A 50-year-old woman was handed seven charges Monday for lacing strawberries with needles in a food scare that has panicked Australia since September, Reuters reports.

Across all six Australian states, nearly 200 complaints were made of sewing needles found in strawberries and other fruits, rocking the $116 million strawberry industry after consumers avoided the fruits at supermarkets. Some growers began dumping the fruits, spawning concern of widespread bankruptcy.

“This has probably been one of the most trying investigations that I’ve been part of,” said Queensland Police Detective Superintendent Jon Wacker, according to Reuters.

The first case was reported in Queensland, Australia’s largest strawberry producer. Not long after, complaints of contaminated containers spread to New South Wales, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory, South Australia and Tasmania.

To quell fear, some farmers installed metal detectors to scan their produce, ABC reports.

The 50-year-old woman is th..

(SHANGHAI) — Online shoppers in China have shattered last year’s record of $24 billion in sales on the country’s annual buying frenzy Sunday, as the tradition marked its 10th year.

The spending binge has for years eclipsed Cyber Monday in the U.S. for online purchases made on a single day. This year’s tally breaks from gloomy forecasts about the world’s second-largest economy, which is struggling with a tariff war with the U.S., a stock market slump and slowing overall growth.

Known as Singles Day, the clamor for deals and discounts was heralded with characteristic fanfare by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has turned an unofficial holiday for people without romantic partners into a yearly windfall for digital retailers.

A massive screen at Alibaba’s gala in Shanghai showed the surging sales numbers in real time: At 2 minutes and 5 seconds after midnight Saturday, 10 billion yuan ($1.43 billion) in purchases had already been made on Alibaba’s platforms. By the 1 hour and 47 ..

Artists created 32 enormous sand portraits on beaches all over the United Kingdom to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the World War I on Sunday.

The portraits, depicting casualties of the war, were created as part of a remembrance project organized by filmmaker Danny Boyle, in partnership with 14-18 NOW, a UK artistic program that commissions artwork to commemorate the centenary of World War I. The project, called Pages of the Sea, worked with arts groups all over the UK to create portraits on the same day, on beaches in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Matthew Horwood—Getty Images for 14-18 NOW Members of the public gather on Swansea Bay Beach, Wales, for filmmaker Danny Boyle’s Pages of the Sea, commissioned by 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of Armistice Day on November 11, 2018 in Swansea, Wales.In a video explaining the project, Boyle said that the portraits were meant to be a “partner” to the more formal ceremonies happening at monumen..

(PARIS) — World leaders with the power to make war but a duty to preserve peace solemnly marked the end of World War I’s slaughter 100 years ago at commemorations Sunday that drove home the message “never again” but also exposed the globe’s new political fault lines.

As Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and dozens of other heads of state and government listened in silence, French President Emmanuel Macron used the occasion, as its host, to sound a powerful and sobering warning about the fragility of peace and the dangers of nationalism and of nations that put themselves first, above the collective good.

“The old demons are rising again, ready to complete their task of chaos and of death,” Macron said.

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” he said. “In saying ‘Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that whi..