Law

Nathan Baggaley won silver twice at the 2004 Olympics and, according to the court's assessment, bought and prepared the boat for a large cocaine deal. He was not on board later, but his brother and another person were. They had tried to take over about 650 kilograms of cocaine from another ship far off the Australian coast. According to the BBC, the drugs had a market value of about 200 million Australian dollars (about 130 million euros).

However, the Australian Air Force, in cooperation with the border police, had filmed the handover from the air. In addition, a navy ship followed the criminals' boat. During the following chase on the water, video footage shows Dru Baggaley throwing numerous drug packages overboard. Baggaley now faces life in prison.

Juan Antonio Hernández, known as "Tony," has been sentenced in the United States to life in prison plus 30 years for cocaine smuggling, among other charges. The 42-year-old is the brother of the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández.

According to the prosecutor's office in New York, the convicted man's drug trafficking proceeds of at least $138.5 million (about 118 million euros) will be confiscated.

After copyright-protected content from Onlyfans was published for a long time without legal consequences on Reddit, a lawyer is now trying to take action against it.

On March 9, 2020, lawyer Jason Fischer sent a demand to Reddit to take content offline for copyright infringement. In it, the lawyer informed the platform that his client, erotic actress Natasha Noel, was the owner of the rights to various photo and video content posted on Onlyfans as well as other social media networks.

"Pursuant to the DMCA, we respectfully request that you execute the attached subpoena directing Reddit's records custodian to disclose the identities of its users," the attorney demands in the lawsuit. Reddit should turn over to the plaintiffs "any and all information" relating to the identities of the "individuals who posted the images and content" that previously appeared at the URLs listed in the lawsuit, he said.

For defrauding numerous people out of more than 20,000 Bitcoin, a British man is to pay a record-breaking fine. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) had previously moved against the British citizen Benjamin Reynolds in federal court.

The court, it has now been revealed, issued a penalty order in early March. Since it considers the guilt of the defendant as proven, this is to pay on the one hand approximately 429 million dollar (approximately 364 million euro) as punishment as well as scarcely 143 million dollar (approximately 121 million euro) as damages to 169 US customers. The number of those actually affected could be even higher.

The CFTC warns that the court's order does not automatically mean that affected parties will get their cryptoassets or their compensation payment. Because even if Reynolds can be tracked down, it may still turn out that he does not have the financial means to settle the demanded sums.

Belgian professional football player Tuur Dierckx was sentenced to one month in prison and must also pay a fine of 800 euros after he hosted an illegal Covid-19 party in December. Four other professionals who had attended the party were fined between 400 and 600 euros.

In court, the players' lawyers had asked for leniency. Professional footballers are in a bubble with other players, coaches and staff, so that despite the pandemic, they no longer see a compelling need to restrict their contacts.

Software developer and antivirus pioneer John McAfee is to stand trial in the U.S. on charges of cryptocurrency fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The Justice Department published the indictment on Friday, and McAfee faces years in prison and heavy fines if convicted.

The 75-year-old was arrested in Spain in October at the behest of U.S. law enforcement officials, who had already filed charges against him for tax evasion and unfairly promoting cryptocurrencies. A statement from McAfee was not initially available. According to U.S. authorities, he remains in custody in Spain.

For the first time worldwide, an individual was sentenced for aiding crimes against humanity in another country. A German court convicted a former Syrian secret service agent for delivering victims to a detention center in Douma, Syria, where they were tortured. War crimes are covered by international law allowing the prosecution of foreigners for crimes committed in other countries.

An initial investigation into the rape accusations against Gérard Depardieu was dropped in 2019 for lack of evidence but reopened last summer, leading to criminal charges filed in December. According to a source close to the case, Depardieu is a friend of the woman’s family.

An actor accuses Depardieu of having raped and assaulted her at his Paris home in August 2018. Some reports have suggested Depardieu and the actor were rehearsing a theatre play scene, but the source said "there was nothing professional about the encounter".

Thai police have arrested the head of a child modelling agency after more than 500,000 indecent images of children were found on computer hard drives.

Danudetch "Nene" Saengkaew, 23, has been charged with child sexual abuse and downloading child abuse images.

