World Briefs

The remnants of Hurricane Earl dumped wind-driven rain on the grey-shingled cottages and fishing villages of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod yesterday, disrupting holidays on the unofficial final weekend of the short New England summer.

The storm swooped into New England waters as a tropical storm with winds of 70 mph after sideswiping North Carolina’s Outer Banks, where it caused flooding but no injuries and little damage.

The storm passed wide of New York City, Long Island and the rest of the mid-Atlantic region, but brought swirling rain as it passed just off Cape Cod, Nantucket Island and Martha’s Vineyard early yesterday. (PA)

Boss denies trafficking

The head of a recruiting company has denied exploiting 400 workers from Thailand and forcing them to work on US farms, in what the FBI says is America’s largest human-trafficking case.

Mordechai Orian, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Global Horizons Manpower surrendered in Honolulu and entered a not-guilty plea in court shortly afterwards.

The FBI had attempted to arrest Orian at his home in Los Angeles last Thursday. He is charged along with three of his employees and two Thailand-based recruiters. (PA)

Paedophiles jailed

Six men and a woman were convicted of child sex abuse in Portugal in a major trial that lasted nearly six years and shocked the country.

They were found guilty of crimes including sexually abusing minors and adolescents, raping children and running a paedophile ring at a state-run children’s home in Lisbon during the 1990s.

The six men were jailed for between six and 18 years for sexual abuse. The woman, whose house was used by the ring, was not given a custodial sentence because of a 2007 change in the law, the judge said in the televised ruling. (PA)

Cold War site clean-up in LA

Officials from California and the US government announced a potentially historic agreement to remove all radioactive conta­mination from a partial nuclear meltdown in 1959 at a Cold War rocket testing site just outside Los Angeles.

Residents who have fought for years for the clean-up heralded the agreement signed by the Department of Energy, Nasa and state officials. The agreement must still go through a public review process.

The decades-old site is known as the Santa Susana Field Laboratory and is now largely owned by plane maker Boeing. (PA)

Minister ‘offers resignation’

South Korea’s foreign minister Yu Myung-hwan has offered to resign over the hiring by his department of his daughter, it is reported.

Yonhap news agency said Mr Yu made his offer to President Lee Myung-bak through the presi­dential chief of staff.

He was accused of nepotism when his daughter was handed a mid-level post handling free trade affairs in his ministry. (PA)

‘Marriage fraud’

A Los Angeles jury was deadlocked over whether Mexican-born actress Fernanda Romero and her husband committed marriage fraud in order to skirt immigration laws.

US District Judge Manuel Real declared a mistrial after jurors told him deliberations had grown hostile and they could not reach unanimous verdicts.

Romero and her US-born husband Kent Ross told the four-day trial they were in love when they married in 2005, but quickly grew apart. Ross said he encouraged Romero to seek legal residency based on their marriage. (PA)

Eminem wins case

A US appeal court found Eminem’s former production company was entitled to more money from downloads of the rapper’s songs and ringtones.

A jury had ruled last year against FBT Productions in its lawsuit against Universal Music Group seeking a greater share of revenue from downloads made between 2003 and 2008.

But the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found FBT’s contract entitled Eminem and his producers to a 50-50 split with Universal for recordings licensed to digital distributors such as Apple’s iTunes. FBT discovered Eminem in 1995 before he signed in 1998 with Dr Dre’s Aftermath Records. Universal’s Interscope Records distributes Aftermath recordings. (PA)