Police have charged a man with sending offensive text messages inciting violence linked to Syd-ney's recent race riots, detectives said yesterday.
The 33-year-old man -- the first to be charged under federal law for sending messages linked to the unrest via cellphone -- faces a maximum three-year sentence if convicted.
Police said they expect to arrest more people who wrote or forwarded such messages in the coming days.
Police said in a statement that the suspect forwarded two messages to several people calling for them to meet at two south-ern Sydney beaches last Sunday -- a week after thousands of white Australians rioted there, attacking men of Middle Eastern appearance.
The statement did not include the exact wording of the messages, and did not identify the suspect.
The suspect was scheduled to appear in court on Feb. 1.
Police say a blizzard of cellphone text messages was sent in the days before the Dec. 11 riot, urging people to mass at Sydney's Cronulla beach to protest the beating a week earlier of two volunteer life savers. The protest erupted into a race riot and sparked two nights of retaliatory attacks by youths of Middle Eastern appearance, also spurred by text messages.
In the days after the violence, more messages circulated in Sydney and other Australian cities urging violence on Dec. 18.
Police Commander Dennis Bray told Australian Broadcasting Corp radio that detectives and phone companies were trying to trace the texts.
"We've been working in the last week in gathering and anal-yzing information we've obtained from the carriers and this fellow was identified as one fellow that had been sending messages and we've acted," he said.
"There will be more," he said.
David Bernie, vice president of the New South Wales state Council for Civil Liberties, said his group is worried at new police powers to confiscate phones.
"We are concerned about the move towards simply police being able to seize people's phones and check their messages without a warrant or some other basis for doing it," he said.
"Any interception of communications should really be done by a search warrant," Bernie said.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
RSS