NEW ZEALAND
Rescuers seek British hiker
Search operations were yesterday underway for a British backpacker who went missing on South Island after an intense flood. Stephanie Simpson, 32, has not been seen since she went for a hike last weekend at Mount Aspiring National Park. “Search teams remained out in the area overnight,” police said in a statement. Last week, flash floods and incessant torrential rains hit the area, leaving several hundred tourists stranded and forcing many residents to evacuate their homes.
INDONESIA
Officials pan US virus study
The government has criticised a US study questioning why the world’s fourth most-populous nation has not yet recorded a case of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, calling the findings an insult and insisting that it is on high alert. A study by Harvard University public health researchers this week found that Indonesia should have reported a coronavirus outbreak and could have undetected cases given its extensive air links to China. “They can be baffled, but it’s a fact” that there are no cases, Minister of Health Terawan Agus Putranto told reporters on Tuesday. “I am just telling you like it is. We’re not hiding anything.”
AFGHANISTAN
US-Taliban talks ‘progress’
President Ashraf Ghani on Tuesday said he was told by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that “notable progress” has been made in talks between the US and the Taliban on an agreement for a US troop withdrawal from the country. Ghani wrote on Twitter that Pompeo had informed him by telephone that the Taliban had made a proposal “with regards to bringing a significant and enduring reduction in violence.”
SOUTH AFRICA
Mandela release celebrated
President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday marked the 30th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s release from jail with an address from the spot where the anti-apartheid icon made his first speech as an awestruck Ramaphosa held the microphone for him. “The day Mandela was released was a day we all knew that apartheid was dead and finished. It was a moment where the world literally stood still,” Ramaphosa told a thousand people gathered in front of Cape Town city hall. “He stood here to speak and I held the microphone,” said Ramaphosa, speaking in front of a giant statue of Mandela. “Nothing could describe that brief second when that microphone crackled,” he said. “That was the moment everyone was waiting for — Nelson Mandela’s first words.”
UNITED KINGDOM
‘The Splash’ sells for ￡23m
Seminal pop art painting The Splash by David Hockey sold for ￡23.1 million (US$30 million) at a London auction on Tuesday, the third-highest price paid for a work by the British artist. The Splash, which was painted in 1966, depicts the moment just after a diver has broken the surface of a swimming pool, capturing the fantasy Californian lifestyle. The price, bid by an unknown buyer, is nearly eight times that achieved when the work last sold at auction for ￡2.9 million in 2006.
UNITED STATES
Virus evacuees released
Nearly 200 people evacuated from Wuhan, China, over the COVID-19 outbreak were on Tuesday released from quarantine in California with officials urging people not to shun them, or workers who helped them, after both groups faced discrimination. The 195 evacuees, mostly Department of State employees, were flown to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, where they were quarantined for 14 days — the outer limit of the virus’ possible incubation period. None tested positive for the virus, but their arrival stoked unfounded fears in the local community that they or base personnel would spread the disease, Riverside County public health officer Cameron Kaiser told a news conference. “They don’t need additional tests, they don’t need to be shunned, they don’t have novel coronavirus,” Kaiser told reporters after his department published a photograph of the former patients throwing away their masks in a quarantine graduation ceremony.
UNITED STATES
Weinstein defence rests
The defense on Tuesday rested its case in Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial without the disgraced Hollywood mogul taking the witness stand, setting the stage for closing arguments in a landmark #MeToo trial punctuated by graphic testimony from six accusers. As expected, Weinstein chose not to testify, avoiding the risk of having prosecutors grill him on cross-examination about the allegations. He confirmed the decision after returning to the courtroom from meeting with his lawyers behind closed doors for about a half-hour as speculation swirled that he was pushing to testify. Asked as he left court if he was thinking of testifying, Weinstein said: “I wanted to.” Defense lawyer Arthur Aidala said that Weinstein “was ready, willing, able and actually quite anxious to testify and clear his name,” but did not do so because his lawyers felt prosecutors “failed miserably” to prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. Jurors are expected to hear the defense’s closing argument today, followed by the prosecution’s closing tomorrow.
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
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
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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