World's Biggest Animals All Time

A German expatriate accused of sexually abusing five young boys told the Phnom Penh Municipal Court on Thursday that the mothers of two of his alleged victims had framed him after he threatened to report one of them for stealing his iPad. Udo Sabiniewicz, 56, was arrested at his FX Animation video dubbing studio in Chbar Ampov district in June and subsequently charged on multiple counts of indecent acts against minors. During the first day of his trial on Thursday morning, he spent the better part of three hours responding to a series of repetitive and seemingly irrelevant questions from the prosecution and attorneys for the plaintiffs, including a lawyer for child protection NGO Action Pour Les Enfants (APLE). After answering questions about how many air-conditioning units he had, what “horsepower” they ran on, and whether he had mosquito nets in his studio, which doubles as his residence, Mr. Sabiniewicz explained how he met the mother of one of his alleged victims while sitting inside an otherwise empty bar on Street 172. “She sat down next to me, asked me to buy her a drink, and told me about her bad situation: Her French husband had just died and the father of her child had also died,” he told the court, leading the woman to interject from the gallery: “It’s not true, it’s not true.” “She asked me if I knew of any work and I offered her to work for me [as a cleaner], but after she came to my house for a couple of days, I realized she was not interested in any work at all,” he continued. “Every day she was drunk, always with her child. We would go out sometimes in the evening and she would be introducing him to foreigners: ‘This is my son, he wants to learn English and talk to you.’” Mr. Sabiniewicz, who also goes by the name Theodor Symon, said the woman then told him that she was indebted to her landlord and could not return home, and that he offered her a place to stay in his studio, downstairs from his bedroom. After “four or five days” of putting up with what he described as “very bad behavior” by her and her son, he told the court, he gave her $150 to settle the debt with her landlord so he could “get rid of her.” During the hearing, the suspect intermittently turned the pages of a stapled set of photographs of the woman that he had brought to the courthouse and placed on the bench beside him. One showed her smoking what appeared to be a marijuana cigarette; in another, she is wearing a revealing red dress, using her hands to accentuate her breasts for the camera. “Her lifestyle was not suitable,” he told the court. Soon after the woman left, he said, he was contacted by another woman looking for similar work. (The two women sat together in court on Thursday and left the premises together.) Mr. Sabiniewicz said he also offered the second woman a job as a cleaner, and that she came to the studio with her son, too, but never spent the night there. While working for him, he said, the second woman disappeared for two weeks, and when she finally returned on June 13, with her son and daughter, he fired her and drove her and her children home.A former garment worker announced plans on Thursday to launch a political party focused on alleviating the problems faced by Cambodia’s youth, targeting what he says is a lacuna in current policy. During a press conference at Le Cafe Restaurant in Phnom Penh’s Chamkar Mon district, Pich Sros, 36, told assembled media that a government led by the Cambodian Youth Party (CYP) would first address “national problems” like “Cambodian youths’ standard of living.” “I decided to create the Cambodian Youth Party to give opportunity to the young people who are patriots,” said Mr. Sros, whose new party is the seventh to be launched this year. “When we get some seats in the National Assembly or if we win and lead the government, we will solve the youths’ problem first.” Mr. Sros said his party would focus on five different points: improving education and health, promoting youth employment, setting a price ceiling for “agricultural goods” sold domestically, providing temporary welfare for those out of work, and raising the standard of living for the country’s poor. “For the poor youth that have the intention to continue studying at university, the government led by the Cambodian Youth Party will provide loans without interest,” Mr. Sros said, adding that a potential CYP government would also support those unable to find jobs with three months of $40 unemployment payments. Asked about his party’s funding, Mr. Sros said the CYP currently relied on donations from party members, but that he was open to outside largesse. “If any humanitarians want to donate to the budget of my party, they are welcome,” he said. In a telephone interview following the press conference, Mr. Sros claimed that his party’s supporters currently numbered in the thousands. “Now we have more than 3,000 people who support our party,” Mr. Sros said, adding that he would submit the CYP’s party application to the Interior Ministry in “about a month.”CPP spokesman Sok Eysan said the CYP’s arrival on the political scene was not a cause for concern for his party. “The Cambodian People’s Party welcomes all new political parties because the ruling party implements democracy,” Mr. Eysan said. Likewise, CNRP youth movement president Hing Soksan said that his party was unconcerned by the CYP’s launch—despite the new party targeting one of the opposition’s main blocs of support.“I think it does not make any problem for my political party, the CNRP,” Mr. Soksan said. “It’s new and Cambodian people [have] no confidence or trust in the new party’s leadership.”He added that if the CYP truly wanted to win in any upcoming election, it would need to join forces with its more established competitor.“I would like to take the occasion to appeal to the youth who are the leaders of the new party to join with the CNRP because only CNRP can win the general election,” he said.However, Ou Virak, a political analyst and founder of the Future Forum think tank, said the CNRP would be mistaken to take the youth vote as a guarantee.“I think [the CNRP] were basically getting the support from the youth with very little effort, with hardly any policies, so now they are actually going to have to deal with youth unemployment or many of the youth issues,” Mr. Virak said.“They basically just benefit from the fact that youth are frustrated with Hun Sen and the CPP, they want change,” he added. “If you look at the new youth party, their platform to me is a lot more interesting in affecting the youth than the CNRP’s.”A 22-year-old woman was found murdered in Phnom Penh’s Pur Senchey district on Thursday morning, while police say her killer was found dead of a suspected suicide later in the day. Choam Chao commune police chief Theng Kosal said investigators believed that the suspect, 29-year-old garment worker Yin Dina, attempted to rape Sun Kunthi, but became enraged when she fought him off, and so strangled her to death. “The victim’s body was found at 9:20 a.m. inside her grocery store house. Her body was found naked from the waist down,” Mr. Kosal said. Witnesses told police they had seen Yin Dina enter and then leave the victim’s house at about 8:30 a.m. When officers arrived at the suspect’s home nearby, they discovered him hanging from the ceiling.“We also found an empty box of poison nearby his body, so we think the suspect took poison before hanging himself,” Mr. Kosal said.According to the police chief, neighbors said the suspect had long held unrequited feelings for the victim. When he saw that she was home alone, “he went there and attempted to rape her,” he said. “I think the woman refused to have sex with him and she was fighting back, which angered the suspect and led him to kill her,” he added. Non Mony Rath, chief of the municipal police’s technical and scientific bureau, examined the body and said there was evidence of attempted rape. “According to the result of the body examination, which was just finished this afternoon, the victim was not raped because she fought back. She was killed by strangulation with a string,” he said. “I also examined the suspect’s body and we found that he ingested rat pesticide to commit suicide first, but did not die, so he hanged himself.