UNITED KINGDOM
Deaf slave finally gets paid
A deaf and mute girl smuggled to the UK and kept as a slave for almost a decade must be paid £100,000 (US$160,000) by her captors, a court ruled on Wednesday. Trafficked from Pakistan as a 10-year-old girl, the victim was repeatedly raped by Ilyas Ashar, 85, who along with his wife Tallat, 69, forced her to work as their servant. She was discovered in the cellar of their five-bedroom house sleeping on a cot bed by investigators looking into allegations of money laundering. Now in her 20s, she learned a form of sign language to testify at the trial last year. “The money will in no way make up for what she went through over a number of years, but it will help her move on with her life and continue her inspiring recovery from these awful events,” Salford Chief Superintendent Mary Doyle said. “I believe today’s outcome also gives hope to any victim of trafficking. It reminds us that there are people out there willing to bring people to this country purely to be exploited, but with the correct use of the law, the perpetrators can be brought fully to justice.” The court calculated the Ashars should pay the victim £101,300 — what she would have been paid if she had earned the minimum wage working for the couple for 12 hours a day, every day since 2003, except for 10 days off. The two must also pay back benefits to the state that they wrongfully claimed for the girl. The victim could not read or write, but was taught to write her name by the Ashars so that they could claim social benefits on her behalf. Ilyas Ashar was earlier jailed for 15 years for rape, trafficking and benefit fraud, while his wife Tallat was jailed for five years for trafficking and benefit fraud.
AUSTRALIA
Naval base locked down
A naval base in Victoria State went into lockdown and a police bomb squad was sent to the scene to investigate unspecified “hazardous material,” security officials said yesterday. An exclusion zone of 400m was declared around a residential apartment at HMAS Cerberus, a naval training base on the Mornington Peninsula, 75km southeast of Melbourne, Victoria police said. The incident occurred after a routine inspection at the base found the material in the apartment, the Australian Defence Force said in a statement. The material was not explosive and did not pose a threat to the 2,600 people living at the base, local media reported, quoting senior police officials. Australia, part of the US-led coalition strikes against Islamic State, remains on high alert for attacks by home-grown militants returning from or motivated by fighting in the Middle East. Security has been tightened at public places. Media reported that a 30-year-old able seaman was being held by police in relation to the base lockdown.
BRAZIL
Police clamp down on porn
Police have launched an operation aimed at identifying people who store and share child pornography, issuing almost 100 arrest warrants and taking 45 people into custody, a police official said on Wednesday. The federal police officer said the one-year investigation has found evidence that the images were also shared by people in Portugal, Italy, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela. The officer said the suspects could be charged with production, storage and distribution of pornographic images of children and teenagers, and face as much as six years in prison. He said to identify the suspects police tracked the so-called Deep Web, a virtual world that is not visible to most Web users or search engines. That evidence collected is to be shared with police in the other countries.
UNITED STATES
Builder faces lot problem
A Florida builder is trying to figure out what to do after constructing a million-dollar, ocean-view home in Florida on the wrong lot, authorities said. The mistake occurred after two state-certified surveyors on the job separately marked the wrong property, said Carl Laundrie, spokesman for Flagler County on the Atlantic Coast north of Daytona Beach. The 492m2 house, which was completed in March, includes five bedrooms, five-and-a-half bathrooms, a theater, game room and swimming pool, according to gotoby.com, a local real-estate news Web site. Mark and Brenda Voss of Linn, Missouri, who had the home built, did not return calls for comment, nor did the owners of the lot. The Vosses own the lot next door to the one on which the house was built.
UNITED STATES
Money row prompts murder
A teenager has told investigators he killed his parents and his 17-year-old sister in their southern Oklahoma home in a dispute over money and in hopes he would get the family inheritance, authorities said on Wednesday. Alan Hruby, 19, who was charged on Wednesday with three counts of first-degree murder, believed he would be the sole beneficiary of the inheritance if he was the only family member left alive, Duncan District Attorney Jason Hicks said. Hicks said the death penalty would be considered for Hruby. Hruby is accused of fatally shooting his father, John Hruby, 50, his mother, Tinker Hruby, 48, and sister, Katherine, 17, at their home in Duncan, Oklahoma, Hicks said.
UNITED STATES
Mother charged over gun
The mother of a 17-year-old Los Angeles boy was charged on Wednesday with allowing him to take a loaded handgun to school. Leah Wilcken, 41, faces four misdemeanor counts, each carrying a potential penalty of a year in jail and a US$1,000 fine, the city attorney’s office said. Prosecutors said that in May, the woman’s 17-year-old son brought a loaded .45 caliber semi-automatic handgun and a spare magazine containing seven bullets to Will Rogers High School. “He was in a dispute with another student and had made a posting on social media” calling on the student to meet him in the school parking lot, city attorney spokesman Frank Mateljan said. A student who had seen the gun earlier in the day notified the principal, and school police found the gun and ammunition in the boy’s backpack in the parking lot, Mateljan said. “The officers believed that the gun may have come from home,” but when they called his mother, she refused to cooperate, he said. The next day, Los Angeles police went to the home and found four other handguns and a shotgun, authorities said.
UNITED STATES
Remorse thwarts robbery
A suspected robber with a guilty conscience walked out of a Washington State bank with stolen cash on Tuesday, then waited outside the building for police to arrest him, police said. The 64-year-old man walked into a Banner Bank branch in Bellingham early on Tuesday and handed a teller a note demanding cash, the Bellingham Police Department said. The teller complied, and the man, identified as Richard Gorton, took the money and left. However, he lingered near the bank building where he was discovered by officers. “He admitted to officers that he had committed this crime and indicated that he became remorseful right after he walked out of the bank,” police said, adding that Gorton told officers he had decided to wait for police instead of making a run with the cash.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of