Beirut, Dec 21: A "soldier" of the Islamic State group carried out a truck attack that killed 12 people at a Berlin Christmas market, a news agency linked to the jihadists said today.
"A soldier of the Islamic State carried out the Berlin operation in response to appeals to target citizens of coalition countries," the IS-linked Amaq news agency said in a statement posted online.
Sydney, Jul 28: Nearly 3 billion koalas, kangaroos and other native Australian animals were killed or displaced by bushfires in 2019 and 2020, a study by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said on Tuesday, triple the group's earlier estimates.
Some 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds and 51 million frogs were impacted by the country's worst bushfires in decades, the WWF said.
When the fires were still blazing, the WWF estimated the number of affected animals at 1.25 billion. The fires destroyed more than 11 million hectares (37 million acres) across the Australian southeast, equal to about half the area of the United Kingdom.
"This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history," said WWF-Australia Chief Executive Officer Dermot O'Gorman in a statement.
The project leader Lily Van Eeden, from the University of Sydney, said the research was the first continent-wide analysis of animals impacted by the bushfires, and "other nations can build upon this research to improve understanding of bushfire impacts everywhere".
The total number included animals which were displaced because of destroyed habitats and now faced lack of food and shelter or the prospect of moving to habitat that was already occupied.
The main reason for raising the number of animal casualties was that researchers had now assessed the total affected area, rather than focusing on the most affected states, they said.
After years of drought made the Australian bush unusually dry, the country battled one of its worst bushfire seasons ever from September 2019 to March 2020, resulting in 34 human deaths and nearly 3,000 homes lost.
London, Feb 12: Fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya returned to the courtroom here on Wednesday, the second day of hearing at the UK High Court, where the former billionaire has appealed against the extradition decision of Westminster Magistrates Court in December 2018.
On being asked about his expectations from the lengthy appeals process against the extradition order as today is the last day for Mallya to present his defence, the embattled former Kingfisher Airlines boss replied, "I have no clue. You see. I'll also see it. Let's not get into a speculative game."
When asked on what would happen if Mallya loses the case and has to return to India, the liquor baron responded: "We do have arguments."
The UK High Court, on Tuesday, had also heard Mallya's appeal against the Westminster Magistrates' Court order extraditing him to India to face alleged fraud and money laundering charges amounting to Rs 9,000 crore.
Mallya was present in the court along with his counsel Clare Montgomery during the hearing. Officials from Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) along with counsel Mark Summers representing the Indian government were also present.
When the judge asked if there was a timeline in the case, Clare said," This is a very dense case," involving multiple individuals and organisations and that not everything had been taken into account by the magistrate Emma Arbuthnot in her ruling against Mallya.
Montgomery contended that the magistrate's ruling had been riddled with "multiple errors". She also brought into question the admissibility of documents submitted by the Indian government - including witness statements and emails that proved crucial in the ruling by judge Arbuthnot, who found "clear evidence of misapplication of loan funds" and that there was a prima facie case of fraud against Mallya.
As she had done throughout the trial, Montgomery continued to assert that Mallya had not acted in a fraudulent manner or run a pyramid and that the collapse of Kingfisher Airlines was, in fact, the failure of a business in difficult economic circumstances.
She also reiterated concerns about the conduct of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in bringing charges against Mallya, claiming that the tycoon had been made a scapegoat.
Montgomery also stated that the Indian government had presented the loan taken out by Kingfisher Airlines, not as a simple business loan but was part of a larger and elaborate attempt at defrauding the banks by Mallya and Kingfisher Airlines management.
This, Montgomery contended, was but one example of a wider misinterpretation of the case by judge Arbuthnot.
The High Court justices reprimanded Montgomery for concentrating on the evidence - in essence rehashing the case presented at the lower court - rather than the apparent "mistakes" made by judge Arbuthnot in her ruling.
Mallya remains on bail of £650,000 as he has done throughout this legal process.
The Crown Prosecution Service which is representing the Government of India will present its case for the extradition of Mallya on Wednesday.
The 63-year-old businessman fled India in March 2016 and has been living in the UK since then.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is far from over. New explosive details leaked by a whistleblower shows that the extent of the rot is far deeper than previously thought.
An anonymous Twitter account, @HindsightFiles, has started releasing the documents, apparently on behalf of Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of the now defunct British data analytics and consulting company Cambridge Analytica.
"Democracies around the world are being auctioned to the highest bidder. We release the documents that explain how," reads the biography of the @HindsightFiles.
The document will reveal previously unreleased emails, project plans, case studies, negotiations and more spanning over 60 countries.
"Over the past two years I have given evidence to investigators, journalists and academics to analyse what happened at Cambridge Analytica, and how our data was used to influence democracies around the world. In the name of shedding light on these dark practices, I am releasing documents and emails in full for the public good," Kaiser, who worked with Cambridge Analytica from 2014 to 208, was quoted as saying.
"I do this to strengthen the case for data rights and enforcement of our electoral laws online globally. We should all be seeking more ethical digital future for ourselves and our children," added Kaiser who starred in the Oscar-shortlisted Netflix documentary "The Great Hack".
The details released so far includes links to material on the firm's activities in Malaysia, Kenya, Brazil and Iran, an addition to the John Bolton archive.
Over the next months, more than 100,000 documents relating to work in 68 countries are set to be released, according to a report in The Guardian.
More than one and a half year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal first became public, US regulators last month said that the now-defunct British data analytics and consulting company engaged in deceptive practices to harvest personal information from tens of millions of Facebook users for voter profiling and targeting.
According to Kaiser, the Facebook data scandal was part of a much bigger global operation designed to manipulate people in collaboration with governments, intelligence agencies, commercial companies and political campaigns.
The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm collaborated with a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, said The Guardian report.
"There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics," Kaiser was quoted as saying.
Similar tactics were deployed in other countries that Cambridge Analytica operated in, including Britain, she claimed.
The files released by Kaiser suggest that Cambridge Analytica offered to help United Malays National Organisation (Umno), the party of Malaysia's Former Prime Minister Najib Razak, to influence the voting of 40 parliamentary constituencies in the 14th General Election (GE14) in 2013.
Umno, according to the leaks, requested the company to prepare a proposal to regain 13 seats, The South China Morning Post reported on Saturday.
In 2018, Razak claimed that he had never engaged Cambridge Analytica in any way.
Comments
Very hard to believe. However, this is highly regretted and condemned in strong words. If some one did it, he might be a fool or mentally disturbed.
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