OESC holds claims event

OESC holds claims event

Latest Stories

  • ‘Isn’t this the language of a dictator?’: Trump confronted after press conference littered with misinformation

    US president doubles down on false election claims and angrily rebukes reporter

  • Pictured: A doctor hugged a distraught elderly coronavirus patient on Thanksgiving, after warning the public America is headed for its 'darkest days' over Christmas

    Dr. Joseph Varon, of Houston's United Memorial Medical Center, has worked 251 days in the COVID-19 ICU. He said the 'darkest days' are to come.

  • Trump's national security advisor and his entourage were said to be treated as 'human petri dishes' in Vietnam, as the US COVID-19 outbreak worsens every day

    Robert O'Brien's airplane crew was also not allowed to enter Vietnam and had to spend the night in Thailand, Bloomberg reported.

  • Operator of notorious South Korean online sex trafficking ring sentenced to 40 years

    A South Korean court has sentenced the operator of a vast online sex trafficking ring to 40 years in prison in a case that outraged the nation. Cho Ju-bin, 25, oversaw a group of 38 accomplices who befriended and then blackmailed at least 74 women into sharing explicit videos that were then posted in pay-per-view internet chat rooms. Sixteen of the victims were less than 16 years old, the age of consent in South Korea. The Seoul Central District Court on Thursday found Cho guilty of violating laws to protect minors from sexual abuse and of making a profit from producing and selling abusive footage, Yonhap News reported. Indicted on 14 criminal charges, including inducing another person involved in the trafficking ring to rape a teenage girl and concealing more than £70,000 in criminal proceeds, prosecutors had initially demanded a life sentence on the grounds of the “irreperable damage” Cho had caused his victims. They had also requested that he be obliged to wear an electronic monitoring device for 45 years. In a petition to the court, one of the women said Cho, who had worked in an orphanage and adopted the online name “The Doctor”, was “evil” and deserved a 2,000-year prison term. Passing sentence, the judge said: “The accused has widely distributed sexually abusive content that he created by luring and threatening many victims.” Media reports have suggested that some of the video clips showed a group of men raping a teenage girl in a motel room, while others included images of the word “slave” cut into a woman’s body. One video showed girls “barking like dogs”, the Kookmin Ilbo newspaper reported. Cho operated the chat room on the Telegram messenger service, with at least 10,000 people accessing the site and paying as much as £1,000 for access. Authorities have been tracing people who used the site and have identified serving police officers and teachers as among the users. Cho’s arrest in March sparked fury across South Korea after prosecutors initially refused to name the suspect before his trial opened. Within days, more than 5 million people had signed petitions on the home page of Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, demanding that the authorities withdraw his right to anonymity. A committee of senior judicial officials, a psychologist and a psychiatrist weighed the public’s right to know and took the unprecedented step of naming Cho. He was then brought out in handcuffs from a police station in central Seoul to face the public. “I apologise to those that I hurt”, Cho said. “Thank you for putting a brake on the life of a devil who could not be stopped.” South Korea’s Ministry of Justice has been the target of criticism for its failure to deal with the growing use of technology to carry out sex crimes, with one ministry official admitting that the case had been “a disaster” and apologising for its “lukewarm response” to online sexual abuse cases.

  • Biden's win hides a dire warning for Democrats in rural U.S.

    Democrats once dominated Koochiching County in the blue-collar Iron Range of northern Minnesota. “We’ve got to see if we can get the Democratic Party to moderate and accept the fact that rural Minnesota is not getting more conservative,” said Bakk, who announced last week that he would become an independent after serving 25 years as a Democrat. The party lost House seats in the Midwest, and Democratic challengers in Iowa, Kansas, Montana and North Carolina Senate races, all once viewed as serious threats to Republican incumbents, fell, some of them hard.

  • Women call for end to domestic violence after lockdowns bring more attacks

    Women around the world marked International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on Wednesday with protests and marches.

  • Florida governor accused of ‘killing spree’ after extending ban on cities from imposing own mask mandates

    Miami-Dade mayor Daniella Levine Cava calls decision ‘deeply frustrating’

  • Type O blood linked to lower COVID risk, taking Vitamin D unlikely to help

    Among 225,556 Canadians who were tested for the virus, the risk for a COVID-19 diagnosis was 12% lower and the risk for severe COVID-19 or death was 13% lower in people with blood group O versus those with A, AB, or B, researchers reported on Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. People in any blood group who were Rh-negative were also somewhat protected, especially if they had O-negative blood. People in these blood type groups may have developed antibodies that can recognize some aspect of the new virus, coauthor Dr. Joel Ray of St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto told Reuters.

  • Donald Trump Jr. says he is 'all done with the Rona' and ends his COVID-19 isolation to celebrate Thanksgiving days after announcing his positive test

    Donald Trump Jr. tested positive for COVID-19 last week. Although he is asymptomatic, the CDC recommends sick people like him isolate for 10 days.

  • Shawn Mendes says he used to trade sleep for 2-hour workouts out of fear that his fans would stop liking him if he wasn't in perfect shape

    The 22-year-old "Wonder" singer told British GQ that girlfriend Camila Cabello helped him to change his perspective on his body.

