NORTH KOREA
Denuclearization refused
The country yesterday vowed to tighten its hold on its “priceless” nuclear deterrent, confounding reports that it might be willing to resume multilateral talks on denuclearization. A front-page editorial in the ruling-party daily Rodong Sinmun said a strong nuclear deterrent was the only guarantee of a “final victory” against the forces of imperialism. “We will tighten our grip on this priceless nuclear treasure sword and carry out battles against imperialists with greater vigor,” it said. The editorial appeared days after Chinese state media said leader Kim Jong-un had informed Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that Pyongyang would consider resuming six-party denuclearization talks. Yesterday’s Rodong Sinmun editorial was the latest in a series of commentaries published in recent days that reaffirmed the North’s commitment to pursuing its nuclear weapons program.
CHINA
Baby in toilet was accident
The fall of a newborn baby into a toilet pipe was accidental and his mother will not be prosecuted, local officials said yesterday, adding that the boy is healthy. The mother, 22 and unmarried, had kept her pregnancy secret and gave birth unexpectedly when she went to the lavatory on Saturday. The newborn fell into the squat toilet and became stuck in the pipe, police in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, said. Firefighters and doctors spent nearly an hour taking a section of the 10cm diameter pipe apart before they could recover the boy. “Our investigations showed it was an accident,” a police officer who declined to be named said.
THAILAND
Army bullet kills journalist
A court has found that an Italian photographer killed while covering the military’s crackdown on anti-government protesters in Bangkok in 2010 was shot by a high-velocity bullet like those issued to soldiers. A Bangkok South Criminal Court judge said yesterday that the inquest into the death of 48-year-old Fabio Polenghi also showed the fatal shot came from the direction of troops mobilized to quash the demonstration. It stopped short of outright blaming the military. Polenghi was shot as he tried to take pictures of the army’s assault on the Red Shirt encampment.
SINGAPORE
News sites need licenses
The government says a new policy will require online news Web sites to be licensed, a move that is being criticized as a form of censorship in a country where the media is already strictly controlled. The city-state’s Media Development Authority (MDA) said on Tuesday that the policy, which takes effect on Saturday, will require Web sites that report regularly on local news and have at least 50,000 visitors a month to obtain annual licenses. They also will be required to remove content found to be in breach of MDA standards within 24 hours of notification.
PAKISTAN
US drone kills four: officials
Intelligence officials say a pair of suspected US missiles fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle has killed four alleged foreign militants near the Afghan border. They say a US drone fired the missiles yesterday into a house in Miran Shah, the main town of the tribal region of North Waziristan. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. The tribal region is home to a variety of local and Afghan militant outfits, including al-Qaeda-linked fighters.
UNITED STATES
Man allegedly freezes baby
Bail was set at US$1 million on Tuesday for a 25-year-old Washington man accused of putting his six-week-old daughter in a minus-12ºC freezer for about an hour to stop her crying. Doctors believe the baby will survive, but it was too soon to know the potential complications, Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist said. The child’s core temperature fell to 29ºC in the freezer, prosecutors said. She also had a broken arm and leg, and a head injury, medical staff determined. Tyler Deutsch pleaded not guilty to charges of child assault, criminal mistreatment and interfering with the reporting of domestic violence. According to court papers, Deutsch gave Pierce County police officers several accounts, but finally said he put the child in the freezer on Saturday afternoon “because he was tired and she was crying.” Deutsch said he fell asleep, awoke as the baby’s 22-year-old mother returned to their trailer in Roy, Washington, and was removing the baby from the freezer as the mother came in, according to the prosecutor’s account. He is accused of taking a phone away when the mother tried to call for help.
FRANCE
Stabbing suspect arrested
Police investigating the stabbing of a soldier in Paris arrested a suspect yesterday that sources described as an adherent of “radical Islam.” “The suspected perpetrator of the attack on a soldier [on] Saturday evening in La Defense was arrested this morning,” Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in a statement. The statement said the suspect was arrested in Yvelines, just to the west of Paris. Sources close to the investigation said the 22-year-old man has been a follower of “traditionalist, even radical Islam for the last three or four years.” The sources urged caution in a case that is still in its early stages, saying the suspect was not known to be a jihadist. The attack in a busy underground shopping and transport hub echoed the grisly killing of another soldier in London, but authorities have not yet established a link between the two cases.