Investigators say the images were found in a raid on the Nene Modelling Agency, north of the capital Bangkok.

The raid was the culmination of a months-long operation that began with a tip-off from Australian police.

Austrian Green Party politician Sigrid Maurer - herself a victim of vicious insults on the internet - was to stand trial for defamation because she had made the obscene messages to her public via Twitter. Now the trial is over.

As reported by ORF, among others, a landlord has withdrawn his private accusation against the politician "in its entirety". The judge then formally acquitted Maurer. However, the acquittal will only become legally binding when the landlords lawyer "officially withdraws his appeal with a written statement", according to the spokeswoman. If the landlord waives further legal remedies, he will have to bear the costs of the proceedings.

An evaluation of 700,000 police press reports by the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation (BR) and the North German Broadcasting Corporation (NDR) showed that the state police deal with the naming of the perpetrators' nationalities very differently.

As a result, nationality is given in only 5% of the reports, in the most frequent cases in the case of theft and the naming of refugees. This contradicts the police crime statistics, where Germans are mentioned five times more often.

As the government of the Netherlands plans to end coal-based electricity, the German RWE corporation seeks to obtain compensation based on the controversial Energy Charter Treaty signed in 1994.

"This is not the first time a fossil fuel company tries to get tax payers to pick up the bill for bad business decisions and it won’t be the last if we fail to act," reacted the director of Climate Action Network Europe, Wendel Trio.

A hacker tried to drastically increase the sodium hydroxide addition to the drinking water supply of Oldsmar, Florida shortly before the Super Bowl game. An employee of the groundwater treatment plant noticed the movement of his mouse pointer and was able to intervene in good time. The sheriff has not yet given any information on the perpetrators or motives.

While trying to film a 'prank' robbery video in the hopes to create a viral hit on YouTube, a 20-year-old man was shot and killed in Nashville, Tennessee on Friday night. According to a report by local NBC News affiliate WSMV, Timothy Wilks was shot by 23-year-old David Starnes Jr., who is claiming self-defense.

Police say that Wilks and a friend approached a group of people, both of them wielding butcher knives. Starnes was among those people and, not realizing that Wilks was filming a prank, shot him. Starnes told detectives he was protecting himself and others from a perceived threat.

In a brief enquiry from the left-wing parliamentary group, the federal government replied that the number of right-wing extremists with weapons permits in Germany is still increasing. An increase of 35% has been recorded since 2019, with the security authorities counting a total of 1,2000 suspected right-wing extremists.

In the context of threats such as "Day X", raids on Bundeswehr soldiers and right-wing chat groups within the police, the constitutional protection authorities assess such preparatory actions as dangerous.

For several years, the Kempten public prosecutor's office has been sitting on more than 1700 Bitcoins. They could bring millions of euros to the state treasury.

As reported by the "Allgäuer Zeitung", the public prosecutor's office does have a digital wallet through which access to the Bitcoins would be possible. However, the former owner of the wallet refuses to reveal the password belonging to the wallet.

The case involved a total of 1800 Bitcoins, which the fraudster had obtained illegally, namely with the help of the computing power of other people's computers.

Bayer has reached a compromise on a crucial part of its multibillion-dollar glyphosate settlement with U.S. plaintiffs. The agribusiness group announced Wednesday a breakthrough in negotiations over how to handle future lawsuits alleging cancer risks from Roundup, a weedkiller containing glyphosate. It said a formal agreement had been reached with plaintiffs' lawyers that included a commitment of up to two billion dollars (1.7 billion euros).

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has convicted Ugandan rebel leader Dominic Ongwen of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It was the first trial before the world criminal court against a former child soldier. The leader of the notorious Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), now about 46 years old, was accused of atrocities in northern Uganda, including murder, torture, and attacks on refugee camps, as well as the use of child soldiers. The judges considered it proven that the man ordered the deadly attacks.

Because of its role in the opioid crisis, McKinsey has agreed to a settlement of at least $550 million to resolve lawsuits. This was reported by the "New York Times" with reference to insiders.