  • Donald Trump commits to leaving White House if Joe Biden wins Electoral College vote

    Donald Trump admitted it was a "very hard thing to concede" electoral defeat but committed to leaving the White House if the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden, the Democrat president-elect as he attended a Thanksgiving event on Thursday. "It's going to be a very hard thing to concede because we know there was massive fraud," Mr Trump said, refusing to say whether he would attend Mr Biden's inauguration in January. In the nearest he has come to a concession, Mr Trump said he would leave the White House if Mr Biden is certified the election winner by the Electoral College - the process by which presidents are elected - on December 14. However, Mr Trump appeared to suggest he still held hopes of retaining the presidency. Asked about his plans for his last Thanksgiving in the White House, the president told reporters that the occasion might be the “first one of a second term”. The president added there were "a lot of things happening between now and January 20th [inauguration day]" and the election results have a "long way" to go. "I know one thing Joe Biden did not get 80 million votes," he said. "The only way he got 80 million votes is through massive fraud." During his annual Thanksgiving call with US troops overseas, Mr Trump also claimed the US will begin delivering Covid-19 vaccines "next week and the week after" as he insisted the country had "rounded the curve" on the pandemic. "We are rounding the curve [on the virus]. The vaccines are being delivered - literally it will start next week and the week after," he said during his address. Mr Trump suggested that medical workers, other frontline staff and elderly people would be the first to receive the vaccinations. It is unclear which vaccine Mr Trump was referencing, or whether he was referring to a specific federal government policy for a vaccine distribution. Two US companies, Moderna and Pfizer, have so far announced that their vaccines are effective at protecting people against coronavirus. Earlier this week US government officials said the administration planned to distribute around 6.4 million doses of Pfizer's vaccine to Americans as soon as the jab received emergency approval from the federal government, expected to be around mid-December. Officials say that by the end of the year they expect to have enough doses of vaccines from both Pfizer and Moderna to vaccinate around 20 million people. However, it is likely to be April before the vaccines are distributed to the wider American public. In his address on Thursday, Mr Trump praised the speed with which a vaccination had been created, saying "two companies already announced [successful vaccines]" adding that several others were "coming up soon". "Some people have called it a medical miracle," the president said adding that the hunt for a vaccination "could have taken four or five years".

  • Saudi Arabia has suspended Turkish meat imports - Turkish union

    Saudi Arabia formally suspended imports of meat, eggs and other products from Turkey earlier this month, the Turkish exporters' union said, after a months-long informal boycott of Turkish goods over political tensions between the two regional rivals. Turkish exporters have reported increasing obstacles to trade in Saudi Arabia, as businessmen in the Gulf Arab state have led calls for bans on Turkish imports and as ties between the two countries deteriorated. Already strained by competing ambitions for regional influence, those relations plunged into crisis two years ago when Saudi agents killed prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

  • Six US oil executives jailed for corruption in Venezuela after being lured to business meeting

    Men plead innocence following arrest in 2017 as State Department demands release

  • Israel blamed for assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh

    Iran blamed Israel for the killing of one of its top Iranian nuclear scientists in an assassination near Tehran yesterday that threatens to provoke a military confrontation during the final months of the Trump presidency. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh succumbed to injuries in hospital after gunmen fired on his car in Damavand county, Iranian media reported. Western and Israeli intelligence had long identified Mr Fakhrizadeh, 59, as the head of a covert Iranian project to develop a nuclear weapon that was shelved in 2003. He was subject to UN sanctions and named by the International Atomic Energy Agency in its 2015 "final assessment" of questions about Iran's nuclear programme. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attack but Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said there were “serious indications” of Israeli involvement. “Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today,” he tweeted. “This cowardice—with serious indications of Israeli role—shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators.” He called on the international community and particularly the European Union to condemn the killing "as an act of state terror".

  • Grandma of missing 3-year-old girl charged with child endangerment, Tennessee cops say

    Zella Linklater, 3, has since been found.

  • North Korea executed people, shut capital in battle against Covid, South's spies say

    Kim Jong Un has also banned fishing and salt production at sea to prevent seawater from being infected with the virus, lawmakers were told.

  • Trump campaign caught sharing fake newspaper cover on election result

    In a now-deleted tweet, Tim Murtaugh attempted to mock the media for projecting Joe Biden as president-elect by sharing a doctored headline declaring ‘President Gore’ in 2000

  • Zoom nightmare come true: New Jersey school board member resigns after streaming bathroom break during meeting

    Stop taking Zoom into the bathroom. A New Jersey school board member accidentally broadcast her bathroom break during a board meeting and resigned.

  • They're baaack: Trump and allies still refuse election loss

    Monday seemed like the end of President Donald Trump's relentless challenges to the election, after the federal government acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden was the “apparent winner” and Trump cleared the way for cooperation on a transition of power. On Thursday, after a Thanksgiving evening conversation from the White House with troops stationed overseas, Trump abruptly pivoted to angrily alleging — still without any evidence — that “massive fraud” was behind his defeat. Speaking to news crews gathered to watch the traditional holiday conversation with the military, Trump denounced officials in battleground states he'd lost as “communists” and “enemies of the state.”

  • Buried under a Serbian cornfield, Roman military headquarters slowly sheds its secrets

    Buried under a Serbian cornfield close to a coalmine, the well-preserved remains of a Roman legion's headquarters are being excavated by archaeologists who say its rural location makes it unique. Covering an estimated 3,500 square meters, the headquarters - or principium - belonged to the VII Claudia Legion. There are over 100 recorded principiums across the territory of the Roman empire, but almost all are buried under modern cities, said Miomir Korac, lead archaeologist of digs there and at the Roman provincial capital Viminacium that the compound served.