29 arrested over Malaysia `birthday orgy`

Colombo: Hundreds of lawyers in Sri Lanka today took to street, demanding resignation of Chief Justice Mohan Peiris, who was appointed by former president Mahinda Rajapaksa after the impeachment of the country's first woman top judge allegedly out of personal vendetta.


Peiris, a confidante of Rajapaksa, was inducted in office in January 2013 after the impeachment and sacking of his predecessor Shirani Bandaranayake on corruption charges despite protests by rights groups, citizens, clergy and lawyers.

Bandaranayake's removal was pronounced unlawful by courts and also condemned by international community. It was cited even in the UN Human Rights Council resolutions adopted against the Rajapaksa administration.
She had denied all the charges against her and alleged that she had been sacked by Rajapaksa "through improper procedure due to personal vendetta".

Several lawyers had vehemently protested against the sacking of Bandaranayake and vowed not to cooperate with Peiris.

"We want him to go with dignity," Upul Jayasuriya, the Chairman of the lawyers' body, Bar Association of Sri Lanka said today.

"We will give him time until tomorrow to resign, if he did not we shall be back here protesting tomorrow," Sunil Watagala, a lawyer said.
In the run up to the January 8 presidential election, the joint opposition had pledged to restore Bandaranayake in her position as the 43rd Chief Justice.


Kuala Lumpur : Police in mainly Muslim Malaysia arrested 29 people including two auxiliary police officers in a raid on an birthday party which they said Monday had turned into a drug-fuelled orgy.

Officers were called to a hotel in the town of Klang near the capital Kuala Lumpur early Sunday after a complaint about noise in one of the rooms.

Ten women and 19 men were arrested while drugs including heroin, ecstasy and ketamine were impounded, police said.

"We suspect it to be a sex orgy cum birthday party," said North Klang police chief Mohamad Shukor Sulong.

A police officer involved in the investigation told AFP on condition of anonymity that all 29 were ethnic Malays, who belong to the multi-cultural country`s Muslim majority, and ranged in age from 20 to 35.

"They brought girls, drugs and beer to celebrate the birthday party," the officer said.

Premarital sex and lewd behaviour are deeply frowned upon in Malaysia, which has traditionally practised a relatively moderate brand of Islam yet remains conservative on sexual issues.

Muslims who are merely caught alone in a secluded place with a member of the opposite sex who is not a relation can face up to two years` jail and a fine.

Muslims make up more than half the country`s nearly 30 million people.

Three die in Nigeria suicide bombings

At least three people have been killed and dozens more injured in twin suicide bomb attacks in Nigeria.

Eyewitnesses say two female militants detonated their explosives in a crowded marketplace in Yobe state.

It comes after a bomb strapped to a girl killed at least 19 people on Saturday - and amid reports that up to 2,000 people were killed by Boko Haram in a series of "massacres" over the past week.

UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has condemned the recent attacks.

Africa’s most populous country is due to hold elections next month even though Boko Haram extremists hold large swathes of territory in the north-east.

Mr Ban’s office said in a statement that he was appalled by reports that hundreds of civilians were slaughtered in an assault around Baga town in Borno state, near Nigeria’s border with Chad. Some reports put the death toll as high as 2,000.

Mr Ban’s office also cited reports that extremists used a 10-year-old girl as a suicide bomber to kill 19 people at a market in Maiduguri, also in Borno state, on Saturday.

Source: http://www.breakingnews.ie/

Paris shooting suspect's wife 'arrived in Syria from Turkey'

The common-law wife of one of the perpetrators of last week’s terrorist rampage in France crossed into Syria from Turkey on January 8, Turkey’s foreign minister said today.

Mevlut Cavusoglu told the state-run Anadolu news agency that Hayat Boumedienne arrived in Turkey from Madrid on January 2, ahead of the attacks, and stayed at a hotel in Istanbul.

He said Turkish authorities established that she had crossed into Syria on Thursday, the day her husband shot a policewoman dead on the outskirts of Paris and a day after the massacre at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Meanshile, French security forces are mobilising in their search for what the prime minister called a “probable” accomplice to three days of bloodshed and terror around the capital.

Manuel Valls said the search is urgent because “the threat is still present” after the attacks that left 17 people dead – journalists at Charlie Hebdo, hostages at a kosher supermarket and three police officers. All three attackers died in nearly simultaneous raids by security forces on Friday.

Video emerged yesterday of one of the assailants explaining how the attacks would unfold and police want to find the person who filmed and posted the video.

Mr Valls told BFM television today that France is at war against “terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam”.

Source: http://www.breakingnews.ie/

Sentencing for Australian in Java delayed

AN Indonesian court has delayed sentencing an Australian man over a package of drugs police found in his home, because of his illness.

