标签： Oceania

On Wednesday, South Korean law enforcement carried out a raid on the national headquarters of Starbucks Korea, the local operator of the global coffee giant confirmed to Agence France-Presse. The action comes in the wake of widespread public outrage over an ill-judged advertising campaign that stands accused of defaming pro-democracy activists killed in the 1980 Gwangju uprising.

The controversy erupted in May this year, when Starbucks Korea launched its ‘Tank Day’ promotion to coincide with the annual anniversary of the historic 1980 pro-democracy movement. The campaign centered on marketing a new line of extra-large tumblers, named to reference the large volume of coffee they could hold, timed to drop on May 18. For South Koreans, this date carries profound national meaning: it marks the day a military dictatorship deployed tanks to Gwangju to crush the popular pro-democracy uprising, a crackdown that left at least 165 civilian protesters dead. Those who lost their lives in the movement are widely revered as national martyrs across South Korea.

Critics quickly condemned the promotion for trivializing one of the most significant and traumatic events in modern South Korean history, and for insulting the memory of the fallen. A complaint was formally filed by a local civic group and family members of the Gwangju victims, who accuse senior leaders of Shinsegae Group — the South Korean conglomerate that holds the license to operate Starbucks Korea — of defamation and insult against the uprising’s victims and their surviving relatives.

“The Seoul police raided the headquarters of Starbucks Korea this morning as part of the ongoing investigation,” a spokesperson for Shinsegae Group told AFP, declining to share additional details on the search operation. Seoul police have only confirmed that the investigation into the company is ongoing, and have also declined to comment further on the specifics of the raid.

The formal complaint names two high-profile executives: Shinsegae Group chairman Chung Yong-jin, and Son Jung-hyun, the former CEO of Starbucks Korea who stepped down from his position in the immediate aftermath of the public furore. Further controversy also emerged when it was revealed that the campaign also used language that echoed phrases used by former authoritarian officials to dismiss claims that they had tortured a student activist to death during the uprising period.

South Korea is Starbucks’ third-largest market globally, trailing only the chain’s founding home the United States and China, making this controversy particularly high-stakes for the brand. Within weeks of the scandal breaking in May, Starbucks Korea issued a formal public apology, and took the extraordinary step of temporarily closing all more than 2,000 of its locations across the country for a one-time staff education event focused on the history of the Gwangju uprising in June.

Shinsegae Group previously conducted its own internal audit of the controversy, which found no evidence that the campaign was intentionally harmful. However, the conglomerate acknowledged that the internal probe faced significant limitations, most notably that the executive in charge of planning the ‘Tank Day’ promotion refused to hand over their mobile phone for investigation.

According to reports from South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency and national public broadcaster KBS, Wednesday’s police raid is aimed at gathering evidence that was not turned over or uncovered during the company’s internal investigation. The fallout from the controversy has already hit Starbucks Korea’s bottom line: Shinsegae confirmed that the chain saw a ‘sharp decline in sales’ in the first weeks after the scandal broke, and data from local platform provider IGAWorks shows that combined credit and debit card payment volume at Starbucks locations fell 17 percent between May and June.

A devastating two-car collision at a well-documented high-risk intersection in an Adelaide coastal suburb has left one young woman dead and a second fighting for survival, with local residents warning this outcome was a preventable tragedy long in the making.

Emergency dispatchers received multiple calls shortly after 10 p.m. on Tuesday, rushing first responders to the junction of Barramundi Drive and Lonsdale Road in Hallett Cove, where a Nissan station wagon carrying three women in their 20s had collided head-on with a Subaru sedan driven by a 27-year-old man. The force of the impact was so severe that one of the vehicles was sliced clean in half, turning the quiet residential intersection into a chaotic crash scene.

Among the three passengers in the Nissan, a 21-year-old Hallett Cove resident was pronounced dead at the scene. A second 20-year-old passenger was airlifted to a nearby major trauma center in critical condition, where medical teams continue to fight to save her life. The 21-year-old driver of the Nissan, a resident of Morphett Vale, sustained only non-life-threatening injuries and was treated on-site by paramedics before being transported to hospital for observation.

The deafening impact of the crash echoed through the surrounding neighborhood, drawing local residents outside to the disaster-strewn street. Seventy-seven-year-old Roger Hand, who was watching television at the time of the collision, described the sudden jolt of the event. “I was watching TV and all of a sudden there was this big bang. It is so sad,” he told local outlet The Advertiser.

Neighbors have long flagged this particular intersection as a persistent danger point for road incidents, with frequent minor crashes leading to repeated calls for infrastructure changes. Local resident Kevin Schwartz explained the root of the intersection’s poor safety record, noting: “There’s a lot of prangs because they try to beat cars doing 80 while going across.”

