightmare is that, still 20 years later, Marc’s never going to come back,” said Luke, who now lives in Evans Head, 700km north of Sydney, with her partner, Kieran, and two children.
Marc’s “parents will never see him again. Tom Singer’s parents, they’re the most wonderful people, their whole family, they’ve been rocked,” she said.
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