Foreign News
Westfield Bondi mall attack: Sydney knife suspect identified by police
A knife-wielding man who killed six people in a Sydney shopping centre before being shot dead has been identified by Australian police.
Joel Cauchi, 40, sent the crowded Westfield Bondi Junction complex into panic on Saturday when he began stabbing people with a long blade.
Five women and a man died. Several others, including a baby, were injured. Authorities said the attack was most likely “related to the mental health” of Mr Cauchi.
Asked whether she believes he was targeting women, New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb told reporters on Sunday it would be “an obvious line of inquiry”. But she added she would not describe the stabbings as an “act of terror”, reiterating that police believed there was “no ideological motivation”.
Mr Cauchi, from neighbouring state Queensland, was previously known to police. Initial searches of a small storage unit he owned in Sydney had not shed light on a possible motive, the commissioner said. Authorities said they were still trying to notify families of the victims, noting two appeared to have no relatives in Australia.
But the family of Ashlee Good – the injured baby’s mother – say she was among those killed. Witnesses have told local media that Ms Good desperately passed the infant to bystanders in the moments after she was wounded.
“The mum got stabbed and the mum came over with the baby and threw it at me and (I) was holding the baby,” one man told Nine News.
The nine-month-old girl “had surgery overnight and is currently in a critical condition and is in ICU,” Health Minister Ryan Park told ABC news.
“Now, we certainly are hoping that she gets through this but there is a long way to go.”
Ms Good’s family said they were “reeling from the terrible loss of Ashlee, a beautiful mother, daughter, sister, partner, friend, all-round outstanding human and so much more”.
“We appreciate the well-wishes and thoughts of members of the Australian public who have expressed an outpouring of love for Ashlee and our baby girl,” the family said in a statement on Sunday.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said Australians were “waking up to try to deal with the shock and trauma” of what had happened.
Describing the attack as “unspeakable and really just beyond comprehension”, Mr Albanese again praised the actions of a lone senior policewoman who confronted Mr Cauchi and shot him dead as horror gripped the mall.
“The wonderful inspector who ran into danger by herself and removed the threat that was there to others, without thinking about the risks to herself,” the prime minister said, thanking her and emergency teams.
Police identified her on Sunday as Inspector Amy Scott, adding she had no current plans to speak publicly about the incident.
Authorities said nine people had been taken to hospital after the stabbings, and another three people had sought medical attention overnight. About 40 paramedics were initially involved in the response.
The shopping centre in Sydney’s affluent east remained closed on Sunday and forensic investigators pored over the scene. Outside, tributes of flowers began to pile up.
Many world leaders have expressed shock. New Zealand leader Christopher Luxon said all New Zealanders were thinking of those affected, while UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said they were “in the thoughts and prayers of the British people”.
Pope Francis said he was deeply saddened by the “senseless tragedy” and offered prayers. King Charles added he and Queen Camilla were “utterly shocked” and “our hearts go out to the families and loved ones”.
(BBC)
Vampire horror film Sinners has broken the record for the most Oscar nominations received by a single film, after being nominated for 16 of Hollywood’s most coveted honours.
The film beat the previous record of 14 nominations, and emerged ahead of its nearest rival this year, Leonardo DiCaprio’s thriller One Battle After Another, which is up for 13 awards.
Sinners’ contenders include its star Michael B Jordan and his British co-stars Wunmi Mosaku and Delroy Lindo.
Other big names up for trophies include Timothée Chalamet, who is hoping for third time lucky after two previous nominations, and Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who is the frontrunner to win best actress for Hamnet.
However, there was no space for her co-star Paul Mescal, who starred opposite Buckley as William Shakespeare in Hamnet; while Wicked: For Good and its stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande missed out completely.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Hollywood on 15 March.
The leading films:
- Sinners – 16
- One Battle After Another – 13
- Marty Supreme – 9
- Frankenstein – 9
- Sentimental Value – 9
- Hamnet – 8
[BBC]
Two people have died and several are feared buried after landslides in New Zealand’s North Island.
The deaths were reported at Welcome Bay, while rescue workers are still searching through rubble at a different site in a popular campground on Mount Maunganui.
There are no “signs of life”, authorities said, adding that they have a “rough idea” of how many people are missing but are waiting for an exact figure. They provided no other details except that the group includes “at least one young girl”.
The landslides were triggered by heavy rains over the last few days, which led to flooding and power outages across the North Island. One minister said the east coast resembled “a war zone”.
New Zealand is “heavy with grief” after the “profound tragedy” caused by recent weather, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said on X.
Footage from the campsite on Mount Maunganui, an extinct volcano, shows a huge slip near the base of the volcanic dome, as rescuers and sniffer dogs comb through crushed caravans and flattened tents.
Authorities said that the search would continue through the night. “This is a complex and high-risk environment, and our teams are working to achieve the best possible outcome while keeping everyone safe,” said Megan Stiffler, the deputy national commander for the Urban Search and Rescue team,
The extinct volcano is a sacred Māori site and one of the most popular campgrounds in New Zealand, with a local holiday website describing it as a “slice of paradise”. But it has been repeatedly hit by landslides in recent years.
“I heard this huge tree crack and all this dirt come off, and then I looked behind me and there’s this huge landslide coming down,” Australian tourist Sonny Worrall told local broadcaster TVNZ.
“I’m still shaking from it now… I turned around and had to jump out of my seat and just run,”he added. He saw it happen while swimming in a hot pool.
Hiker Mark Tangney told the New Zealand Herald he heard people screaming from under the rubble. “So I just parked up and ran to help… We could hear people screaming: ‘Help us, help us, get us out of here’,” he said.
Those calls persisted for about half an hour and then went silent, Tangney said.
A surf club in another part of Mount Maunganui has been evacuated following fears of more landslides.
A state of emergency has been declared in the Bay of Plenty where Mount Maunganui sits, and various parts of the North Island, including Northland, Coromandel, Tairāwhiti and Hauraki.
Several areas reported their wettest days on record on Thursday. Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, for example, received three months worth of rain within a day, according to local media.
Some 8,000 people were without power as of Thursday morning, Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported.
The wife of a man who was swept away in the Mahurangi River is holding out hope that he will survive.
“I know his personality is strong, wise,” she told RNZ, adding that he was a fisherman back home in Kiribati and knew how to swim and dive.
The man, 47, was driving to work with their nephew when the car they were in fell into the river.
He had pushed the nephew towards a branch so the nephew could hoist himself onto land; but the older man did not manage get back up himself, according to the report.
“It’s been a very big event for us as a country, really hitting almost our entire eastern seaboard of the North Island,” said Minister for Emergency Management Mark Mitchell.
“The good news is that everyone responded really quickly, and there was time to get prepared. That helps to mitigate and create a very strong response,” he told RNZ.
December to February are typically the sunnier months in New Zealand but in recent years heavy rains and storms have become more frequent.
In February 2023, parts of the island were devastated by Cyclone Gabrielle, which is to date the costliest cyclone to hit the Southern Hemisphere, with damage amounting to NZ$13.5bn ($7.9bn; £5.9bn).
This week’s flooding has added to the toll for the local communities that are still rebuilding.
[BBC]
Usha Vance, the wife of Vice-President JD Vance, has announced she is pregnant with her fourth child.
In a post on X, the second lady said she is looking forward to welcoming a boy in late July.
“Usha and the baby are doing well,” a statement posted on Tuesday to the second lady’s social media account read.
Vance and his wife, Usha, 40, have three young children: Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel.
Usha Vance (née Chilukuri) was born and raised in the working-class suburbs of San Diego, California, to a mechanical engineer father and a molecular biologist mother who had moved to the US from Andhra Pradesh, India.
She met JD Vance as a student at Yale Law School in 2010, when they joined a discussion group on “social decline in white America”.
Before becoming second lady, Usha Vance had a legal career, including a job as a corporate litigator at firm Munger, Tolles & Olson in San Francisco. She also worked for conservative judges, Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court and appeals court judge Brett Kavanaugh, before he was appointed by Trump to the Supreme Court.
Usha Vance is the first to have a baby as second lady, though other first ladies have had children while their husbands were in office.
First lady Frances Cleveland, wife of President Grover Cleveland, gave birth to daughter Esther in the White House in 1893, followed by a second child, Marion, who was born outside the White House.
JD Vance has been one of the most vocal members of the Trump administration in calling for higher birth rates in the US.
“Let me say very simply: I want more babies in the United States of America,” he said in 2025.
(BBC)
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