This latest fatal crash brings the total number of road fatalities on South Australian roads to 73 so far in 2026, a grim statistic that averages out to one road death every three days across the state.

South Australian Police have issued a public appeal for any members of the community who witnessed the collision, or who have dashcam footage captured in the area around the time of the crash that could aid the official investigation, to contact Crime Stoppers immediately on 1800 333 000 or submit information via the organization’s official website.

Next week, a rare celestial event will bring a small, passionate community of globetrotting astronomy enthusiasts to the northern tip of Spain, all chasing the once-in-a-century experience of a total solar eclipse visible over mainland Europe. The event, scheduled for August 12, promises the kind of visceral, life-altering encounter that keeps dedicated “eclipse chasers” plotting their next trip years in advance: when the moon slides fully between Earth and the Sun, the midday sky will drop into an eerie violet twilight, air temperatures will plummet, disoriented wildlife will mistake sudden darkness for night, and distant planets and stars will shine bright against the blotted-out solar disk.

For this tight-knit group of hobbyists and professional scientists alike, no photograph, video, or secondhand account can replicate the raw intensity of standing in the path of totality. “It feels like it’s the end of the world… you’re changed forever if you see one,” explained Elizabeth Warning, a 51-year-old TV researcher and self-described eclipse chaser based in Sydney, Australia. But Warning’s long-planned trip to Spain hangs in the balance: devastating wildfires continue to burn across parts of the eclipse’s visibility corridor, forcing many travelers to reconsider their plans. As someone who has lived through Australia’s recurrent bushfire crises, Warning said her sympathies lie with local communities that have lost homes and loved ones to the blazes. “It’s very sad,” she said.

Total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth every 18 to 24 months on average, so dedicated chasers build their travel itineraries years in advance to catch every possible event. While many past eclipses have required expensive, logistically complex trips to remote locations like Siberia, Chile, or Antarctica, this year’s Spanish event is the first total solar eclipse visible on mainland Europe this century, making it far more accessible for travelers from across the globe.

Ryan Milligan, a solar physicist at Queen’s University Belfast, has chased 12 total eclipses across six continents, from the frozen Faroe Islands to the arid expanses of Siberia. “A total eclipse is not something you see, it’s something you experience,” he told reporters. “The temperature drops, the light and the shadows are all in the wrong place, the colours are muted, there’s a 360 degree sunset, the animals go to sleep — these things you cannot convey to people through a picture or a video or a news article.” For chasers, the brief, intense window of totality — which rarely lasts more than a few minutes — delivers an unmatched adrenaline rush that sparks an addiction to the hobby. “It’s that adrenaline rush of trying to experience all that within a few minutes that pushes us literally to go to the ends of the Earth,” Milligan added. Once the event ends, chasers immediately turn their attention to planning their next encounter.

The hobby is not without its risks, however: cloud cover, the universal bane of eclipse chasers, has ruined many carefully planned trips. Lucie Green, a solar physicist at University College London, traveled all the way to Antarctica in 2021 to watch an eclipse, only for heavy cloud cover to block the entire event. “I’ve got about a two-thirds success rate,” she joked. Luck can change in an instant, though: Warning recalled watching clouds part at the very last second during a 2015 eclipse in the Faroe Islands, giving her a full view of totality that eclipse watchers just hundreds of meters away missed out on — while Milligan, who was in that cloudy group, still laments missing the event after being told he would have seen it if he had stayed at his hotel.

The small size of the eclipse chasing community means members often run into each other unexpectedly across the most remote corners of the globe: Green recalled accidentally bumping into Milligan while driving through the unpopulated northwest Australian outback to watch a 2019 eclipse.

For this year’s event, many casual astronomy fans have also joined the trip to northern Spain. Jenny Winker, a 60-year-old retiree from St. Paul, Minnesota, is traveling with nine family members to see the event. “If you’ve never seen a total eclipse, it is breathtaking,” she said. Like Warning, Winker has been closely monitoring the ongoing Spanish wildfires, having already watched wildfire smoke drift over her home state from blazes in Canada.

Green noted that the eclipse is scheduled to occur just before sunset, so smoke particles from the ongoing wildfires could create a hazier view than many chasers expect. Even with the uncertainty around wildfires and weather, many chasers are already looking ahead to next year’s event: a total solar eclipse crossing Egypt that will be the longest visible totality for observers on Earth until 2114, with six minutes and 22 seconds of full solar coverage in Luxor, near the ancient Valley of the Kings.