Gary Glitter, a British rock singer who spent three years in a Vietnamese jail for child sex abuse offenses, returned to Britain yesterday after failing to find sanctuary in Asia.
Glitter, famous in the 1970s and 1980s with songs such as Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again and I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am), was surrounded by photographers as he arrived at Heathrow Airport following a Thai Airlines flight from Bangkok.
The 64-year-old Glitter, whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd, was met by police officers and was due to appear in a London court yesterday. His name will reportedly be placed on a sex offenders’ registry, which already lists about 30,000 names.
Glitter, 64, was released from jail in Vietnam on Tuesday after serving almost all his three-year sentence for “obscene acts with children” — offenses involving girls aged 10 and 11. He was then flown to Bangkok for a connecting flight to London, but failed to board the flight saying he had ear and heart problems.
He wandered Bangkok airport for nearly 24 hours despite being declared persona non grata in Thailand. He then flew to Hong Kong but was rejected by authorities there. After returning to Bangkok, he was put on the flight to London.
British media have speculated the singer tried to avoid returning for fear of the negative reception he would receive. Since his release, Glitter’s every move has been tracked by British tabloid photographers.
Despite his once-huge fame in Britain, where he had more than 25 hit singles, Glitter fell completely from favor after he was convicted in Britain in 1999 of downloading thousands of images of child pornography onto his personal computer. Glitter served half of a four-month jail term.
‘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
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS