UNITED KINGDOM
Teen goes on crime spree
A 14-year-old boy has been charged with carrying out seven robberies in a single hour using a moped in north London this week, police have said. The teenager was due yesterday to appear at Highbury Corner magistrates’ court, having been arrested by officers responding to calls about a series of crimes in the Hornsey, Crouch End and Muswell Hill areas. Officers said they detained the pillion passenger of a moped about five minutes after the final alleged incident and found 13 mobile phones in his possession. Nine of the devices had been identified and returned to their owners by Friday evening, police said. The rider of the moped made off, Scotland Yard said.
SLOVAKIA
Murdered expat remembered
Thousands of Slovaks on Friday rallied in the capital, Bratislava, to pay tribute to a murdered Filipino expat, beaten to death by man believed to be a neo-Nazi. Henry Acorda, a 36-year-old Filipino, was assaulted in the heart of the capital on May 26 by 28-year-old Juraj H, whose surname has been withheld pending trial. Five days later Acorda died in hospital. Organizers told the local Dennik N daily that about 3,000 protesters, mostly in their 20s, turned out for the memorial rally that began with a violinist playing a mournful tune. Some carried banners reading, “Justice for Henry” and “Nazi brain burn in hell.” Others laid flowers and lit candles at an improvised memorial where the attack occurred.
VATICAN
Pope given ISS flight suit
Astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday gave Pope Francis his own blue jumpsuit, but to distinguish him from ordinary planetary pilgrims such as themselves they added a white cape. “Since clothes make the man, we thought we’d have a flight suit like ours made for you,” Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli told the pope at a meeting in the city-state also attended by four other ISS veterans — three Americans and one Russian.
UNITED STATES
Woman likely killed by gator
A woman who disappeared while walking her dogs near a Florida lake on Friday was bitten and likely killed by an alligator that was later captured, wildlife officials said. A necropsy confirmed that the gator bit Shizuka Matsuki, 47, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said in a statement. Officials believe Matsuki was killed and were searching for her body, it said. They were able to positively identify the woman from evidence collected from the necropsy of the alligator, commission spokesman Rob Klepper said, but he would not specifically say what the evidence was.
GREECE
Illegal artifact hoard found
A brush fire in a central region has helped authorities discover a hoard of illegally excavated antiquities. The Ministry of Culture and Sports on Friday said that firefighters trying to extinguish the blaze found about 200 artifacts, some up to 2,800 years old, in plastic bags hidden under bushes. The discovery was made on Thursday in the countryside between the villages of Livanates and Megaplatanos, about 150km northwest of Athens. Most of the pottery and metal objects were unharmed by the fire, while some bore traces of smoke, a ministry statement said. Authorities are trying to establish who excavated and hid the artifacts, some of which had been cleaned and undergone basic repairs on the spot. Under the law, all ancient artifacts found in the country are state property.
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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