AUSTRALIA
Indigenous heads lament loss
Indigenous leaders yesterday called for a week of silence and reflection after a referendum to recognize First Peoples in the constitution was decisively rejected. More than 60 percent on Saturday voted “no” in the landmark referendum that asked whether to alter the constitution to recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people with an indigenous advisory body that would have advised parliament on matters concerning the community. “This is a bitter irony,” indigenous leaders said in a statement. “That people who have only been on this continent for 235 years would refuse to recognise those whose home this land has been for 60,000 and more years is beyond reason.” They said they would lower the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island flag to half-mast for the week and urged others to do the same.
UNITED KINGDOM
Michael Caine retires at 90
Veteran British actor Michael Caine, a Hollywood icon with a decades-spanning career littered with awards and acclaim, on Saturday said that he has retired from acting at the age of 90. The Oscar-winner bowed out following another widely praised performance in his final film, The Great Escaper, which was released on Oct. 6. “I keep saying I’m going to retire. Well I am now,” Caine told BBC Radio 4’s Today program. “The only parts I’m liable to get now are 90-year-old men. Or maybe 85. They’re not going to be the lead. You don’t have leading men at 90, you’re going to have young handsome boys and girls. So I thought, I might as well leave with all this.” A prolific actor known for his amiable Cockney persona and deadpan acting style, Caine has appeared in more than 160 films during his seven-decade career.
FRANCE
Louvre, Versailles evacuated
The Louvre Museum in Paris and Versailles Palace on Saturday evacuated visitors and staff after receiving bomb threats, police said. The evacuations of two of the world’s most-visited tourist sites came amid heightened vigilance around the country following a fatal school stabbing by a suspected Islamic extremist. Alarms rang out through the Louvre when the evacuation was announced, and in the underground shopping center beneath its signature pyramid. Paris police said officers searched the museum after it received written bomb threats. The Louvre communication service said no one was hurt and no bomb was found. The former royal palace at Versailles also received bomb threats, and the palace and its gardens were evacuated while police examined the area.
UNITED STATES
Piper Laurie dies aged 91
Piper Laurie, the strong-willed, Oscar-nominated actor who performed in acclaimed roles despite at one point abandoning acting altogether in search of a “more meaningful” life, died early on Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91. Laurie died of old age, her manager, Marion Rosenberg, said via e-mail, adding that she was “a superb talent and a wonderful human being.” Laurie arrived in Hollywood in 1949 as Rosetta Jacobs and was quickly given a contract with Universal-International, a new name that she hated and a string of starring roles with Ronald Reagan, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis, among others. She went on to receive Academy Award nominations for three distinct films: The 1961 poolroom drama The Hustler, the 1976 film version of Stephen King’s horror classic Carrie and the 1986 romantic drama Children of a Lesser God.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
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