NIGERIA
Triple bombing kills 30
Thirty people were killed late on Sunday in a triple suicide bombing attributed to Boko Haram militants in the town of Konduga, Usman Kachalla, head of operations at the State Emergency Management Agency, said yesterday. Three bombers detonated their explosives outside a hall in Konduga where soccer fans were watching a match on television. “We have over 40 people injured,” Kachalla said, updating an earlier casualty toll of 17 people dead and 17 wounded.
INDONESIA
Struggle for wheel kills 12
Twelve people were killed and dozens injured early yesterday after a bus passenger tried to wrest control of the steering wheel from the driver following an argument, police said. The accident happened at about 1am on a toll road in West Java. The bus swerved into oncoming traffic, smashing into two cars and causing a truck to roll. About 43 people were injured, many seriously, including the 29-year-old man who had tried to seize the steering wheel. The bus driver was among the dead.
INDIA
Doctors strike nationwide
Hundreds of thousands of doctors around the country went on strike yesterday, demanding better working conditions and security at hospitals. It was triggered by an attack at a medical college in West Bengal state a week ago that seriously injured three junior doctors after a dispute with a family whose relative had died. Striking doctors protested outside hundreds of hospitals, holding placards and wearing black arm bands and bloodied mock bandages. The Indian Medical Association said almost all of its members had joined the protests.
AUSTRALIA
Oil spill lawsuit opens
A lawsuit filed by Indonesian seaweed farmers seeking more than US$137 million from Thailand’s PTT Exploration and Production to cover damage they say they suffered after the nation’s worst oil spill opened in Sydney yesterday. The class-action suit represents more than 15,000 farmers who claim to have lost their livelihoods in the years after oil gushed into the Timor Sea for more than 74 days following an explosion at the Montara oil rig in August 2009. The trial is expected to last about 10 weeks.
AUSTRALIA
Appeal for missing teen
The father of a teenaged Belgian backpacker missing for more than two weeks yesterday pleaded for help as police called the disappearance baffling. Theo Hayez, 18, vanished after leaving a bar in Byron Bay late on May 31. “This is a question of providing assistance to a person in grave danger,” Lehore Hayez told reporters in Tweed Heads, 66km north of where his son was last seen. “We know that Theo used WhatsApp the night he disappeared,” he added, but without saying why he believed his son to be in danger. Police were notified of the disappearance on June 6 after Hayez failed to check out of his hostel.
ISRAEL
Settlement named for Trump
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday inaugurated a new settlement in the Golan Heights named after US President Donald Trump. Netanyahu unveiled a “Trump Heights” sign, featuring the flags of the two nations, to mark the site. The Cabinet had met earlier under a tent in the north of the Golan to name the planned settlement. “Thank you PM @netanyahu and the State of Israel for this great honor!” Trump tweeted.
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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