CHINA
Release of advocate urged
A group of UN human rights experts on Wednesday condemned the detention in China of a rights activist who promoted the Tibetan language and called for charges against him to be dropped. The six experts criticized a regional court ruling last month that upheld charges of “incitement to separatism” against Tashi Wangchuk, who has been held for more than two years. They said the charge can carry a five-year prison sentence. The court case largely centered on comments the activist made in a New York Times article and video documentary in which he called for the Tibetan minority to be taught in their mother tongue.
ISRAEL
Army helped stop attack
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday said that Israeli intelligence services prevented the downing of an “Australian airliner” as part of wide-ranging international intelligence-sharing, but gave no details. His comments followed a statement from the army that a branch of military intelligence known as “Unit 8200” had foiled an “aerial attack abroad by [the] Islamic State [group].” Israeli media said the army statement referred to an attempted bombing in July last year of an Etihad Airways flight due to leave Sydney for Abu Dhabi, which was foiled by Australian security forces before the plane took off. An Australian man had sent his unsuspecting brother to board the flight carrying a homemade bomb disguised as a meat-mincer, Australian police said.
MONTENEGRO
Suspected attack on compound
An unknown person blew themselves up after throwing a suspected grenade into the US embassy compound in Podgorica, the government said yesterday. “In front of the USEmbassyMNE building in Podgorica, Montenegro, an unknown person committed suicide with an explosive device. Immediately before, that person threw an explosive device,” the official government account tweeted, adding that the device was “most probably” a hand grenade.
INDONESIA
Eleven missing in landslide
Eleven people are missing and 14 have been injured following a landslide yesterday that cascaded down the terraced slopes of a rice field on Java, officials said. The missing people, farmers tending their crops in Brebes District were buried under an avalanche of mud and rock at about 8am. “The landslide buried the farmers working in their rice fields,” National Agency for Disaster Management spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said in a statement. The incident followed several days of heavy rain in the mountainous area. Another 14 farmers were injured and have been taken to a nearby medical center for treatment.
CAMBODIA
PM vows to ‘shame’ Australia
Prime Minister Hun Sen has threatened to “shame” Australia and block the release of a joint statement at a regional summit in Sydney next month if he faces pressure over a political crackdown at home. The prime minister has been chastised by Western countries for taking a hammer to the nation’s democracy in recent months by dissolving the main opposition party, shuttering independent news outlets and pursuing critics in the courts. On Wednesday, Hun Sen said he would not tolerate any pressure on domestic politics when he attends an ASEAN summit hosted by Australia next month. “If you treat me inappropriately, I will hit back and leave shame on your face at the scene,” he said.
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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