THAILAND
Activist to be freed on bail
Lawyers for a student activist detained for campaigning against a military-backed constitution and in the second week of a hunger strike said he was expected to be released on bail last night. The military government prevented opponents from campaigning against the charter before the vote on Aug. 7 and the Election Commission introduced a law criminalizing any such activity. Khon Kaen University student Jatupat Boonpattararaksa was detained on Aug. 6 for handing out “vote no” leaflets. He went on hunger strike after he was detained and faces charges of violating the ban on campaigning.
HONG KONG
Movie poster sparks furor
A poster for upcoming Hollywood movie Arrival mistakenly featuring a Shanghai landmark on the territory’s skyline was yesterday taken down from the film’s official Facebook page after sparking outrage and ridicule.The error sparked a torrent of comments on social media under the hashtags #HongKongisnotChina and #HongKongindependence. Others called for a boycott of the film, due out in November. The poster showed a giant vertical spaceship over Victoria Harbour with the Oriental Pearl Tower, perhaps Shanghai’s best known landmark, prominently featured in the foreground.
AUSTRALIA
Zoo sells primate music
An orangutan living in Adelaide Zoo has created a jazz riff that his keeper hopes will help raise awareness about the plight of the hairy primates. Pij Olijnyk said he was one day showing the 21-year-old Sumatran orangutan named Kluet some photos and videos on his cellphone. Once Kluet had the hang of swiping the screen, Olijnyk introduced him to an app that creates music, saying: “He loved it... He started just riffing away and playing some amazing stuff, and I just thought ‘this is brilliant,’” the keeper said in a video posted on Facebook yesterday. The zoo is selling the 30-second tune, Give me a Klue, and on which Kluet played the drums and piano, to mark world orangutan day, with all funds raised going to help conservation efforts for the animal.
ISRAEL
Army disciplines soldiers
The army on Thursday jailed one soldier and sanctioned two others after they were filmed apparently dropping a stun grenade alongside a group of seated Palestinians. A video posted online on Tuesday showed an army jeep pulling up next to the men, sitting at the roadside in the northern West Bank village of Kafr Laqif. As the jeep pulls away a flash and smoke can be seen in the road and the men scatter, apparently unharmed. A spokesperson told reporters that the sergeant was jailed for 10 days and the other two soldiers were confined to their base for seven days.
UNITED STATES
Call to fire police officers
Chicago’s police superintendent has called for the firing of seven officers for their response to a colleague’s fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in 2014. Superintendent Eddie Johnson’s decision, announced on Thursday by a Police Department spokesman, comes about two years after Officer Jason Van Dyke fired 16 shots at McDonald, a 17-year-old African-American. The dashboard camera video of the shooting that was released, under pressure, in November last year exposed an entrenched “code of silence” among officers who had sworn to a far different account of the shooting from what the video captured. The seven officers recommended for firing had backed up Van Dyke’s account that McDonald had moved menacingly toward him with a knife, but their story was contradicted by the video of the shooting.
UNITED KINGDOM
London launches Night Tube
All-night services were to begin on the London Underground yesterday, after being delayed for months by a dispute with workers. The Night Tube is seen as a boost for revelers, tourists and shift workers, who on Friday and Saturday nights would be able to travel on the network at any chosen hour. The new service is to begin on the Victoria and Central lines, crossing through the center of London and covering neighborhoods including Notting Hill and Brixton.
UNITED KINGDOM
Nurse faces punishment
A nurse who developed Ebola working in Sierra Leone is facing disciplinary action over allegations she lied about her temperature during health checks on her return. The Nursing and Midwifery Council alleges that Pauline Cafferkey “allowed an incorrect temperature to be recorded” at Heathrow Airport on Dec. 29, 2014, and intended to conceal from Public Health England staff that she had a temperature higher than 38?C. The council on Thursday said that a full hearing on the allegations is scheduled for next month. Cafferkey could lose the right to practice.
GERMANY
Minister favors burqa ban
Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maiziere yesterday came out in favor of a partial burqa ban amid a fierce national debate on integration. “We agree that we reject the burqa, we agree that we want to introduce a legal requirement to show one’s face in places where it is necessary for our society’s coexistence — at the wheel, at public offices, at the registry office, in schools and universities, in the civil service, in court,” he said after a meeting with regional counterparts from his conservative party. De Maiziere told public television that the full face veil “does not belong in our cosmopolitan country... We want to show our faces to each other and that is why we agree that we reject this — the question is how we put this into law.”
ITALY
Extremist imam expelled
The government has expelled a second imam within a week as it seeks to prevent extremist preachers from radicalizing others. Minister of the Interior Angelino Alfano on Thursday announced the expulsion of Khairredine Romdhane Ben Chedli. The 35-year-old Tunisian was recently absolved of terrorism-related charges by the nation’s highest court, but Alfano said his support for extremists rendered him unfit to stay, the ANSA news agency reported. The Ministry of the Interior on Saturday last week announced the expulsion of another imam arrested in the same 2013 sweep as Ben Chedli.
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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