■ AUSTRALIA
Jail-time cut for guilty pleas
Criminals who plead guilty within six weeks of their arrest could get a 40 percent reduction in their prison sentence under a proposal aimed at reducing the backlog at courts in one Australian state. South Australian Attorney-General John Rau said yesterday that late guilty pleas were a major contributor to delays and inefficiencies in the trial process. The 40 percent reduction in term length would apply for someone pleading guilty within six weeks of arrest, while a 30 percent cut would apply for a later plea that still comes before a trial is set. A 20 percent reduction would be given for guilty pleas entered after trial committal proceedings. Rau said the proposal would not apply to the most serious of crimes, including violent assaults and sex crimes.
■CAMBODIA
Norwegian jailed 18 months
A court yesterday jailed a 63-year-old Norwegian man for 18 months on charges of paying for sex with a teenage boy in Siem Reap, the country’s northwestern tourist hub. Sletten Rolf was arrested in January in the province — home to the famed Angkor Wat temples — for soliciting paid sex with a 16-year-old boy last year. The provincial court sentenced Rolf to three years in prison, but ordered half the term to be suspended. Cambodia’s age of consent is 15, but all payment for sex is illegal. Cambodia has struggled to shed its reputation as a haven for pedophiles, putting dozens of foreigners in jail for child sex crimes or deporting them to face trial in their home countries since 2003.
■INDIA
Kashmir under tight curfew
Thousands of Indian police and paramilitary forces enforced a strict curfew in much of Kashmir yesterday after security forces shot dead four protesters, police and witnesses said. Government forces have struggled to contain almost three months of violent demonstrations by Kashmiris ignited by the killing of a 17-year-old student by police on June 11. Four people were killed Monday in the northern village of Palhalan when security forces opened fire on protesters during fresh demonstrations against Indian rule in Kashmir. Residents told visiting reporters that the protests were peaceful and that no one was throwing stones at the time of the shooting.
■THAILAND
Violence continues in south
Five people have been killed and four wounded in Thailand’s restive Muslim south, police said yesterday, the latest upsurge in violence blamed on separatist militants. The attacks, which included drive-by shootings and a roadside bombing, took place late on Monday and early yesterday and targeted both Muslims and the region’s minority Buddhists. The attacks took the death toll to 18 in the past 10 days, with 37 people wounded, according to police data.
■MALAYSIA
Trainee pilot crashes, dies
A female trainee pilot died when the light aircraft she was flying crashed in southern Johor state, Malaysian police said yesterday. The two-seater light aircraft, owned by the KL International Flying Academy, took off on a training flight from Senai International Airport at 8:56am and crashed 20 minutes later at the foot of a mountain. “We have recovered the body of the female trainee pilot from the aircraft while the male instructor, who survived the crash, has been sent to a local hospital,” district police chief Zulkefly Yahya said.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Cockroaches hold key
One of the hardiest insects around, the cockroach, may hold the key to next-generation antibiotics, British scientists hope. The brain and nervous system of the cockroach and the locust hold nine molecules that are toxic to superbugs, which are becoming resistant to mainstream drugs, Nottingham University, central England, said in a press release on Monday. In lab-dish tests, postgrad researcher Simon Lee found the novel compounds killed more than 90 percent of poisonous Escherichia coli and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus germs. Lee, who will be presenting the work at the Society for General Microbiology’s meeting this week, said he was unsurprised that insects could naturally secrete their own antimicrobial drugs. “Insects often live in unsanitary and unhygienic environments where they encounter many different types of bacteria. It is therefore logical that they have developed ways of developing themselves against micro-organism,” Lee said.
■ FRANCE
Thai rape trial begins
A 61-year-old man appeared in a Paris court on Monday charged with raping or sexually assaulting 10 Thai girls aged between six and 11. Jean-Claude Chamoux was arrested after police burst into his hotel room in the Thai resort of Pattaya in 2005 just after he raped an eight-year-old girl to whose mother he had paid 20 euros (US$26), court documents alleged. He was detained, but later released on bail and illegally left the country to return to his home in Paris, where police arrested him in June 2006. The accused has admitted to carrying out some of the acts of which he is accused, but told investigators he had never had the impression he was forcing the girls to comply with his wishes, the charge sheet alleges. A verdict was expected on Friday.
■ IRAN
Tehran scoffs over stoning
Tehran is scoffing at European concern over the case of a woman sentenced to be stoned to death on an adultery conviction. Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said yesterday that Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani faces charges of murder and infidelity and the case shouldn’t be linked to human rights. He says Europeans who believe freedom for murderers serves human rights should release their own murderers from jail.
■ ITALY
Anti-mafia mayor slain
A southern mayor hailed for his commitment to fighting organized crime has been killed in a mafia-style execution. News report and the local prosecutor say Angelo Vassallo was found dead in the village of Acciaroli, his body riddled by bullets. The ANSA news agency said the 57-year-old was shot on Monday in his car near his home.
■ GERMANY
Neo-Nazi group raided
The interior ministry said it had staged nationwide dawn raids yesterday on the country’s largest neo-Nazi group. The raids took place at 6am on members of the HNG group, described by the ministry as being comprised of around 600 “neo-Nazis and violent members of the far-right subculture.” “The HNG is currently the largest neo-Nazi group in Germany,” the ministry said. It is suspected of contacting imprisoned far-right activists and spurring them on to further “battle against the system,” the statement added. “Far-right groups like the HNG do not conform to our Constitution and threaten the cohesion of society,” interior ministry official Klaus-Dieter Fritsche said.
■ BAHAMAS
Extortion charges dropped
A judge on Monday dismissed charges against two alleged extortionists, halting a planned retrial in a US$25 million case that involved the death of US actor John Travolta’s son, court sources said. Supreme Court Senior Justice Jon Isaacs made the ruling following Travolta’s decision not to pursue the matter any further, citing the memories of the ordeal that were too painful to relive. Travolta and his family were vacationing at their oceanfront home at Old Bahama Bay, on Grand Bahama Island in January last year when 16-year-old Jett, the actor’s only son, suffered a seizure and died.
■ UNITED STATES
Police defend quick release
Las Vegas police are defending the quick release of Paris Hilton from jail after her Aug. 27 arrest on suspicion of cocaine possession, saying they wanted to avoid disruptions in the jail’s operations. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on Monday that Hilton was out of the jail in about three hours, roughly half the average time it takes to process people facing the same charge through the Clark County Detention Center. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Deputy Chief Jim Dixon, who runs the jail, acknowledges Hilton was pushed through the booking process in order to get her into a separate room and out of the jail as soon as possible.
■ MEXICO
Storm shelters open
Authorities opened shelters and warned people to watch out for mudslides on Monday as Tropical Storm Hermine approached the northeastern border with Texas, the second major storm to hit the area this season. A hurricane watch was issued for the area from Rio San Fernando, northward to Baffin Bay in Texas. Hermine is expected to hit in the same area where Hurricane Alex roared ashore in June. It killed at least 12 people as remnant rains drenched a wide swath of the northeast for days. Emergency officials urged people living in low-lying coastal areas to move to shelters.
■ SURINAME
President shrugs off past
Former dictator Desi Bouterse shrugged off questions about his past during his first overseas trip as elected president, saying on Monday that he will not interfere in his ongoing murder trial and dismissing a 1999 drug conviction as “almost a joke.” Bouterse traveled to Guyana to discuss the proposed construction of the first bridge over the river that divides the South American neighbors. He fielded questions at a news conference about his past as a two-time coup leader who has been charged in the deaths of 15 prominent citizens in December 1982. As president he is not required to testify, and if convicted he could potentially engineer a pardon and avoid a 20-year sentence.
■ MEXICO
Suspects’ bodies found
The bodies of three men suspected of participating in the massacre of 72 migrants last month were found by the side of a road in the north after an anonymous caller told authorities where to find the cadavers, officials said on Monday. Prosecutors’ spokesman Ricardo Najera said authorities have no information on who made the call, but in the past suspects in especially brutal killings that draw too much attention to drug gangs have been “handed over” to authorities. Federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire said the bodies of the three men — along with two women — were found by Marines last week after an anonymous caller on Aug. 30 tipped authorities off to the presence of the bodies in Tamaulipas state.
‘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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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