FRANCE
Most-wanted man captured
Police said yesterday that they had captured the country’s most-wanted man in a hotel outside Paris six weeks after he dynamited his way out of a prison in a dramatic jailbreak. Redoine Faid, a famed 41-year-old career thief who had been serving time for past robberies and risked a heavy new sentence over the 2010 death of a policewoman, was arrested overnight at a hotel in Pontault-Combault, about 20km east of Paris. Police said he was arrested with an accomplice and that weapons were seized at the scene. Officials had warned that Faid, who grew up in tough immigrant suburbs outside Paris, was considered armed and “especially dangerous.” Faid had been in prison since mid-2011 for breaking the terms of his parole over past convictions for bank robberies and brazen heists of cash-in-transit vehicles.
RUSSIA
Crew arrive at space station
A Soyuz capsule carrying an American, Russian and Italian yesterday successfully docked with the International Space Station, where the new crew will spend six months conducting a variety of experiments. The docking took place less than six hours after the Russian spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The capsule carrying NASA’s Karen Nyberg, Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and Italy’s Luca Parmitano orbited the Earth four times before docking with the space station. “It was a pretty cool ride,” Nyberg said upon arrival.
UNITED STATES
Man allegedly freezes baby
Bail was set at US$1 million on Tuesday for a 25-year-old Washington man accused of putting his six-week-old daughter in a minus-12oC freezer for about an hour to stop her crying. Doctors believe the baby will survive, but it was too soon to know the potential complications, Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist said. The child’s core temperature fell to 29oC in the freezer, prosecutors said. She also had a broken arm and leg, and a head injury, medical staff determined. Tyler Deutsch pleaded not guilty to charges of child assault, criminal mistreatment and interfering with the reporting of domestic violence. According to court papers, Deutsch gave Pierce County police officers several accounts, but finally said he put the child in the freezer on Saturday afternoon “because he was tired and she was crying.” Deutsch said he fell asleep, awoke as the baby’s 22-year-old mother returned to their trailer in Roy, Washington, and was removing the baby from the freezer as the mother came in, according to the prosecutor’s account. He is accused of taking a phone away when the mother tried to call for help.
FRANCE
Stabbing suspect arrested
Police investigating the stabbing of a soldier in Paris arrested a suspect yesterday that sources described as an adherent of “radical Islam.” “The suspected perpetrator of the attack on a soldier [on] Saturday evening in La Defense was arrested this morning,” Interior Minister Manuel Valls said in a statement. The statement said the suspect was arrested in Yvelines, just to the west of Paris. Sources close to the investigation said the 22-year-old man has been a follower of “traditionalist, even radical Islam for the last three or four years.” The sources urged caution in a case that is still in its early stages, saying the suspect was not known to be a jihadist. The attack in a busy underground shopping and transport hub echoed the grisly killing of another soldier in London, but authorities have not yet established a link between the two cases.
FRANCE
Most-wanted man captured
Police said yesterday that they had captured the country’s most-wanted man in a hotel outside Paris six weeks after he dynamited his way out of a prison in a dramatic jailbreak. Redoine Faid, a famed 41-year-old career thief who had been serving time for past robberies and risked a heavy new sentence over the 2010 death of a policewoman, was arrested overnight at a hotel in Pontault-Combault, about 20km east of Paris. Police said he was arrested with an accomplice and that weapons were seized at the scene. Officials had warned that Faid, who grew up in tough immigrant suburbs outside Paris, was considered armed and “especially dangerous.” Faid had been in prison since mid-2011 for breaking the terms of his parole over past convictions for bank robberies and brazen heists of cash-in-transit vehicles.
RUSSIA
Crew arrive at space station
A Soyuz capsule carrying an American, Russian and Italian yesterday successfully docked with the International Space Station, where the new crew will spend six months conducting a variety of experiments. The docking took place less than six hours after the Russian spacecraft lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The capsule carrying NASA’s Karen Nyberg, Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and Italy’s Luca Parmitano orbited the Earth four times before docking with the space station. “It was a pretty cool ride,” Nyberg said upon arrival.
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
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
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
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