ANDREW Roger, 52, has been in Indonesian custody for eight months after marijuana, crystal meth and various pills were seized in the raid in Surabaya, East Java.

Prosecutors argued the former Darwin resident should serve 16 years from a maximum 20 years, because of the quantity and variety of drugs involved.

Roger's lawyers argued he needed rehabilitation for proven marijuana dependance that had spanned 35 years of his life.

He was due to be sentenced on Monday but Roger told the court he felt so unwell, he couldn't focus on the proceedings.

He said medications he needed were out of stock at the prison where he's remanded.
The sentencing was delayed to Wednesday.

In court last week, the waste management contractor pleaded to be spared from prison.
He said a 16-year term amounted to a life sentence because of his age and poor health.
When Roger was arrested, he was being treated for injuries from a motorbike crash that almost claimed his leg.

He has told the court he also suffers anxiety, panic and insomnia if he doesn't smoke pot.
A father of adult children and grandfather, Roger said his months in jail had been hell.
"The mental effect and terror of this has been incredible," he said.

Source: http://www.news.com.au/

Taxi strike has widened to Nanjing

High franchise fees, competition from private cars top grievance list
Taxi drivers in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, joined a strike that has swept the country since Thursday afternoon demanding a reduction of the monthly franchise fees paid to taxi companies, which eat up a large share of their revenues.
On Thursday, hundreds of taxis were parked near Nanjing's two railway stations, the long-distance bus station and the airport. Many taxis on the road refused to carry passengers.
On Friday, the city's transportation system was affected at peak times, with many striking taxi drivers suggesting through ride-hailing Internet apps that their colleagues participate.
Workers at the railway stations and the airport asked passengers to switch to buses or subway trains.
Liu Xingyou, a taxi driver, said that he has to pay 7,000 yuan ($1,130) to his company every month, and he only earns about 12,000 yuan.
"But I also need to pay for the natural gas, which is more than 3,000 yuan a month," the 56-year-old said. "I get up before 6 am every morning and sit for about 14 hours a day, only to get 2,000 yuan a month. That's unbearable."
According to Nanjing's transport department, the city now has about 11,700 taxis. Drivers of some new models of vehicles are required to pay a franchise fee of 9,000 yuan a month. Drivers in Beijing and Guangzhou pay about 4,000 or 5,000 yuan.
Licenses for taxi companies have been largely frozen since the early 1990s. Big taxi companies operating today generally got their licenses earlier. They collect fixed fees from individual taxi drivers across the country.
Some drivers also complained that a city's charging standards, low fuel surcharge allowances, five-hour double-billing during peak hours and the new ride-hailing apps have greatly hurt their incomes.
"We hope that the fuel surcharges can be raised, the double-billing hours extended to 24 hours and the ride-hailing apps that allow private cars to enter the market banned," Liu said.
On Sunday, taxi drivers in Shenyang, Liaoning province, went on strike, demanding that all private cars be prohibited from acting as taxis.
On Thursday, China's Ministry of Transport issued a regulation allowing only licensed taxis to offer services through the apps.
The ministry said that while innovations are welcomed, the ride-hailing apps should be covered by the country's transport regulations and do not provide a platform for private car owners to enter the taxi business.
Some local governments have put forward similar rules.
This week, Beijing and Shanghai decided to fine drivers 30,000 yuan to 100,000 yuan if they use a private car as a taxi. In December, the Shanghai government detained and fined 12 private car drivers
The transportation department in Zibo, Shandong province, banned the use of the Didi Zhuanche service, which enables the use of private cars.
In October, the transportation departments of Shenyang and Nanjing began fining car owners for acting as taxis.
Zhu Pingdou, vice-president of app maker Didi Dache, said the company "felt sorry" that the Zhuanche service had been banned.
"The service has provided a solution to many cities' traffic problem," Zhu said. "Maybe it should not be simply banned; it provides convenience to passengers."

Source: http://m.chinadaily.com.cn

France Gripped By Fear After Paris Terror Attacks

PARIS (AP) — What started as a hunt for two terror suspects grew into something worse — fears of a nest of terrorists that could strike again in the heart of Paris. The suspects in three attacks knew each other, had been linked to previous terrorist activities, and one had fought or trained with al-Qaida in Yemen, which claimed ownership Friday of this week's newspaper massacre.

Investigators are now trying to determine to what extent the attacks were coordinated.

The Kouachi brothers had been the subject of a vast manhunt following the armed attack on the Charlie Hebdo weekly that claimed 12 lives on Wednesday. The brothers died Friday when police attacked the building near Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris where they had barricaded themselves.

