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Thursday, October 22, 2020
2020 Melbourne Lord Mayor candidate Wayne Tseng answered some questions about his campaign for the upcoming election from Wikinews. The Lord Mayor election in the Australian city is scheduled to take place this week.
Tseng runs a firm called eTranslate, which helps software developers to make the software available to the users. In the candidate’s questionnaire, Tseng said eTranslate had led to him working with all three tiers of the government. He previously belonged to the Australian Liberal Party, but has left since then, to run for mayorship as an independent candidate.
Tseng is of Chinese descent, having moved to Australia with his parents from Vietnam. Graduated in Brisbane, Tseng received his PhD in Melbourne and has been living in the city, he told Wikinews. Tseng also formed Chinese Precinct Chamber of Commerce, an organisation responsible for many “community bond building initiatives”, the Lord Mayor candidate told Wikinews.
Tseng discussed his plans for leading Melbourne, recovering from COVID-19, and “Democracy 2.0” to ensure concerns of minorities in the city were also heard. Tseng also focused on the importance of the multi-culture aspect and talked about making Melbourne the capital of the aboriginals. Tseng also explained why he thinks Melbourne is poised to be a world city by 2030.
Tseng’s deputy Lord Mayor candidate Gricol Yang is a Commercial Banker and works for ANZ Banking Group.
Currently, Sally Capp is the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, the Victorian capital. Capp was elected as an interim Lord Mayor in mid-2018 after the former Lord Mayor Robert Doyle resigned from his position after sexual assault allegations. Doyle served as the Lord Mayor of Melbourne for almost a decade since 2008.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
The United States Army has announced that Corporal Jeremy Morlock is to face a court martial on three charges of premeditated murder. Morlock is accused of killing Afghan civilians for sport; at least eleven other soldiers are caught up in the allegations.
The prosecution case is that Morlock colluded with Sergeant Calvin Gibbs to plot the deaths of Afghans. Gibbs is said to have planned the attacks which Morlock helped arrange by recruiting other soldiers to carry them out. The pair, as well as three others charged with murder, deny this. Gibbs’s lawyer said his client’s defence is that the Afghans were killed legitimately, while Morlock’s said his client was present but did not cause any deaths. Preliminary hearings in the case were heard last month.
The five are accused of unprovoked grenade and gun attacks. Seven other soldiers are accused of conspiring to cover up the crimes by dismemberment of the corpses and collecting body parts. No other cases have yet been committed for trial, including that of Gibbs. All the soldiers are from the 5th Stryker brigade, which went to Afghanistan last year and has seen combat in Kandahar, where the alleged attacks occurred between January and May this year.
Morlock is also going to stand trial for assault, use of a controlled substance (hashish), attempting to block an investigation, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to assault and “wrongfully photographing and possessing visual images of human casualties”. The soldiers are accused of photographing their victims and keeping body parts as trophies, though the military has not yet commented on if bones they say the men took were in fact from civilian murder victims. Al Jazeera English reports that much media attention has focused on this detail.
The seven not charged with murder are also charged with assault and using hashish. The assault charge relates to the beating of a whistleblower. Morlock could have faced the death penalty on the premeditated murder charges, but the army has decided not to seek this sentence upon a conviction and instead the maximum sentence available is life without parole.
Officials have commented about concerns the case could have a negative impact on relations with the Afghan public, especially with regards to efforts to undermine Taliban support in Kandahar.