Malaysia High Court to Admit DNA Evidence against Anwar's sodomy trial

Setback for Anwar in Malaysia sodomy trial -High Court decides to admit key DNA evidence against opposition leader, reversing earlier ruling.
 Tweet

Anwar Ibrahim maintains there is a political conspiracy against him [AFP]

Anwar Ibrahim, the Malaysian opposition leader, has suffered a setback in his sodomy trial, as a court decided to accept the key DNA evidence that had been earlier rejected as inadmissible.

The country's High Court, on Wednesday, said it would let prosecutors use the evidence in their bid to link Anwar to traces of semen found on his accuser, a 25-year-old former aide.

The surprise reversal of the decision came after an appeal by the prosecution, and after the court had heard new testimony from police.

"It is clear that [Anwar's] arrest was lawful and the detention was for a lawful purpose," judge Zabidin Mohamed Diah told a packed courtroom.

"This court has no choice but to allow these items to be tendered [as evidence]. My earlier ruling in the matter is reversed," he said, but added that the court would not compel Anwar to provide a sample of his DNA.

The court had previously ruled that DNA from a bottle, toothbrush and hand towel in Anwar's detention cell -taken without his consent - was obtained illegally, and was therefore inadmissible.

Vital evidence

The evidence is a vital part of the prosecution's effort to prove that Anwar had sex with Mohamad Saiful Bukhari Azlan, his former aide. A chemist had testified that the DNA on those items matched that of semen discovered on Saiful.

Anwar faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of sodomy, which is considered a crime in the Muslim-majority country.

Yusof Zainal Abiden, the government prosecutor, had asked the High Court to review its earlier decision about the illegality of the DNA evidence.

He urged the court to compel Anwar to provide his DNA as tests would show whether there was a match with the semen found in an internal examination on Saiful, who claims he was coerced into having sex with the politician at a Kuala Lumpur condominium in June 2008.

Anwar has refused to voluntarily provide a DNA sample because he fears authorities will tamper with it.
The opposition politician criticised the court's decision, insisting to reporters that authorities got the three items through "trickery and deception".

'Political conspiracy'

Sankara Nair, Anwar's counsel, said the judge did not take all the facts into consideration.

"We disagree with the decision because the judge says the arrest was legal but it wasn't just the issue of the arrest alone, it was also the violation of lockup rules and many other issues," he told the AFP news agency.
Malaysia High Court to Admit DNA Evidence against Anwar's sodomy trial

Anwar maintains that the charges are part of a political conspiracy to remove him from politics.
He is also struggling with new allegations of sexual misconduct after a sex video depicting a man believed to resemble him was leaked under mysterious circumstances on Monday.

Anwar claims both the sodomy charge and the video were fabricated by the government to crush his political threat.

Authorities deny any conspiracy. And police said they were investigating the video, which has not been publicly circulated.

Source:

Agencies

Newscribe : get free news in real time

Safe nuclear does exists, China is leading the way with thorium

Tweet

A few weeks before the tsunami struck Fukushima’s uranium reactors and shattered public faith in nuclear power, China revealed that it was launching a rival technology to build a safer, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper network of reactors based on thorium.

Thorium could be a much safer option for China which has been unsettled by the nuclear crisis in Japan where fears over radiation levels are rising Photo: AP

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

This passed unnoticed –except by a small of band of thorium enthusiasts – but it may mark the passage of strategic leadership in energy policy from an inert and status-quo West to a rising technological power willing to break the mould.

If China’s dash for thorium power succeeds, it will vastly alter the global energy landscape and may avert a calamitous conflict over resources as Asia’s industrial revolutions clash head-on with the West’s entrenched consumption.

d chosen a “thorium-based molten salt reactor system”. The liquid fuel idea was pioneered by US physicists at Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, but the US has long since dropped the ball. Further evidence of Barack `Obama’s “Sputnik moment”, you could say.

Chinese scientists claim that hazardous waste will be a thousand times less than with uranium. The system is inherently less prone to disaster.

“The reactor has an amazing safety feature,” said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA engineer at Teledyne Brown and a thorium expert.

“If it begins to overheat, a little plug melts and the salts drain into a pan. There is no need for computers, or the sort of electrical pumps that were crippled by the tsunami. The reactor saves itself,” he said.

Thorium reactor can't easily spin out of control

“They operate at atmospheric pressure so you don’t have the sort of hydrogen explosions we’ve seen in Japan. One of these reactors would have come through the tsunami just fine. There would have been no radiation release.”

Thorium is a silvery metal named after the Norse god of thunder. The metal has its own “issues” but no thorium reactor could easily spin out of control in the manner of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or now Fukushima.

