Catalan separatists unveil giant banner against Spain King Felipe VI in Barcelona Boy who ‘dreamed’ of working with Apple hacks its systems from home

BARCELONA: Catalan separatists unveiled a giant banner against Spain's King Felipe VI on a building in the Barcelona square where he is due to attend a ceremony on Friday in honour of the victims of last year's deadly jihadist attacks in the city.

"The Spanish King is not welcome in the Catalan countries," the banner read in English. It was accompanied by an upside-down portrait of the monarch.

The king and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez are due to join families of the victims for the commemoration at the Plaza Catalunya, near Las Ramblas, Barcelona's main avenue where a jihadist ploughed through crowds in a white van, killing 14 people on August 17, 2017.

During his escape, the 22-year-old Moroccan attacker also stabbed to death a young man before stealing his car.

Catalonia's main separatist civil society group, the Catalan National Assembly, on Twitter expressed "all its support to the activists who deployed this banner and spent the entire night defending freedom of expression".

Family members of the victims of the attacks in Barcelona and the nearby seaside resort of Cambrils -- where a woman was stabbed to death and several other people injured just hours after the Barcelona van rampage -- had asked for a "truce" in the political conflict over Catalonia's separatist drive on the one-year anniversary of the attacks.

The king had been jeered by Catalan separatists, who reject the monarchy and hope to set up an independent republic, when he joined a massive protest against terrorism in Barcelona shortly after the attacks.

Catalan separatists organisations will stage their own commemorations of the attacks on Friday so as to avoid appearing alongside the king, who adopted a hardline stance against Catalonia's separatist push last year. SYDNEY: Apple Inc said on Friday no customer data was compromised after Australian media reported a teenager had pleaded guilty to hacking into its main computer network, downloading internal files and accessing customer accounts.

The boy, 16, from the southern city of Melbourne, broke into the US computer giant's mainframe from his suburban home many times over a year, The Age newspaper reported, citing statements by the teenager's lawyer in court.

The teen downloaded 90 gigabytes of secure files and accessed customer accounts without exposing his identity, the paper said.

Apple contacted the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation when it became aware of the intrusion, The Age said, quoting statements made in court. The FBI then referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

The report said an AFP raid on the boy's family home produced two laptops, a mobile phone and a hard drive that matched the intrusion reported by Apple.

The sensitive documents were saved in a folder called "hacky hack hack", the report said.

It said the boy had boasted about his activities on the mobile messaging service Whatsapp.

An Apple spokesman said the company's information security personnel "discovered the unauthorised access, contained it, and reported the incident to law enforcement" without commenting further on the specifics of the case.

"We ... want to assure our customers that at no point during this incident was their personal data compromised," the spokesman said.

The AFP declined to comment because the matter was before the court.

A court spokeswoman also declined to comment other than to say the teenager would be sentenced on Sept. 20.

The boy's name could not be made public because he was a juvenile offender.