World News

By Andrew Goudsward and Kanishka Singh, Reuters Republican presidential candidate, former US president Donald Trump is whisked away by Secret Service after shots rang out at a campaign rally at Butler Farm Show Inc. on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. Photo: JEFF SWENSEN / AFP / GETTY A US Secret Service probe found communication gaps and a lack of diligence ahead of the July attempted assassination of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania, rally. "There was complacency on the part of" some agents "that led to a breach of security protocols," Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe told reporters on Friday, adding that agency employees will be held accountable. "These penalties will be administered according to our disciplinary process," Ro...

Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met with US President Joe Biden Saturday. (File image) Photo: SAUL LOEB / AFP Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said today that he is confident the AUKUS defence pact will be supported by any future US administration, after a meeting with President Joe Biden that covered bilateral defence cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. Biden is set to hand over the presidency after a 5 November election that will deliver the White House to his vice president, Kamala Harris, or Republican Donald Trump, who has vowed a confrontational approach with China and voiced scepticism about traditional US alliances. The US is Australia's closest security ally. "There is no question in my mind that AUKUS will continue to have the support of any future US admin...

By Larissa Ham, ABC News Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett were found dead at their home in Easey Street, Collingwood on 13 January 1977. Photo: Supplied / Victoria Police A man has been arrested in Italy over the infamous Easey Street murders in inner-city Melbourne almost 50 years ago. A 65-year-old man, who is a dual citizen of Australia and Greece, was nabbed at an airport in Rome on Thursday night, with a charge and warrant placed for his arrest. The arrest follows a decades-long investigation by Victoria Police's Homicide Squad, following the murders of housemates Suzanne Armstrong, 27, and Susan Bartlett, 28, who were found dead at their home in Easey Street, Collingwood on 13 January 1977. Both women, who had last been seen alive on the evening of 10 January that year, had...

By Juveria Tabassum and Nicholas P Brown, Reuters Nike said on Thursday that former senior executive Elliott Hill will rejoin the company to succeed John Donahoe as president and CEO. Photo: AFP Nike said on Thursday that former senior executive Elliott Hill will rejoin the company to succeed John Donahoe as president and CEO, as the sportswear giant shakes up its leadership amid efforts to revive sales and battle rising competition. The company's shares rose 8 percent in after-hours trading. Hill was at Nike for 32 years and held senior leadership positions across Europe and North America where he helped expand the business to more than US$39 billion, the company said. He was previously Nike's president, consumer marketplace, leading all commercial and market operations for the Nike...

By Richard Orton and Wilhelm Furnon* of Photo: 123rf.com Analysis - A new Covid-19 variant is spreading rapidly and could soon become the dominant variant around the globe. The variant, called XEC, was first detected in Germany in August and appears to have a growth advantage over other circulating variants - but it is not a radically different variant. XEC is what's known as a "recombinant variant". Recombinants can occur naturally when a person is simultaneously infected with two different Covid variants. XEC is the product of a recombination (exchanged pieces of genetic material between two variants) between the KS.1.1 variant and the KP.3.3 variant. These two parent variants are closely related, having both evolved from JN.1, which was the dominant variant arou...

By Jared Richards, ABC News After immense, immediate backlash, Katy Perry explained that comeback single Woman's World was a feminist satire. But of what, exactly? Photo: Screenshot / Youtube "Tone-deaf." "Like its author had to have feminism explained to her by the top half of the first page of Google." "Made me feel stupider every sorry time I listened to it." "Stuck in 2016." These are just some of the reviews for Katy Perry's comeback single 'Woman's World', which led to a disastrous rollout of the pop star's sixth album, 143, out on Friday. Perhaps more damning than the reviews was the discourse within the Katy Kats (the pop star's devoted fan group) when a song snippet leaked pre-release. Some were sure it was an AI-generated fake, if not a complete troll ahead of a real comeba...

By Laila Bassam and Maayan Lubell, Reuters Thick smoke rises above the southern suburbs of Beirut after an Israel strike on September 20, 2024. The strike on Hezbollah's stronghold in Lebanon's capital Beirut reportedly killed at least eight people and wounded dozens of others, with a source close to the movement saying a top military leader was dead. Photo: AFP Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander and other senior figures in the Lebanese movement in an airstrike on Beirut on Friday, vowing to press on with a new military campaign until it is able to secure the area around the Lebanese border. The Israeli military and a security source in Lebanon said Ibrahim Aqil had been killed along with other senior members of an elite Hezbollah unit in the airstrike, sharply escalating the ye...

By Michael Sun of the ABC Demi Moore is the beating heart – and sinew, bone and tendon – of The Substance. Photo: Madman Would you take a miracle drug that guaranteed eternal youth? That granted poreless skin and supple limbs? That reversed all the violence of the world and restored the body to its smoothest, its tautest, its lithest? What if it wasn't so eternal after all? What if it came with a raft of unknown - and grotesque - side effects? What if the flesh rotted and bruised, peeled off like mandarin skin? Would you keep taking it? Would you? This is the Faustian bargain that powers The Substance - French director Coralie Fargeat's fantastically nasty, proudly gaudy piece of body horror that instantly cleaved audiences into loud, warring factions at its Cannes premiere earlier t...

By Daniel Trotta and Joseph Ax for Reuters Mark Robinson, Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina and candidate for Governor, delivers remarks during a campaign event for Donald Trump on 14 August. Photo: GRANT BALDWIN / Getty Images via AFP North Carolina's Republican candidate for governor has promised to stay in the race after CNN reported that he once called himself a "black Nazi" and proposed bringing back slavery in comments posted on a pornography website. Mark Robinson, an African American who denied making the comments, is North Carolina's lieutenant governor and running for governor in the 5 November election against Democratic candidate Josh Stein, the state's attorney general. North Carolina's gubernatorial campaign has implications for the presidential contest. The fortune...

Hsu Ching-kuang, head of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, speaks to the media outside the company's office in New Taipei City. Taiwanese company Gold Apollo on September 18 denied a report that it had produced hundreds of explosive-packed pagers used by Hezbollah members which simultaneously exploded, killing at least nine people. Photo: AFP / YAN ZHAO Components used in thousands of pagers that detonated on Tuesday in Lebanon in a deadly blow to Hezbollah were not made in Taiwan, Taiwan's economy minister said on Friday. Taiwan-based Gold Apollo said this week it did not manufacture the devices used in the attack, and that Budapest-based company BAC to which the pagers were traced has a license to use its brand. It was not clear how or when the pagers were weaponised so they could be rem...