MONTEGO BAY, St James — Pointing to statistics showing that four out of every five young girls lost their virginity to rape or molestation, Attorney General Marlene Malahoo Forte yesterday lamented that Jamaica has a serious problem with sexual abuse.

Malahoo Forte did not state the source of the data. At the same time, the former sexual offences prosecutor and judge said that women do not make suitable jurors in rape cases. “One of the things I learned as a prosecutor, in empanelling a jury, don’t choose women on a rape case, because women judge other women so harshly when it comes to sexual matters,” Malahoo Forte said in an address at the official launch of the Miss Montego Bay Pageant 2019 held at the Blue Beat in St James.

According to the attorney general, while people tend, at first, to believe a woman who has reported being raped, doubt creeps in once attempts are made to take the matter to court. “When we hear about the story outside of the courtroom, we believe it. But the minute we engage the formal process for the criminal to be brought to book, we start doubting the woman. And we start wondering if she had brought it on herself,” Malahoo Forte said.(Jamaica Observer)…[+]

The Australian man who claimed to have invented cryptocurrency bitcoin has been ordered to hand over half of his alleged bitcoin holdings, reported to be worth up to $5bn. The IT security consultant Craig Wright, 49, was sued by the estate of David Kleiman, a programmer who died in 2013, for a share of Wright’s bitcoin haul over the pair’s involvement in the inception of the cryptocurrency from 2009 to 2013.

Kleiman’s estate alleges Wright and Kleiman were partners, and therefore his family is entitled to a share of the bitcoin that was mined by the pair in that time. Wright denies there was a partnership. A US district court in Florida on Tuesday ruled that half of the bitcoin mined and half of the intellectual property held by Wright from that time belongs to Kleiman.

One issue is it is not known exactly how much bitcoin Wright holds. It has been claimed that the Kleiman estate could get anywhere between 410,000 and 500,000 bitcoin, putting the value at between A$6.1bn and A$7.4bn as of Wednesday.

Wright claimed to the court that he couldn’t access the bitcoin because he doesn’t have a list of the public addresses of that bitcoin. He claimed in 2011, after seeing the cryptocurrency had begun to be associated with drug dealers and human traffickers, he put the bitcoin he mined in 2009 and 2010 into an encrypted file and into a blind trust. The encrypted key was divided into multiple key slices, and the key slices were given to Kleiman who distributed them to people through the trust.(The Guardian)…[+]

A number of children in Spain have had abnormal hair growth similar to “werewolf syndrome” after receiving incorrect medication, officials say. Seventeen cases have been reported in Cantabria, València and Granada. The children developed the symptoms after receiving medicine for a stomach condition that contained a drug used to treat alopecia, health regulators said.

“My son’s forehead, cheeks, arms, legs and hands were covered with hair… it was very scary,” one mother said. Following an investigation by the Spanish health regulator Aemps, the source of the condition was traced to a formula issued to parents to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease – a muscle condition that affects acid reflux from the stomach – in their young children.

A supply of what was thought to be omeprazole was found to contain minoxidil, an ingredient that stimulates hair growth, the regulators said. A report published on the Aemps website said the medicine had been distributed by a pharmaceutical company in the Málaga region of Spain.(BBC)…[+]

BRASILIA– Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said today  that South American countries would meet to determine a common policy in defense of the Amazon rainforest, and took another swipe at France for an offer of $20 million in aid.

In an indication that Bolsonaro, a far-right conservative, is forging closer ties with neighboring countries than European nations, he also accepted an offer from Chile of four aircraft to help fight the fires sweeping through the world’s largest rainforest.Speaking to journalists after a meeting with Chilean President Sebastian Pinera in Brasilia, Bolsonaro said that a meeting with regional neighbors except Venezuela to discuss a common policy in defense of the Amazon will be held on Sept. 6 in the Colombian city of Leticia.(Reuters)…[+]