Man is jailed for murder after 34 years

Sydney: An Australian man has been jailed for the 1988 murder of an American mathematician who fell from a Sydney cliff known to be a gay meeting place.

Scott Johnson’s death was initially recorded as suicide, but his family pressed for further investigation. A coroner in 2017 found a number of assaults, some fatal, where the victims had been targeted because they were thought to be gay.

Scott White, 51, pleaded guilty in January and was jailed yesterday for 12 years and seven months. Justice Helen Wilson said she did not find beyond reasonable doubt that the murder was a gay hate crime, an aggravating factor that would have led to a longer sentence.

White was 18 and homeless when he met 27-year-old Los Angelesborn Dr Johnson at a bar in suburban Manly in December 1988 and went with him to a nearby clifftop at North Head.

White’s former wife Helen White told police in 2019 that her then-husband had bragged about beating gay men and had said the only good gay man was a dead gay man. White’s lawyers have appealed his conviction and hope he will be acquitted of the murder charge in a jury trial.

Changsha: Rescuers have found two more survivors in the rubble of a central China building that collapsed on Friday.

A man and a woman were pulled out on Monday afternoon and early yesterday morning, the official Xinhua News Agency said.

The woman, whose rescue came after being buried for 88 hours, alerted workers using life detection equipment to her presence by knocking on objects. Xinhua said she was conscious, had normal vital signs and was able to communicate with her rescuers.

The collapse of the six-storey building happened at 12.24pm on Friday in Changsha, the Hunan provincial capital south of Beijing.

Police have arrested nine people, including the building’s owner, on suspicion of ignoring building regulations or committing other violations. Also held were three people in charge of design and construction and five others who allegedly gave a false safety assessment for a guest house on the building’s fourth to sixth floors.

Madrid: Spain’s government has said it has nothing to hide amid mounting unease over national security controversies involving Pegasus spyware, including the hacking of the prime minister’s mobile phone and spying on Catalan separatists by unknown agents.

Cabinet spokeswoman Isabel Rodriguez promised that the Socialist-led coalition government would engage in “the utmost collaboration with the legal authorities, including declassifying relevant documents if it proves necessary”.

The government revealed on Monday that the mobile phones of

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Defence Minister Margarita Robles were infected last year with Pegasus spyware, which is available only to countries’ government agencies.

The government was already under pressure to explain why the mobile phones of dozens of people connected to the separatist movement in Spain’s northeastern Catalonia region were infected with Pegasus between 2017 and 2020.