Professor Robert Cywinksi from Huddersfield University said thorium must be bombarded with neutrons to drive the fission process.

“There is no chain reaction. Fission dies the moment you switch off the photon beam. There are not enough neutrons for it continue of its own accord,” he said.

Dr Cywinski, who anchors a UK-wide thorium team, said the residual heat left behind in a crisis would be “orders of magnitude less” than in a uranium reactor.

The earth’s crust holds 80 years of uranium at expected usage rates, he said. Thorium is as common as lead. America has buried tons as a by-product of rare earth metals mining. Norway has so much that Oslo is planning a post-oil era where thorium might drive the country’s next great phase of wealth. Even Britain has seams in Wales and in the granite cliffs of Cornwall. Almost all the mineral is usable as fuel, compared to 0.7pc of uranium. There is enough to power civilization for thousands of years.

I write before knowing the outcome of the Fukushima drama, but as yet none of 15,000 deaths are linked to nuclear failure. Indeed, there has never been a verified death from nuclear power in the West in half a century. Perspective is in order.

We cannot avoid the fact that two to three billion extra people now expect – and will obtain – a western lifestyle. China alone plans to produce 100m cars and buses every year by 2020.


The International Atomic Energy Agency said the world currently has 442 nuclear reactors. They generate 372 gigawatts of power, providing 14pc of global electricity. Nuclear output must double over twenty years just to keep pace with the rise of the China and India.

 Strain could shift onto gas, oil and coal

If a string of countries cancel or cut back future reactors, let alone follow Germany’s Angela Merkel in shutting some down, they shift the strain onto gas, oil, and coal. Since the West is also cutting solar subsidies, they can hardly expect the solar industry to plug the gap.

BP’s disaster at Macondo should teach us not to expect too much from oil reserves deep below the oceans, beneath layers of blinding salt. Meanwhile, we rely uneasily on Wahabi repression to crush dissent in the Gulf and keep Arabian crude flowing our way. So where can we turn, unless we revert to coal and give up on the ice caps altogether? That would be courting fate.

US physicists in the late 1940s explored thorium fuel for power. It has a higher neutron yield than uranium, a better fission rating, longer fuel cycles, and does not require the extra cost of isotope separation.

The plans were shelved because thorium does not produce plutonium for bombs. As a happy bonus, it can burn up plutonium and toxic waste from old reactors, reducing radio-toxicity and acting as an eco-cleaner.

Dr Cywinski is developing an accelerator driven sub-critical reactor for thorium, a cutting-edge project worldwide. It needs to £300m of public money for the next phase, and £1.5bn of commercial investment to produce the first working plant. Thereafter, economies of scale kick in fast. The idea is to make pint-size 600MW reactors.

Yet any hope of state support seems to have died with the Coalition budget cuts, and with it hopes that Britain could take a lead in the energy revolution. It is understandable, of course. Funds are scarce. The UK has already put its efforts into the next generation of uranium reactors. Yet critics say vested interests with sunk costs in uranium technology succeeded in chilling enthusiasm.

The same happened a decade ago to a parallel project by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). France’s nuclear industry killed proposals for funding from Brussels, though a French group is now working on thorium in Grenoble.

Norway’s Aker Solution has bought Professor Rubbia’s patent. It had hoped to build the first sub-critical reactor in the UK, but seems to be giving up on Britain and locking up a deal to build it in China instead, where minds and wallets are more open.

So the Chinese will soon lead on this thorium technology as well as molten-salts. Good luck to them. They are doing Mankind a favour. We may get through the century without tearing each other apart over scarce energy and wrecking the planet.

This is my last column for a while. I am withdrawing to the Mayan uplands.

Related Articles

• Japan crisis forces rethink on the nuclear option
  20 Mar 2011
• Obama pushes on with nuclear plan
  16 Mar 2011
• Shale revolution has an audience from Blackpool to Algeria
  14 Mar 2011
• US Fed: 'commodity prices are transitory'
  15 Mar 2011
• Government to slash subsidies for solar power
  18 Mar 2011

Missile hits Gaddafi compound in Tripoli

Building in military centre is destroyed as coalition forces target facilities used by Libyan leader.

Tweet

A three-storey building in a military command centre used by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has been destroyed in an air strike by coalition forces.

The Sunday-night strike was the first reported attack on the Bab al-Azizia, a sprawling compound in Tripoli, the capital, that Gaddafi has used recently as a backdrop for televised addresses and which was bombed by the United States in 1986.

The regime invited journalists to visit the site of the attack early on Monday morning. Spokesman Mussa Ibrahim called it a "barbaric bombing" but said no one had been hurt. He declined to say whether Gaddafi himself was inside the compound.

Despite two separate cease fires declared by the Gaddafi regime, fighting continued throughout Libya on Monday. Loyalist troops were still present in the coastal city of Misurata, east of Tripoli and the site of a major oil refinery, stationing snipers on rooftops and bringing in residents of neighbouring towns to act as human shields, witnesses said. In Zintan, southwest of Tripoli, Gaddafi forces were on the attack for the second-straight day as they attempted to exert more control over towns in the Nafusa Mountain area.

Coalition forces from France, the United Kingdom, United States and other nations began striking the Gaddafi regime's military assets on Saturday as part of an effort to enforce a UN Security Council resolution aimed at protecting Libyan civilians.

That air campaign appeared to open some breathing room for rebels in the east, who pushed out of the opposition stronghold of Benghazi and neared Ajdabiya, 160km to the south, where regime troops and rebel fighters clashed. The situation there was fluid; fighting prevented journalists from entering the town itself, and there were reports that it was still mostly encircled by Gaddafi troops.

Tripoli hit for second day

Other loud explosions rocked Tripoli on Sunday night, as Britain''s ministry of defence said one of its submarines had again fired guided Tomahawk missiles on Libyan air defence systems.

"The principle firing happened around nine o''clock in the evening local time and that''s when we believe there was a strike in the region of Gaddafi''s compound," McNaught said.

"We saw a large plume of smoke coming from an explosion somewhere in that general direction. It is likely there were plenty of useful military targets there if you were a major international force looking to persuade Gaddafi to make peaceful noises."

The blasts came two days after the United Nations Security Council authorised international military action to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya, as well as "all necessary measures" to prevent attacks by Gaddafi forces on civilians.

The uprising against Gaddafi broke out on February 15, and hundreds of civilians have died in the regime''s brutal crackdown.

''Gaddafi not a target''

The US military said the coalition campaign, called Operation Odyssey Dawn in the United States, had succeeded in "severely degrading" Gaddafi''s air defences.

US Navy Vice Admiral William E Gortney stressed in a press briefing on Sunday that the Libyan leader is not a target for the international military assault on the country.

Gortney, the US spokesman for the coalition, added that any of Gaddafi''s ground troops advancing on pro-democracy forces are open targets for US and allied attacks.

"If they are moving on opposition forces ... yes, we will take them under attack," he told reporters.
"There has been no new air activity by the regime and we have detected no radar emissions from any of the air defence sites targeted and there''s been a significant decrease in in the use of all Libyan air surveillance radars."

Gortney said the coalition acting against Gaddafi, which originally grouped the US, Britain, France, Italy and Canada, had broadened to include Belgium and Qatar.

Libyan ceasefire

His comments came shortly after the Libyan military announced its second ceasefire since the UN resolution authorising the no-fly zone was passed.

http://english.aljazeera.net//news/africa/2011/03/2011320202616794816.html Residents of Benghazi celebrated after French jets prevented Gaddafi''s forces from reaching them

But the White House has said it will not recognise a ceasefire declaration.
"Our view at this point...is that it isn''t true, or has been immediately violated," White House National Security

Adviser Tom Donilon told reporters on Sunday.

Despite the strikes, the Libyan leader has vowed to fight on and in a televised address, a defiant Gaddafi promised a "long war" that his forces would win.

"We will fight for every square in our land," Gaddafi said. "We will die as martyrs."

He said the air attacks by foreign forces amounted to a "cold war" on Islam and threatened retribution against Libyans who sided with the foreign intervention.

"We will fight and we will target any traitor who is co-operating with the Americans or with the Christian Crusade," he said.

Conflicting casualty claims

The comments came as Tripoli''s official media said the air strikes were targeting civilian objectives and that there were "civilians casualties as a result of this aggression".

However, Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, denied that any civilians had been killed in the bombardment, which saw some 110 cruise missiles being shot from American naval vessels in the Mediterranean sea.

Gaddafi "was attacking Benghazi and we are there to stop that ... we are ending his ability to attack us from the ground, so he will not continue to execute his own people," Mullen said.

"It was a significant point when the Arab League voted against this guy. This is a colleague [of theirs], and we''ve had a significant number of coalition countries who''ve come together to provide capability."

But Arab League chief Amr Moussa on Sunday condemned what he called the "bombardment of civilians" and called for an emergency meeting of the group of 22 states to discuss Libya.
He requested a report into the bombardment, which he said had "led to the deaths and injuries of many Libyan civilians".

"What is happening in Libya differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone, and what we want is the protection of civilians and not the bombardment of more civilians," Egypt''s state news agency quoted Moussa as saying.

Source:

Al Jazeera and agencies

Newscribe : get free news in real time