RUSSIA
Navies in joint patrol
The Russian and Chinese navies carried out a joint patrol in the northeast of the Pacific Ocean, the Russian military said yesterday. The vessels proceeded with maneuvers to practice anti-submarine tactics, it said. The patrol came after the two nations held joint military drills, as the allies deepen ties that have seen NATO dub Beijing an “enabler” of Moscow’s war in Ukraine. China early last month said that the two sides would participate in a joint maritime patrol and that China would also participate in Russia’s “Ocean-2024” strategic exercise.
AUSTRALIA
Explicit film shown on flight
Passengers aboard a flight to Tokyo last week got more inflight entertainment than they bargained for when an explicit film featuring sex talk and explicit images was broadcast to every screen. Technical problems meant individual movie selection was not available on a Qantas flight from Sydney to Haneda, Japan, leaving the crew to pick one film to be broadcast to the whole cabin. Their selection of Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn’s racy drama Daddio was a surprise to many, and to the airline, which apologized yesterday. According to one review, the movie features “references to oral sex, masturbation” as well as a “brief, but clear photo of erect penis on phone screen.” “The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight and we sincerely apologise to customers for this experience,” a Qantas spokesperson said. Once the mistake was clear, “all screens were changed to a family-friendly movie for the rest of the flight,” Qantas added.
JAPAN
Cabinet photo manipulated
The government on Monday admitted manipulating an official photograph of the new Cabinet to make its members look less unkempt, after online mockery of their sagging trousers. Images taken by local media showed what appeared to be an untidy patch of white shirt under the morning suits of Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Minister of Defense Gen Nakatani. In the official photograph issued by Ishiba’s office, those blemishes had mysteriously disappeared, but not quickly enough to stop a barrage of mockery of the “untidy Cabinet” on social media. “This is more hideous than a group picture of some kind of a seniors’ club during a trip to a hot spring. It’s utterly embarrassing,” one user wrote. “Minor editing was made,” top government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters.
NETHERLANDS
Curator rescues artwork
A museum has recovered one of its artworks that looks like two empty beer cans after a staff member accidentally threw it in a bin thinking it was trash. The work, entitled All The Good Times We Spent Together by French artist Alexandre Lavet, appears on first glance to be two discarded and dented beer cans. However, a closer look shows they are in fact meticulously hand-painted with acrylics and “required a lot of time and effort to create,” the museum said. However their artistic value was lost on a mechanic, who saw them displayed in an elevator and chucked them in the bin. Froukje Budding, a spokeswoman for the LAM museum in Lisse, said that artworks are often left in unusual places — hence the display in an elevator. Curator Elisah van den Bergh noticed that the cans had vanished. She recovered them from a bin bag just in the nick of time as they were about to be thrown out. She said there were “no hard feelings” toward the mechanic, who had just started at the museum. “He was just doing his job,” she said.
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