UNITED STATES
Monkey denied copyright
An Indonesian monkey that achieved Internet celebrity with a grinning selfie cannot own the photograph’s copyright, a federal judge said this week. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had argued in District Court in San Francisco that the rights to the photograph, which was snapped using a photographer’s unattended camera, rightfully belonged to the monkey, a crested macaque, as it had pushed the shutter button. In a tentative opinion on Wednesday, Judge William Orrick disagreed. “While Congress and the president can extend the protection of law to animals as well as humans, there is no indication that they did so in the copyright act,” he said. The images were taken during a trip by British photographer David Slater in 2011. He put his camera on a tripod amid a troop of macaques, setting it so it would automatically focus and wind, and waited for the animals to get curious. The images were widely shared online, including without permission by Wikipedia. When Slater asked the Web site to remove the image, it refused under much the same rationale as PETA: Slater did not press the shutter release, so the image was not his. The photographer’s lawyers asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that a monkey lacks legal standing. Its motion, at times, struck a mocking tone. “A monkey, an animal-rights organization and a primatologist walk into federal court to sue for infringement of the monkey’s claimed copyright. What seems like the setup for a punch line is really happening,” it said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Royals to visit Bhutan
Kensington Palace says the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will visit Bhutan this spring, the royal couple’s first visit to the landlocked Himalayan kingdom. The palace said on Friday that Prince William and his wife, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, will be making the visit at the request of the Bhutanese government. The royals are also to visit India on the trip. Prince William’s father, Prince Charles, visited Bhutan 1998. Prince Andrew visited in 2010. Meanwhile, Prince Harry is also to visit south-central Asia in the spring, taking on an official visit to Nepal.
CROATIA
Serbian commander charged
Prosecutors on Friday charged a former Serbian paramilitary commander, extradited from Australia last year, with the torture and murder of civilians and prisoners of war during the nation’s 1990s conflict. Dragan Vasiljkovic, nicknamed “Captain Dragan,” was indicted for the detention and torture of civilians and police in the ethnic Serb rebel stronghold of Knin, the prosecutors said. As the commander of a Serb paramilitary unit he did “nothing to prevent and punish such crimes,” which occurred in 1991, and personally took part in them, a prosecutor’s statement said.
SRI LANKA
Giant sapphire to be sold
A gem merchant claiming to have the world’s biggest star-blue sapphire is ready to sell the precious stone, which he says is worth at least US$300 million. The Gemological Institute of Colombo certified the gem as weighing 1404.49 carats. The institute’s chief gemologist Ashan Amarasinghe says that according to available data, the stone could be the world’s biggest blue-star sapphire. The oval-shaped gem is as large as a man’s palm. It was mined from a pit near the central town of Ratnapura, which is known as the nation’s “gem city.” The present owner bought the sapphire in September last year.
MALI
Woman kidnapped again
A Swiss woman who had been briefly abducted in 2012 was kidnapped again by suspected extremists who scaled the walls of her home in northern Mali in the middle of the night, authorities said on Friday. Stockly, a Christian, remained in Timbuktu even after it fell to al-Qaeda-linked extremists in 2012. She was abducted that April and ended up in the hands of extremist group Ansar Dine. She was freed about 10 days later after a mediation effort led by neighboring Burkina Faso, and ultimately returned to Timbuktu.
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
Hotel fire selfie duo let go
Authorities said they have released two young men who were detained over their selfie in front of a New Year’s Eve hotel fire. The Emirates’ state-run WAM news agency reported the news late on Friday, citing Dubai Attorney General Essam al-Humaidan. He said the two unidentified men were released after investigators found “no evidence of criminal intent.” The 63-story Address Downtown luxury hotel caught fire just before a fireworks display at the nearby Burj Khalifa. The hotel burned through the fireworks display and into the new year.
SRI LANKA
Sirisena pardons insurgent
The president has pardoned a former Tamil Tiger insurgent accused of conspiring to kill him 10 years ago. President Maithripala Sirisena on Friday set free Sivaraja Jenivan, which was the first anniversary of Sirisena being elected to office. Attorney U.R. de Silva said Jenivan was arrested in 2005 inside a passenger bus leaving Sirisena’s hometown, Polonnaruwa. He was convicted last year of being an accomplice to a Tamil Tiger rebel who was planning to assassinate Sirisena.
‘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
RSS