INDIA
Floods kill 113 people
Heavy rains have killed at least 113 people in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states over the past three days, officials said yesterday, as flood waters swamped a major city, inundated hospital wards and forced the evacuation of inmates from a jail. An official said that at least 93 people had died in Uttar Pradesh since Friday after its eastern areas were lashed by intense monsoon showers. Rising water levels forced authorities to shift 900 inmates from a prison in eastern Ballia District, police officer Santosh Verma said. In Bihar, the death toll from the latest bout of rain had reached 20 as of yesterday, a state government official said. State capital Patna has been badly hit, with waist-deep flood waters across many streets, and entering homes, shops, and even the wards of a major hospital. The Meteorological Department yesterday said it expected the intensity of rainfall over Bihar to drop and showers over Uttah Pradesh to abate this week.
UNITED KINGDOM
Johnson denies groping
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office has denied allegations he made unwanted sexual advances toward two women 20 years ago. Journalist Charlotte Edwardes wrote in a column for the Sunday Times that Johnson put his hand on her thigh at a dinner party thrown by the magazine he was editing at the time. She said a woman she spoke with after the dinner who was sitting on Johnson’s other side said the same thing happened to her. Johnson’s office issued a brief statement late on Sunday stating: “The allegation is untrue.” Edwardes responded via Twitter: “If the prime minister doesn’t recollect the incident then clearly I have a better memory than he does.”
AUSTRALIA
Car mows down kangaroos
Police are calling for witnesses to come forward after 20 kangaroos were killed by a vehicle in “acts of animal cruelty” in the New South Wales town of Merimbula. Authorities believe one vehicle drove through the suburb of Tura Beach between 10:30pm and 11:30pm on Saturday night, targeting and killing the animals. Twenty kangaroos, including joeys, were killed and three remaining joeys are in veterinary care, said Janine Green, a volunteer with Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education Service, who discovered the kangaroos. Green alleged the culprit drove a white ute with a spotlight to intentionally run over the animals. “They were driving around and around and had a spotlight. So the kangaroos were just startled and standing there,” she said. “They were driving up on the footpaths… It was football final night so a lot of people would have been drinking. So lucky nobody was walking home. Detectives from the south coast police district are investigating.
NEW ZEALAND
Asics shop broadcasts porn
Pornography played on giant television screens at an Asics sports store in Auckland’s Queen Street for hours over the weekend after hackers took over the shop’s computer systems. It only stopped after employees arrived to open the store on Sunday morning. The Japanese company has apologized to anyone who was inadvertently subjected to the material and said it was working with its software and online security suppliers to make sure it did not happen again. Police and Internet body Netsafe has also been alerted to the hacking, the company said. Witnesses said the pornography played from 1am to 10am on Sunday. The store manager told the New Zealand Herald he was “100 percent sure” that his staff members were not responsible for the incident.
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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