■INDONESIA
Workers demand security
Thousands of people took to the streets of Jakarta yesterday amid a heavy police presence as they demanded better social security for workers. “The social security system in Indonesia is still weak,” Indonesian Workers Association head Saepul Tavip told reporters. “The system here only covers about 25 percent of the workers. The social security has to cover all workers and even small people,” he said. Indonesian Metal Workers Federation member Didik Suryanto, 31, called for May Day to be made a holiday. “We contribute a lot to the country’s economy and industry. The government should declare May 1 as a public holiday to honor us better,” Suryanto said.
■UNITED STATES
Obama and Bono chat
President Barack Obama and U2 front man Bono met in the Oval Office on Friday to discuss the US administration’s development work in Africa. The White House says the social activist singer joined with Obama, along with members of his national security staff, to talk about ways to ensure the country’s foreign aid is effective. They also discussed opportunities for using innovation and technology to drive economic growth in Africa.
■UNITED STATES
Palin hacker convicted
A man who hacked into the e-mail account of then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was convicted on Friday on charges of illegally accessing her e-mail and obstruction of justice. David Kernell, 22, was convicted on the two charges by a Tennessee jury, which acquitted him of a third charge of wire fraud. Palin’s email was hacked in Sept. 2008 as she campaigned alongside Republican presidential candidate John McCain. A number of her emails and two family photos taken from her account were posted online. Kernell faces a maximum of one year in prison and a US$100,000 fine for unauthorized access of Palin’s e-mail, and 20 years in prison and a US$250,000 fine for the obstruction of justice charge, the Justice Department said.
■AUSTRALIA
Disrespectful video pulled
The creators of a comedy video showing a black sportsman as a spear-holding tribesman who talks in clicks have apologised and pulled it from YouTube. DreamTeam Talk, a Web site for Australian Rules football fans, posted a statement saying it had not meant to show disrespect to dreadlocked West Coast Eagles rookie Nic Naitanui, 19. “DT TALK would like to publicly apologise for any inadvertent disrespect shown towards Nic Naitanui and the West Coast Eagles,” the statement said. “We are huge fans of Naitanui [we all have him in our dream teams] and it was never our intention for Naitanui to be seen in a negative light.”
■UNITED STATES
Salinger ‘sequel’ in balance
A lawsuit blocking publication of a purported “sequel” to J.D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye will be reconsidered in federal court, but Salinger’s trustees are likely to prevail, an appeals court ruled on Friday. The unauthorized spinoff, 60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye, was barred from publication in the US after Salinger — who died in January at age 91 — last year, sued its Swedish author Fredrik Colting, who writes under the name J.D. California. Colting’s book is already available in other countries including Britain, where it is labeled on its cover as a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
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