Benazir Bhutto

Former Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Zardari Bhutto says the differences between his country and neighboring Iran are "very worrying" for the region's stability. Pakistan used rockets and drones to strike militant Baloch militants inside Iran on Thursday, two days after Tehran sacked the bases of another group within Pakistani territory. The neighbors have had turbulent relations in the past, but the attacks were the first-profile cross-border intrusions in recent years and came against a backdrop of increased tensions.

Prince Andrew is reported to be in talks with American authors to write an exciting tell-all autobiography. After Prince Harry's controversial book Spare, sources close to him have referred to it as Spare 2.0. In the aftermath of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the disgraced Duke is said to have hoped that an autobiography would help him to set the record straight. His last big attempt to do so, the notorious BBC Newsnight interview in 2019, backfired spectacularly, but the Duke would have more power with a book. Andrew is thought to be in talks with US author and interviewer Daphne Barak (bottom right), who has written biographies of Amy Winehouse and former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto, according to the book.

The privileged Melbourne schoolgirls arrested for reportedly shoplifting Victoria's Secret lingerie (left) and Crocs footwear would have undergone a frightening journey and been publicly shamed by Singaporean police (top right). The six teenagers, aged 14 to 16, were seen on CCTV camera stashing expensive lingerie inside Victoria's Secret, Mandarin Gallery last Sunday, before walking without paying. Peter Lloyd, the former ABC journalist who was widely arrested, jailed, and threatened with caning by the rattan in Singapore, has firsthand knowledge of what happens when a person is trapped in a non-authoritarian state. Lloyd, who was then aged 41, received up to 20 years in prison and 15 lashes of the feared rat cane in 2008, when he was first charged with trafficking ice. Lloyd spent ten months in notorious Changi Prison on heroin use, abuse, and drug paraphernalia charges. In a communal cell, sleeping on a straw mat on a concrete floor, he spent ten months. The schoolgirls would have had "the fear of god" embedded in them, according to their narrator, and "a period of predicted public shame would be the start of their days of humiliation." Kampong Suva precinct was made up of young cops, not much older than the teens, but with a firm and tenacious resolve to reduce crime, he said. A criminal guilty of minor offenses, as well as heroin trafficking, vandalism, rioting, or even overstaying a visa can be sentenced in Singapore (bottom right) as punishment.