Heath Ledger's family arrived back in Australia yesterday and started the final leg of the late star's long journey home following his premature death last month in New York.
The actor's father, Kim Ledger, and other relatives touched down in the family's home city of Perth yesterday afternoon. The group, accompanied by security guards and at least one police officer, came off the plane and were ushered immediately into an elevator.
Local media reported that Kim Ledger, the actor's mother Sally Ledger Bell, sister Kate and several other people were driven in cars across the tarmac and out of the airport. There was no immediate indication that the actor's remains were aboard the flight.
Ledger died in his New York City apartment on Jan. 22. He was 28. Authorities suspect a drug overdose, but the cause of his death is still pending the outcome of toxicology tests. Police said several prescription drugs were found in the apartment where the actor's body was found.
Details of funeral arrangements for the late co-star of Brokeback Mountain have not been announced, and the mother of his two-year-old daughter Matilda, actress Michelle Williams, has requested privacy for those in mourning.
The family will reportedly hold a private ceremony for the actor and then either bury his remains or have them cremated and interred in a family plot in Perth, where his two grandparents lie.
As Ledger's hometown prepared for the arrival of his remains, residents of the idyllic and isolated city expressed sadness at his sudden death -- and outrage at rumors that he was a drug user.
"If a person dies, let him go in peace. All this rubbish they bring up about drugs and everything else, I think it's a lot of rubbish," said Margaret Byrne, 58, a catering supervisor at Royal Perth Hospital.
Another Perth resident, Ian Bennett, said he was indifferent about Ledger's death and believed allegations of his drug use.
"It's part of the scene," the food services attendant at Royal Perth Hospital said.
"It's probably the biggest news we've had in Perth in a long time," said Shannon Harvey, film critic at the Sunday Times.
"He's probably the highest-profile star who's ever come out of Perth and probably our greatest success story," Harvey said.
Harvey said Ledger returned to Perth to promote some of his earlier movies, but he tried to keep a low profile when visiting his family.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might