SINGAPORE
Two dozen charged over riot
Prosecutors will charge 24 Indian workers for taking part in the city-state’s first riot in more than 40 years, police said yesterday. The men face jail terms of up to 10 years plus caning for the hour-long fracas on Sunday night, triggered when an Indian construction worker was struck and killed by a private bus in a district known as Little India. The 55-year-old bus driver who killed Sakthivel Kumaravelu, 33, has been released on bail after being arrested on charges of causing death by a negligent act.
AFGHANISTAN
Woman saved from stoning
Police in a remote northern village rescued a woman from being stoned to death after she was condemned by the Taliban for allegedly cheating on her husband, officials said yesterday. The militants handed down the death penalty after the woman’s husband, a Taliban follower, accused her of having an affair. A Kunduz police spokesman said the rescue operation was launched after the woman’s relatives notified the police.
UNITED KINGDOM
Latin dictionary finished
A monumental dictionary of medieval British Latin has been completed after a century of research and drafting, in a project that spanned the careers of three editors and a small army of contributors. The 17th, and final, part of The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources is published this week, drawing on more than 1,400 sources from the 6th to the 16th century. Medieval British Latin was particularly distinctive because it was affected by the diversity of native spoken languages, including English, French, Irish, Norse and Welsh. “It’s a difficult question to know how many people are going to use it. Fewer and fewer people know any Latin, but this means that more people will need a dictionary to know how to read it,” said Richard Ashdowne, current editor of the dictionary, who took over in 2011 from David Howlett when he retired after 31 years on the project.
TURKEY
Police probe art thefts
Police are investigating the theft of paintings and artifacts worth about US$30 million, media reported on Monday. They are hunting for about 40 paintings stolen from the State Museum of Art and Sculpture in Ankara after recovering another 30 major artworks in a raid in Istanbul last week. Radikal newspaper said that according to a 2010 inventory at the museum, more than 300 pieces had been stolen, including several dozen that had been replaced by fakes.
UNITED STATES
Roaches can handle winter
A species of cockroach native to Asia that has been seen crawling around the High Line, an elevated, outdoor park in lower Manhattan, can survive the city’s often brutal winters, according to a new study. Researchers at Rutgers University have identified the pest as Periplaneta japonica, which is native to Japan. How the bugs got to New York was unclear, but researchers speculated they were in the soil of one of the plants in the park. Researchers said the new roach cannot breed a hybrid super-roach by mating with the more common local variety due to mismatching genitalia.
UNITED STATES
Ex-mayor sentenced
Former San Diego mayor Bob Filner was sentenced on Monday to three months of home confinement and three years of probation for harassing women. He pleaded guilty in October to one felony and two misdemeanors.
‘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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