SINGAPORE
Airbnb hosts plead guilty
Two men yesterday pleaded guilty to using platforms, including Airbnb, to rent out condominium units for less than six months. Terence Tan En Wei and Yao Songliang pleaded guilty at the State Court to four charges of illegally renting out four condominium units last year. They face fines of up to S$200,000 (US$151,746) per charge. Court documents show that they used platforms such as Craigslist, HomeAway and Airbnb to rent out the units. Offering short stays in private homes is illegal in Singapore, where most residents live in subsidized public housing. The minimum rental period had been six months, but has since been reduced to three months.
NEW ZEALAND
Nats pick Simon Bridges
The conservative National Party yesterday chose their first Maori leader as they regrouped after an election loss. Party members selected 41-year-old Simon Bridges from among five candidates. He is a former lawyer and prosecutor who was first elected to parliament 10 years ago. He held several ministerial portfolios in the previous government, including energy, labor and transport. The party also chose a Maori deputy leader after Paula Bennett fended off one challenger to retain her position. “I’m really excited about the opportunity I’ve got ahead,” Bridges said. “I hope Maori are proud of me.”
JAPAN
Man held over mutilation
A US tourist has been arrested after a local woman he met through a dating app went missing earlier this month, her body believed to have been dismembered and scattered across several locations, media reported. Police arrested the 26-year-old last week on suspicion of confining the woman, who had been reported missing since Feb. 16, media said. They later found what appeared to be the woman’s head inside a suitcase at an apartment the man had booked in Osaka, media said. A Hyogo Prefecture police official confirmed the location and times the torso, legs and arms were found, but provided no further details.
CHINA
Prominent figures blast plan
In a rare public expression of dissent, a well-known political commentator and a prominent businesswoman have penned open letters urging lawmakers to reject a plan that would allow President Xi Jinping (習近平) to rule indefinitely. In a Monday statement on WeChat to Beijing’s members of China’s rubber-stamp parliament, Li Datong (李大同), a former editor of China Youth Daily, wrote that lifting term limits would “sow the seeds of chaos.” “If there are no term limits on a country’s highest leader, then we are returning to an imperial regime,” Li told reporters yesterday. Businesswoman Wang Ying (王瑛) wrote on WeChat that the party’s proposal was “an outright betrayal” and “against the tides.”
GREECE
Economy head steps down
Minister of Economy and Development Dimitri Papadimitriou quit early yesterday, the prime minister’s office said, hours after his wife, Rania Antonopoulos, was ousted as a junior minister over a housing stipend controversy. A reshuffle is to be announced tomorrow, reports say. Despite being personally wealthy, Antonopoulos had reportedly requested a 1,000 euro (US$1,234) monthly housing stipend available to government members without permanent homes in Athens. Antonopoulos on Monday said she had received 23,000 euros over two years, and was technically within her rights to do so.
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
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
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
RSS