UNITED STATES
Ex-spy held as flight risk
A former CIA officer and contract linguist for the FBI accused of selling US secrets to China must remain locked up because he is a “serious flight risk” in a case involving “espionage over many, many years,” a federal judge ruled on Thursday. Alexander Yuk Ching Ma was arrested two weeks ago after an undercover operation in which prosecutors say he accepted thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for his past espionage activities. Ma, 67, faces life in prison or possibly a death sentence if convicted of a rarely used charge involving an intent to hurt the US or aid a foreign power, Assistant US Attorney Ken Sorenson said during a detention hearing.
NORWAY
Polar bear kills man
A polar bear has killed a man on the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic, local officials said yesterday, the sixth fatal attack in almost 50 years in the region. The incident took place overnight in a camping area near the main town of Longyearbyen, 1,300km from the North Pole. The man, who has not been named, was seriously wounded during the attack and died soon after, the local governor’s office said in a statement. Other people at the scene fired shots at the bear, which was later found dead in the parking lot of the local airport.
UNITED STATES
Kenosha shooter charged
Prosecutors on Thursday charged a 17-year-old from Illinois in the fatal shooting of two protesters and the wounding of a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a night of unrest following the weekend police shooting of Jacob Blake. Kyle Rittenhouse faces five felony charges that include first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree reckless homicide, and a misdemeanor charge for possession of a dangerous weapon by a minor. Rittenhouse, a white teen who was armed with a semi-automatic rifle as he walked the streets with other armed civilians amid protests this week, would face a mandatory life sentence if convicted of first-degree intentional homicide.
NORWAY
China warns about prize
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) cautioned against giving a Nobel Peace Prize to Hong Kong protesters as he visited Norway, underscoring the limitations of Beijing’s new diplomatic charm offensive targeted at Europe. “We don’t want to see anyone politicizing the Nobel Peace Prize,” Wang said during a press briefing attended by his Norwegian counterpart, Ine Eriksen Soreide, in response to a question about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations. “China will firmly reject any attempt by anyone to use the Nobel Peace Prize to interfere in China’s internal affairs.”
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
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
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
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