An acquaintance of at least one of the Kouachis, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, was identified as the suspected killer of a policewoman in suburban Paris the previous day —and as the man armed with a semi-automatic rifle who opened fire Friday in a kosher market near Paris' Porte de Vincennes and holed up with hostages there.

He threatened to kill his captives if the Kouachis weren't freed. Like the brothers, he was killed when police moved in.

According to French judicial documents obtained by The Associated Press, the connections among the terrorist suspects date back to 2010, when Coulibaly was sentenced to five years in prison for an abortive attempt to free another terrorist from prison. Smain Ait Ali Belkacem was serving a life sentence for a bombing attack on the Paris rapid transit system in 1995.

Cherif Kouachi, 32, the younger of the brothers, was detained in that investigation, but freed later without being tried. A former pizza deliveryman, he appeared in a 2005 French TV documentary on Islamic extremism and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2008 for trying to join up with fighters battling in Iraq.

The French judicial documents said Coulibaly and the younger Kouachi knew each another, and traveled with their wives in 2010 to central France to visit a radical Islamist, Djamel Beghal, who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison on a terrorism-related charge.

Police issued a bulletin Friday asking anyone with information about Coulibaly's wife, 26-year-old Hayat Boumeddiene, to contact them, saying she was potentially "armed and dangerous."

According to the judicial documents, a police search of Coulibaly's residence in 2010 turned up a crossbow, 240 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition, films and photos of him during a trip to Malaysia, and letters seeking false official documents.

In a police interview that same year, Coulibaly identified Cherif Kouachi as a friend he had met in prison and said they saw each other frequently, according to a transcript of the interview obtained by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper and posted on the newspaper's website.

According to the newspaper, he told the police that people he met in prison used the nickname "Dolly" for him. He said he was employed as a temp worker at a Coca-Cola factory.

"I know a lot of criminals because I met heaps of them in detention," he is quoted as telling the police.

Michel Thooris, secretary-general of France's police labor union, told AP he didn't believe these were "three people isolated in their little world."

"This could very well be a little cell," he said. "There are probably more than three people," he added, given that Cherif Kouachi and Coulibaly had had contacts with other jihadist groups in the past.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, speaking in a TV interview late Friday, also indicated authorities are bracing for the possibility of new attacks.

"We are facing a major challenge" and "very determined individuals," Valls said.

Francois Molins, the Paris prosecutor, said authorities increasingly grew to see links between the attackers after they discovered that Boumeddiene and the companion of one of the Kouachi brothers had exchanged about 500 phone calls.

Speaking to reporters late Friday, he said that 16 people had been detained in the investigation. Officials were continuing to look for "possible accomplices, the financing of these criminal actions, the source of these weapons and all the help that (the terror suspects) might have benefited from, in France as well as overseas, in Yemen," Molins said.

The latest U.S. assessments described to the AP show that the brothers led a normal life for long enough in recent years that the French began to view them as less of a threat and reduced the surveillance. They are continuing to investigate whether the brothers' steps away from radical Islam were part of a plan of misdirection, or whether it was real — and that they simply had another change of heart and decided to turn to violence.

On Friday, a French TV news network said it spoke directly to Coulibaly before his death, and he said he and the brothers were coordinating and that he was with the Islamic State extremist group. BFM, the network, said it also talked to the younger Kouachi brother, who claimed to be financed and dispatched by al-Qaida in Yemen, normally a rival organization.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula said Friday it had planned the assault on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper staff — but did not mention the other terrorist acts.

Separately, officials in Yemen and the U.S. said Said Kouachi, 34, the older of the brothers, had trained with al-Qaida in Yemen. Yemeni authorities suspect he fought with the Islamic extremist group at the height of its offensive in the country's south, a Yemini security official said Friday.

Another senior security official said Said Kouachi was in Yemen until 2012. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of an ongoing investigation into the older Kouachi brother's stay.

A U.S. law enforcement official said Friday that investigators believe Said Kouachi traveled to Yemen to receive weapons training from al-Qaida. The official, who was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation by name, said the brothers had raised enough concern to be placed on the U.S. no-fly list because one had traveled to Yemen and the other had been convicted of terrorism charges.

Though the brothers claimed affiliation to al-Qaida, the U.S. official said, investigators were still trying to determine whether al-Qaida had ordered the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices or if the brothers had done it on their own.

The official said investigators have been searching for any contacts that the brothers maintained with individuals in the United States, but had not yet found any.

French authorities knew Kouachi traveled to Yemen, but it's not clear whether they knew what he did there, U.S. officials believe. Still, French authorities placed both Kouachi brothers under close surveillance when he returned.

Source: http://m.huffpost.com