AUSTRALIA
Shark kills man near Broome
A man has died after being bitten by a shark at Cable Beach near Broome, authorities said yesterday. Western Australia police were called to Cable Beach in the morning after reports of the attack. The man was pulled from the water and given medical treatment, but later succumbed to his injuries. Shark attacks are rare on the 22km stretch of sand, but authorities are generally forced to close the beach once or twice a year when saltwater crocodiles are spotted nearby.
AUSTRALIA
Military told to ‘own’ report
The nation’s top military official yesterday said that the country’s defense force must “own” a recent report on soldiers committing crimes in Afghanistan and pledged changes to ensure that atrocities do not happen again. Defense Force Chief General Angus Campbell said that he would ensure the report was dealt with thoroughly, and take responsibility for duty and performance as the commander in the Middle East in 2011. The report, published on Thursday after an inquiry into the conduct of special forces personnel in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016, found that senior commandos forced junior soldiers to kill captives to “blood” them for combat.
FINLAND
Ferry passengers stranded
A passenger ferry on Saturday ran aground next to islands between Sweden and Finland, leaving nearly 430 people stranded overnight, the owner and coast guard said. The Viking Line’s Grace, sailing between Turku and Stockholm, hit rocks around 2:10pm shortly before a stopover in Mariehamn, in the Aland archipelago, the coast guard said. “There is no water leak and no immediate threat” to passengers, the coast guard wrote on Twitter. The ferry was carrying 331 passengers and 98 crew, a Viking Line spokeswoman said. “The ship’s situation is stable. On Sunday we will tell the passengers which ship they can take to return to Sweden and Finland,” she said.
UNITED STATES
Man charged for child porn
A 46-year-old Florida high-school teacher, soccer coach and church youth leader has been charged with 408 counts of child pornography possession. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd on Saturday told a news conference that Shawn Fitzgerald possessed hundreds of pornographic images on his cellphone. A tip from the National Center on Missing and Exploited Children led investigators to Fitzgerald, Judd said. It did not appear that Fitzgerald had harmed any children himself, Judd said. The images depict children as young as 10 months old being sexually abused by adults and engaging in acts with other children, the sheriff said.
VATICAN CITY
Pope appeals to youth
Pope Francis on Saturday urged young economists, entrepreneurs and business leaders to promote post-COVID-19 pandemic development models that involve the poor in a video message to a forum of young people in Assisi, Italy. The poor should be invited to participate in discussions about creating a “different economic narrative,” he said. Young people should help change production systems and consumption patterns to make them more sustainable, Francis said, adding that “we are not condemned to economic models whose immediate interest is limited to profit and promoting favorable public policies, unconcerned with their human, social and environmental cost.”
‘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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