The brutal deaths of about 30 women and children in Papua New Guinea’s highlands amount to the “worst payback killing” in the country’s history, the police minister has said.

Bryan Kramer made the declaration after visiting Hela province, where 16 people were slaughtered by rival clansmen who the prime minister, James Marape, described as “warlords”.

The motive for the massacre was unclear last week, and the total death toll from a series of attacks had also varied, according to reports.

After enduring months of constant harassment at work, South Korean office worker Christine Jung finally confronted her aggressor — only to be fired and sued for defamation by her employer.

Her situation is not unusual in South Korea, where employees have traditionally been expected to turn a blind eye to abusive behaviour by those in power — a phenomenon so commonplace that locals have coined a word for it, “gabjil”. But that could soon change thanks to a revised labour law.

The new legislation that comes into effect on Tuesday will criminalise business owners who unfairly dismiss employees harassed at work.

This brief notice was a part of the “Upcoming trials” series featured on the website and the Twitter account of the Media and Law Studies Association (MLSA), a media freedom and legal rights organization in Turkey. It was founded by journalist Evin Baris Altintas in 2017 to track and document the cases against journalists, writers and academics imprisoned or charged with crimes after the failed coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2016. Parlak’s trial is one of dozens of cases that MLSA is monitoring.

Altintas believes the reason Turkish authorities targeted certain individuals is because they wanted to silence those willing to speak out against Erdogan and his policies. Freedom of expression and media freedom are protected by Turkish law.

THE BIG MAN with a little mustache sat slumped in his chair at an immigrant aid office in Ciudad Juárez. The Mexican city sits a block and a half from El Paso, Texas, across the shallow trickle of the Rio Grande. But proximity to the U.S. meant nothing in his case; the office might as well have been on another continent. The man was sobbing. “Soy un muerto. Un muerto vivo,” he kept saying. “I’m a dead man. The walking dead.”

The man, whom I will call Franklin to protect him from retaliation, said he was being pursued by assassins. Back in his home country months earlier, covered from head to toe to conceal his identity, he had given testimony against cartel bosses who had extorted his and his common-law wife’s businesses. The extortionists were convicted and imprisoned, but the witness’s disguise had fooled no one. Post-trial, two of the bosses’ armed underlings pursued Franklin, first in his home country in Central America. Then, after he fled, they threatened his niece back home with death if she did not say where he had gone. “Juárez, Mexico,” the terrified woman told the hit men.

Officials from major political parties on Sunday debated whether Self-Defense Forces troops should take part in a U.S.-proposed coalition to safeguard strategic waters near the Strait of Hormuz amid reports the government is mulling such a move.

Koichi Hagiuda, executive acting secretary-general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, stressed the need to consider a response to the proposal but said the current situation does not require the immediate dispatch of SDF troops to the Middle East.