UNITED STATES
Chinese jailed for espionage
A Chinese businessman was on Wednesday sentenced to about four years in prison for conspiring to export sensitive military information to China after accessing the computer systems of US defense contractors, including Boeing. Su Bin (蘇斌) was sentenced to 46 months in prison in a federal court in Los Angeles. He had faced 30 years in prison before reaching a plea agreement with prosecutors in March. His attorneys were requesting two-and-a-half years. The 51-year-old Bin admitted to conspiring with two unnamed hackers in China to export US military information between 2008 and 2014, according to Bin’s plea agreement. The men targeted fighter jets such as the F-22 and the F-35, as well as Boeing’s C-17 military cargo aircraft program, according to court records.
UNITED STATES
Beijing suspected in hacking
The Chinese government is believed to have infiltrated computers belonging to a US banking regulator, which employees then tried to cover up, a congressional report released on Wednesday said. The computer system at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), which guarantees US banking deposits, was “hacked by a foreign government, likely the Chinese” the document said. According to the report, which was released by the Republican-led Science, Space and Technology Committee, the agency then tried to hide the attacks. According to the committee, the first hacking was detected in 2010, and the problem reared its head again in 2011 and 2013. “In all, 12 workstations were compromised and 10 FDIC servers were penetrated and infected by a virus created by a hacker,” the committee said.
AUSTRIA
IS recruiters jailed
A Muslim preacher at the center of an extremist propaganda network was on Wednesday sentenced to 20 years in jail for recruiting young fighters to the Islamic State (IS) group. The 34-year-old “brainwashed” dozens of people aged between 14 and 30, according to the public prosecutor, and recruited a number of them to fight for the organization in Syria. A court in the southern city of Graz found the preacher, who goes by the name of Ebu Tejma, guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization and of inciting terrorist attacks following a trial that has been running since February.
KUWAIT
Maids guaranteed wages
The government has set a minimum wage for its hundreds of thousands of mostly Asian domestic staff, the first country in the Gulf to do so, local media reported yesterday. A decree issued by Interior Minister Sheikh Mohammad Khaled Al Sabah set the minimum wage at 60 dinars (US$200) a month and also granted domestic staff a raft of other rights, al-Anbaa newspaper reported. Kuwait is the first country in the Gulf to regulate the work conditions of domestic staff and Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have urged others to follow suit to tackle widespread abuses.
UNITED STATES
Lobster Day to be observed
The senate said Sept. 25 should once again be designated as National Lobster Day in honor of New England’s most celebrated crustacean. New England senators made the request last month, citing the lobster’s cultural and economic importance to the region. The senate passed this year’s resolution on Tuesday. The same day was named in the lobster’s honor last year.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of