MALAYSIA
Police arrest 15 linked to IS
Authorities have arrested 15 people, mostly foreigners from Indonesia, on suspicion of having links with the Islamic State (IS) group, police said yesterday. The suspects were arrested in several raids across the country between July and this month, police counterterrorism head Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay said in a statement. The first case involved a 25-year-old Indonesian palm plantation worker in Sabah state, who police believe had acted as a facilitator for a family of five that carried out a suicide attack on a church in Jolo, in the southern Philippines, in December last year. Ayob said that the suspect had also allegedly channeled funds to the Maute group, which seized control of the lakeside town of Marawi in the Philippines for five months in 2017, a conflict that killed more than 1,100 people.
SINGAPORE
Facebook tightens ad rules
Social media giant Facebook yesterday said that it had implemented new rules for political advertisements in the city-state ahead of an election expected within months. The new rules require those who want to run ads about social issues, elections or politics to confirm their identity and location, and disclose who is responsible for the advertisement. Facebook also requires “Paid for by” disclaimers in advertisements, which are to be stored in a searchable online library for seven years. Under pressure from authorities worldwide, Facebook last year started introducing several similar initiatives in various countries, including the US and India, to increase oversight of political ads.
UNITED STATES
Man returns from China jail
As the word dropped from Wendell Brown’s lips, the former college football player and Detroit, Michigan, native appeared to try to relish its taste for just a moment more: “Freedom.” After three years in a Chinese prison for allegedly assaulting a man during a bar fight, Brown on Wednesday returned home to the hugs and smiling faces of his loved ones. Outside of his family’s house on Detroit’s east side, he took a few moments to reflect on regaining his freedom. “We don’t really understand that word to its fullest extent until [we’re] without it,” Brown said. Brown was teaching English and coaching football in southwestern China when he was arrested in September 2016 and charged with intentional assault. He denied hitting the man and said that he was defending himself after being attacked. Witnesses said that Brown was being harassed by other patrons. Brown was the only person prosecuted. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but a court later reduced it to three years.
UNITED STATES
Cop takes plea in toilet case
A former Honolulu police officer on Wednesday pleaded guilty to failing to report that another officer forced a homeless man to lick a public urinal. Reginald Ramones is one of two officers arrested and charged with depriving the man of his civil rights. As part of a plea agreement, Ramones pleaded guilty to a lesser charge that he knew a fellow officer committed a civil rights breach and did not inform authorities. Police spokeswoman Michelle Yu said that Ramones left the department last month. The second officer charged in the case, John Rabago, remains on restricted duty. He has pleaded not guilty. The plea agreement said that Rabago told the man he could avoid arrest by licking the urinal. The man reluctantly did. Ramones said that Rabago convinced him not to report it.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
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
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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