Top News Stories –

Taylor Swift sued over Shake It Off lyrics –
Pop star Taylor Swift is being sued for $42m (£27m) for allegedly stealing the lyrics to her hit 2014 song Shake It Off. US R&B singer Jesse Braham has claimed in legal papers Swift stole the words from a song he wrote in 2013 called Haters Gone Hate. As well as the monetary compensation, Mr Braham also wants his name added as a writer on the track. Representatives for Swift have yet to officially comment on the legal case. Shake It Off topped music charts around the world and reached number two in the UK. The video for the song has been watched more than 1.1 billion times on YouTube. [BBC]
Taylor Swift

Australia drops knights and dames from honours system –
Australia will no longer appoint knights and dames under the honours system, PM Malcolm Turnbull has said. Mr Turnbull said the titles were “not appropriate” in modern Australia, and that Queen Elizabeth had accepted the cabinet’s recommendation to drop them. Former PM Tony Abbott reintroduced knighthoods and damehoods in 2014. His controversial decision to grant Prince Philip a knighthood in January was widely seen as one of the factors which ended his term as leader. [BBC] Mr Turnbull became Australia PM in September 2015
Malcolm Turnbull

Four gymnasts share asymmetric bars gold –
Fan Yilin, Viktoriia Komova, Daria Spiridonova and Madison Kocian shared an unprecedented four gold medals at the gymnastics world championships on Saturday when the judges could not decide between their asymmetric bars routines. With the giant television screen confirming that there were indeed four champions from the eight-woman final, the gold medalists stood with their arms around each other in a straight line as the crowd gave them a standing ovation. The Russians were still in shock after a prolonged medals ceremony featured three national anthems being played and the master of ceremonies making four announcements starting with “Winner of the gold medal and the 2015 uneven bars champion is….” Organizers also had to abandon the flag-raising ceremony as there was no room for three flags on the same horizontal pole. While so many gold medals have never been given out in one event before, there was a five-way tie for silver at the 1922 championships on the pommel horse. [Reuters]
Daria Spiridonova

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Alladin Magic Carpet Prank

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Other News Stories –

Armed conflicts and attacks

• War in Somalia (2009–present)
  • Islamist al-Shabaab militants attack a hotel in Mogadishu resulting in at least 12 deaths. (AFP via Yahoo! News) (Reuters via ABC News Australia)
• Syrian Civil War
  • Islamic State fighters seize control of Mahin, a town in Syria‘s central Homs province, following clashes with government forces which left about 50 dead. Fighting was also reported to be taking place on the outskirts of Sadad, a nearby town mostly populated by Christians. (Reuters)
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict (2015)
  • One Palestinian is killed and three Israeli soldiers injured in two attacks in the West Bank. According to the Israeli army, the Palestinian was shot dead after attempting to stab soldiers at a military checkpoint near the Beit Einun village in Hebron. In a second incident in the same area, a driver rammed and injured three Israeli paramilitary border policemen with his car before fleeing the scene. None of the three were injured seriously. (The Daily Star) (Al Jazeera)
  • Since the beginning of October, nine Israelis, 67 Palestinians – around half of them alleged attackers – and an Arab Israeli have been killed in this wave of violence. (AFP via Yahoo.)
  • The fate of slain Palestinians is fueling a new feud with Israeli authorities. The Israeli defense minister says Israel is refusing to return the bodies of Palestinians killed during this month-old surge of violence unless the Palestinian side agrees to keep theirfunerals “modest.” (Reuters)
  • An Israel Defense Forces inquiry concludes the death of a Palestinian woman at a checkpoint in Hebron last month was unnecessary, finding the teenager could have been detained and not killed. (Haaretz)

Disasters

• The United States Navy sends a remotely operated underwater craft to investigate a wreck which they believe is the remains of the SS El Faro which disappeared on October 1 near the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin with 33 people on board. (CNN)
• Kogalymavia Flight 9268
  • Airlines including Emirates, Lufthansa and Air France refuse to fly over the Sinai Peninsula until the cause of the crash is known. (AP via ABC News America)
  • Russian air transport chief Alexander Neradko says Flight 9268 broke apart at high altitude and scattered plane parts over a wide swath of Egyptian desert. Neradko added it was too soon to determine what caused Saturday’s horrific crash. (USA Today)
  • Russia observes a nationwide day of mourning for victims of the plane crash in Egypt. (AP via Fox News)
  • The bodies of more than 140 of those killed in the air crash have been flown back to St Petersburg. (BBC)
• Colectiv nightclub fire
  • Three other victims of the nightclub fire die at hospital, bringing the death toll to 30. (Mediafax)

International relations

• China–Japan–South Korea trilateral summit
  • The leaders of the People’s Republic of China, South Korea and Japan hold their first summit in three years. (New York Times)
  • Japan and China agree to restart mutual visits of their foreign ministers, to hold bilateral high-level economic dialogue early next year, and to work toward early implementation of communication mechanisms between their military forces. (Reuters)

Law and crime

• School shootings in the United States
  • A campus shooting at around 1:20 AM at Lot W, near Wilson Hall and Gleason-Hairston Terrace, at the Main Campus of Winston-Salem State University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, kills at least one person and wounds at least one- the two are believed to be students; the suspected gunman, Jarrett Jerome Moore, is not believed to be a student, and is believed to be still at large. (CNN, via MSN), (University note), (Winston-Salem Journal)

Politics and elections

• Turkish general election, November 2015
  • Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) wins Sunday’s snap election with more than 49 percent of the vote. AKP, projected to get 316 seats in the 550-seat parliament, regains single-party rule just five months after losing it. (Washington Post) (BBC) (Al Jazeera)
  • Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu calls on all of Turkey’s political parties to work together on a new constitution to replace the 1982 constitution written during the military junta of 1980-1983. The document has been amended 17 times revising 113 of the 177 articles. (Reuters) (Kuwait News Agency) (ODATV)tr
  • Protesters clashed with police outside the headquarters of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) in the Kurds‘ main city of Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey as it became evident President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP were getting a solid majority and would return to power. The tumult spread to other major cities and towns in the Kurdish heartland. The HDP won 10.7 percent of the vote; the party holds 59 of its 80 seats in the parliament. Al-Ahram (Wall Street Journal)

• Azerbaijani parliamentary election, 2015
  • Azeri voters go to the polls for a parliamentary election, which Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev’s ruling New Azerbaijan Party is widely expected to win since the The Müsavat (Equality) Party and other Azerbaijani mainstream opposition parties are boycotting. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is not monitoring the election because the restrictions imposed by the authorities make credible poll monitoring impossible. (TASS) (Reuters)
• Attacks on secularists in Bangladesh
  • Teachers, writers and students lead a protest rally in Dhaka against the recent killings and attacks on secular authors and publishers in Bangladesh. (AFP via Straits Times)

Science and technology

• Smart Sheriff, the most widely used child surveillance mobile app in South Korea, is pulled from the market after specialists raised serious concerns about the program’s safety. Security experts say its programming left the door wide open to hackers and put the personal information of some 380,000 users at risk. The country’s April 2015 law requires all new smartphones sold to those 18 and under have software parents can use to monitor their kids’ social media activity. (AP via U.S. News & World Report)

Sport

• In athletics, Stanley Biwott and Mary Jepkosgei Keitany of Kenya win the 2015 New York City Marathon. (Runners World), (ABC7 New York)
• 2015 World Series
  • In Major League Baseball, the Kansas City Royals defeat the New York Mets in the 2015 World Series 4 games to 1. (Fox Sports). (Huffington Post)

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