■ AUSTRALIA
McInnes faces more claims
Up to 16 women could take part in a A$37 million (US$33 million) sexual harassment case involving David Jones, the nation’s most exclusive department store, lawyers for the chief complainant said yesterday. Publicist Kristy Fraser-Kirk is suing the store and its former chief, Mark McInnes, over unwelcome advances that allegedly included placing his hand under her clothes and attempting to kiss her. The 27-year-old’s lawyers told the Federal Court that six more David Jones workers had come forward to support Fraser-Kirk’s claims and were expected to take part in the landmark suit, in addition to four already involved. Rachel Francois, Fraser-Kirk’s lawyer, said three other employees had also made complaints against other David Jones staff, while two former staff of McInnes from another company had also come forward, making a total of 16. McInnes was not in court, but he issued a statement shortly after the hearing rejecting the claims.
■ INDIA
Rebels kill six policemen
Maoist guerrillas killed six policemen in a gunfight in the eastern state of Bihar, police said yesterday, in the latest of a series of rebel attacks on security forces. More than 150 Maoists battled with the police, who were on patrol in forests about 150km from the state capital Patna late on Sunday, senior police officer P.K. Thakur said. Authorities in New Delhi launched an offensive last year to tackle the worsening insurgency, but since then the Maoists have hit back with repeated strikes against police and paramilitary forces. On Sunday five policemen were killed by Maoists in the state of Chhattisgarh.
■ AUSTRALIA
‘Spiderman’ arrested
A French climber known as “Spiderman” was arrested on the roof of a 57-story Sydney skyscraper yesterday after scaling the building without ropes or a harness to raise climate change awareness. Alain Robert, 48, scaled the 150m, twin-tower Lumiere apartment building in central Sydney in about 25 minutes, as dozens of curious onlookers packed the pavement to cheer, clap and take photographs. “I think people were impressed with him, he is the world’s best climber,” publicist Max Markson said. “His motivation for doing it is ... to raise awareness of global warming and the environment.” The Frenchman unfurled a banner advertising the www.onehundredmonths.org Web site, which claims mankind has only limited time before greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere reach irreversibly dangerous levels. Robert was arrested by police when he reached the skyscraper’s roof and taken to a nearby police station, where he was charged with trespass and endangering the safety of another. “He has been granted conditional bail to appear at the Downing Centre Local Court on Friday,” police said.
■CHINA
Tiger habitat to be set up
Beijing and Moscow have agreed to set up the first cross-border protection zone for Siberian tigers, as they try to boost efforts to save the endangered species, the China Daily newspaper reported yesterday. The zone will straddle China’s northeastern province of Jilin and Russia’s Primorsky Krai region, and authorities in both countries will launch an anti-poaching campaign along the border, the report said. They will also adopt identical monitoring systems for Siberian tigers and their prey, conduct joint ecological surveys and step up the amount of information they share, it said.
■ SUDAN
Russian pilots kidnapped
Two Russian pilots operating in the Darfur region have been abducted by unknown gunmen, an army spokesman said yesterday. The pair were seized in Nyala, capital of South Darfur State, on Sunday, spokesman Sawarmi Khaled Saad said. “Two Russian pilots were kidnapped by a small armed group in a section of Nyala,” Saad said. “We have closed off all access routes [around Nyala].” The kidnappings mark the second abduction of foreigners in Darfur this month. On Aug. 14, two Jordanian police advisers deployed with the joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force police were kidnapped by gunmen but released a few days later.
■ RUSSIA
Nursing home fire kills nine
A fire broke out early yesterday at a nursing home, killing nine people. Emergency officials said the blaze may have been started by a resident setting himself on fire. A spokeswoman for the regional Emergencies Ministry, Daria Korovina, said the fire at the facility in Tver injured two others and forced the evacuation of some 480 people. Tver is about 200km north of Moscow. Korovina said investigators found a canister of flammable liquid in the room where the fire started, leading to speculation the resident set himself ablaze. Russia suffers frequent fires at hospitals, schools and other state-run facilities. Many have been blamed on official negligence and violations of fire safety rules.
■ SOMALIA
Forces capture pirates
Japanese, EU and NATO forces cooperated on Sunday to intercept pirates who were preparing to attack ships in the Gulf of Aden, the NATO counter-piracy task force said. A Japanese Maritime Self Defence aircraft spotted a pirate skiff with seven suspected pirates on board and alerted a helicopter from the Danish warship Esbern Snare under NATO command, which intercepted the skiff. “Subsequently the suspected pirates threw their weapons overboard and surrendered,” a NATO statement, released in London, said. An Italian helicopter from another vessel under NATO command provided support for the operation. Crew members from an American warship, the USS Kauffman, also in NATO’s counter-piracy operation, boarded the skiff and found a ladder pirates used to board ships “and other pirate-related paraphernalia,” the statement added. “
■ NORWAY
Al-Qaeda bomb plot foiled
When police arrested a suspected al-Qaeda cell last month they turned up the makings of a bomb lab tucked away in a nondescript Oslo apartment building. Authorities learned early on about the alleged cell by intercepting e-mail from an al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan and — thanks to those early warnings — were able to secretly replace a key bomb-making ingredient with a harmless liquid when one of the suspects ordered it at an Oslo pharmacy. Officials say the suspected plot was one of three planned attacks on the West hatched in the rugged mountains of northwest Pakistan by some of al-Qaeda’s most senior leaders. The other plots targeted the bustling New York subway and a shopping mall in Manchester, England. The ringleader of the plot was 39-year-old Mikael Davud, a Uighur who came to the country in 1999 as part of a UN refugee program and was naturalized eight years later. Davud was arrested on July 8 along with suspected accomplices Shawan Sadek Saeed Bujak Bujak, a 37-year-old Iraqi Kurd, and a 31-year-old Uzbek national, David Jakobsen.
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
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
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS