Tropical Storm Sandy On Course To Hit Jamaica

In Indonesia, it can take as little as two days between joining a political party and becoming its leader. Of course, it helps to be the popular President’s son. On Saturday, Kaesang Pangarep, a 28-year-old prolific YouTuber and the youngest son of Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, joined the youth-oriented Indonesian Solidarity Party (PSI) that rivals the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P); by Monday, he was named its chairman.

(SEOUL, South Korea) — North Korea said Wednesday that it will expel a U. S. soldier who crossed into the country through the heavily armed border between the Koreas in July. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said that authorities have finished their questioning of Pvt. Travis King. It said that he confessed to illegally entering the North because he harbored “ill feeling against inhuman maltreatment and racial discrimination” within the U.

(DUBAI, United Arab Emirates) — Iran claimed on Wednesday that it successfully launched an imaging satellite into space, a move that could further ratchet up tensions with Western nations that fear its space technology could be used to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s Communication Minister Isa Zarepour said the Noor-3 satellite had been put in an orbit 450 kilometers (280 miles) above the Earth’s surface, the state-run IRNA news agency reported.

(STRASBOURG, France) — Six young people argued that governments across Europe aren’t doing enough to protect people from climate change at the European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday in the latest and largest instance of activists taking governments to court to force climate action. Legal teams for the 32 nations — which includes the 27 EU member countries, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Russia and Turkey — questioned the admissibility of the case as well as the claim that the plaintiffs are victims of climate change harm. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But lawyers representing the young adults and children from Portugal said the nations they’re suing have failed to adequately address human-caused warming and therefore violated some of the group’s fundamental rights. Barrister Sudhanshu Swaroop, a counsel for United Kingdom, said national governments understand the threat of climate change and its challenges and are determined to tackle it through international cooperation. He said the plaintiffs should have gone through national courts first, and stressed that since they are not nationals of the countries they are attacking, other than Portugal, the European Court of Human Rights cannot have jurisdiction. “There was no attempt by the applicants to invoke, let alone exhaust domestic remedies,” agreed Isabelle Niedlispacher, a legal expert for Belgium. Pleading on behalf of the young people, Alison Macdonald told the judges about the urgency to tackle the “biggest crisis that Europe and the world” have perhaps faced, and that they should play a bigger role in helping control planet-warming emissions. “It cannot be within a state’s discretion whether or not to act to prevent catastrophic climate destruction,” she said. Although there have been successful climate cases at national and regional levels — young environmentalists recently won a similar case in Montana — the activists’ legal team said that because national jurisdictions did not go far enough to protect their rights, the group felt compelled to take the matter to the Strasbourg-based court. Arguing that their rights to life, to privacy and family life, and to be free from discrimination are being violated, the plaintiffs hope a favorable ruling will force governments to accelerate their climate efforts. “We’ve put forward evidence to show that it’s within the power of states to do vastly more to adjust their emissions, and they are choosing not do it,” lawyer Gerry Liston told The Associated Press at the start of the day-long hearing. The court’s rulings are legally binding on member countries, and failure to comply makes authorities liable for hefty fines decided by the court. “This judgement would act like a binding treaty imposed by the court on the respondents, requiring them to rapidly accelerate their climate mitigation efforts,” Liston said.

Zeerak Ahmed has spent years in the U. S., working for some of the world’s biggest tech companies. But one thing he has grown frustrated with is how “computing treats non-Latin languages as second class citizens.” One such language is his mother tongue, Urdu, the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, which is also widely spoken in India.

MOSUL, Iraq — A raging fire seemingly caused by fireworks set off to celebrate a Christian wedding consumed a hall packed with guests in northern Iraq, killing at least 100 people and injuring 150 others as authorities warned Wednesday the death toll could still rise. Authorities said that flammable building materials also contributed to the latest disaster to hit Iraq’s dwindling Christian minority.