McKinsey had advised OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and its owning Sackler family. Purdue is accused of using predatory methods to push the prescribing of its drugs. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2019 as part of a proposed ten billion dollar settlement.

More than 40 US states had sued the consulting firm over McKinsey's role in the opioid crisis. The settlement was joined by 43 states, the Washington D.C. District and three United States territories, insiders report. Several state attorneys general announced a memo on the opioid epidemic for Thursday.

Prof. Ulrich Kelber, the German federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, criticized the federal government in a press release. Germany has not implemented the EU data protection directive on data protection in the prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences and the execution of sentences for more than 1,000 days.

As a result, he lacks effective enforcement powers with the security authorities, which would be a basis for the judicial prosecution of data protection violations.

BaFin has suspended and filed a criminal complaint against one of its employees who is suspected of having used insider information when trading Wirecard shares just before the payments company disclosed that €1.9bn in corporate cash was missing from its accounts.

The suspect, an unnamed employee of the securities supervision department, sold structured products based on Wirecard on June 17 last year, BaFin said.

Because a little boy choked on a sausage, the sausage manufacturer Herta is on trial in France. The trial against the company for involuntary manslaughter began on Monday afternoon in the southwestern French town of Dax, according to a statement from the local public prosecutor's office. An acquittal has been requested for the group. A verdict is to be announced on February 8.

The Democratic State Rep. Athena Salman has published a series of tweets shedding light on legislation draft "HB 2650" handed in by multiple Republican State Representatives.

If the legislation would pass, all abortions would be classified as first degree murder and a "class 1 felony" which "is punishable by death or life imprisonment".

One of the world's most-wanted fugitives, the 56-year old billionaire Tse Chi Lop, was arrested at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, police announced on Saturday. Tse Chi Lop is the alleged leader of a vast Asian drug syndicate responsible for up to 70% of all narcotics entering Australia.

He was arrested at the request of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) without incident during a stop-over on a flight from Taiwan to Canada.

On Wednesday the cabinet of Egypt toughened penalties for female genital mutilation, authorizing prison terms of up to 20 years in a bid to curb a practice that has persisted despite religious edicts against it. Human rights activists have long advocated against it, but government efforts to end it have met with resistance. That notion, however, has been disputed by al-Azhar, the Sunni Muslim world's most respected religious institution, located in Cairo.

Up to 5.4 million people in Hong Kong could apply to the new visa and relocate to the UK. The government estimates 300,000 might apply in the next five years.

Valve and five publishers of video games are to pay fines of 7,8 million euros according to the will of EU competition regulators. As the EU Commission announced on Wednesday, EU antitrust law had been violated.

The other companies affected are Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax, also among the better-known names in the industry.

The companies are accused of preventing consumers from using purchased video games in other EU countries. Specifically, it has been criticized that game keys - that are required on Steam to unlock games, only work within certain national borders.

Lee Jae-yong, executive of South Korea’s giant Samsung group, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and sent to jail on Monday. He was found guilty of bribery involving the country’s former president Park Geun-hye, who is already behind bars.

Initially, in 2017, Lee was sentenced to five years in jail, but Lee was released from jail the following year after an appeal court decided that the bribes paid were significantly smaller than previously thought. The case wound its way all the way up to the South Korean Supreme Court, which, in 2019, ordered the retrial.

The State Commissioner for Data Protection (LfD) of Lower Saxony Barbara Thiel has imposed a fine of 10.4 million euros on the electronics retailer notebooksbilliger.de (NBB). In addition, the company had cooperated closely with the LfD in the proceedings, which had been ongoing since 2017, "in order to ensure full compliance with the GDPR, also from the point of view of the authority". According to surveys from 2018, the company notebooksbilliger.de from the small town of Sarstedt in Lower Saxony is the online electronics retailer with the highest turnover in Germany, ahead of Mediamarkt.de, Saturn.de or Alternate.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser has ruled against releasing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on bail: "I am satisfied that there are substantial grounds for believing that if Mr Assange is released today, he would fail to surrender to court to face the appeal proceedings."

Rebecca Vincent, Director of International Campaigns at NGO Reporters without Borders, called the court's decision to refuse bail "unnecessarily cruel."