UNITED STATES
Guilty plea of trade theft
A former employee of the chemical company Chemours has pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal trade secrets and sell them to Chinese investors. Jerry Jindong Xu (徐晉東), a Canadian citizen, in August last year was arrested in New York and entered the guilty plea on Friday last week. He faces up to 10 years in prison at his sentencing on June 27. Prosecutors say the conspiracy involved the theft of trade secrets related to sodium cyanide, a chemical most often used to mine gold, silver and other precious metals.
NICARAGUA
Alliance calls for total strike
The National Alliance for Justice and Democracy on Tuesday called for a nationwide 24-hour strike to protest “extreme conditions” under President Daniel Ortega, who has yet to decide on reviving talks over the crisis that has left at least 148 dead. The strike is set to begin today at noon “in solidarity with the victims” of the two months of unrest. “This is a national and peaceful civil strike that covers the entire country and all economic activities, except those related to the preservation of life and the coverage of basic services for the population,” said the alliance, a key player in the now-stalled crisis talks. The coalition also demanded an “immediate” decision from Ortega on the prospect of reviving negotiations.
MALAYSIA
Top two judges resign
The nation’s top two judges are resigning, court officials said yesterday, the latest senior public servants to leave their posts since the former government lost power. Chief Justice Raus Sharif and appeals court president Zulkefli Ahmad Makinudin are to step down on July 31, a judiciary statement said. The resignations were approved by the king on Friday last week, as is required by law for such senior legal posts, the statement said.
INDIA
Lesbians’ struggle exposed
The suicide of a lesbian couple who jumped into a river and drowned highlights the hidden struggles of gay women, who are subjected to “corrective rape” cures and family pressure to marry, activists said on Tuesday. The women in Gujarat State left suicide notes on Monday, a police officer told reporters. He refused to confirm whether one woman also threw her toddler into the river, as reported by local media, which quoted the notes as saying: “We are leaving this world to live with each other. The world did not allow us to stay together.” It is more common to hear about lesbians committing suicide than other members of the LGBT community, gay rights campaigner Anjali Gopalan said. “They live a far worse life than gay men, a much tougher life, because there is largely more acceptance of male homosexuality,” she said. Lesbians face a life of double discrimination, first because of their gender and then because of their sexuality, activists say.
AUSTRALIA
Google defamation suit OK’d
The High Court yesterday cleared the way for a rare defamation action against Google, after entertainment promoter Milorad Trkulja claimed that it published material linking him to the criminal underworld. Trkulja was shot in the back at a Melbourne restaurant in a 2004 attack that was never solved. In 2012, Google was ordered to pay A$200,000 (US$151,356 at the current exchange rate) in damages to Trkulja, who claimed he was defamed by material that implied he was a major crime figure and had been the target of a professional hit.
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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