Man injured in suspected golden cat attack in Kuala Pilah
Negri Sembilan Wildlife and National Parks Department (Perhilitan) director Faizal Izham Pikri said the department received a report on the incident at 9pm and the victim is currently being treated at Tuanku Ampuan Najihah Hospital.
Perhilitan officers visited the 56-year-old victim, who suffered injuries to his head, hands and legs.
"The incident reportedly occurred early Saturday morning near the victim's goat pen located behind his house. Based on our investigation, we suspect the wild animal involved is an Asian golden cat," he said in a statement today.
Faizal said the department had provided the victim with an application form for the Wild Animal Attack Aid Fund to help ease the cost of medical treatment.
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New Straits Times
17 hours ago
- New Straits Times
Mushroom murderer Erin Patterson's decision to testify fails to convince jury
A month into the trial of the Australian woman accused of murdering three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives with poisonous mushrooms, her barrister Colin Mandy stood and delivered one of the case's pivotal moments. "The defence will call Erin Patterson," Mandy told the court. Patterson, who was convicted on Monday of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, was the only witness for her defence in a 10-week trial that gripped Australia. She told the court she had a loving relationship with the three people who died, including her mother and father-in-law, saying they were all she had in a frequently troubled life. In fact, she murdered three of them and attempted to kill a fourth by slipping lethal death cap mushrooms into individual Beef Wellingtons she served at a July 2023 lunch, a jury found. An alleged murderer testifying as a witness in their own defence is a rare strategy and normally a last resort, said Nicholas Papas, a veteran criminal barrister based in Melbourne who frequently acts in murder trials. "The risk is that when you call your client, then suddenly people start focusing on your client," he said. Patterson's decision also opened her up to five days of tense cross-examination by prosecutor Nanette Rogers, with whom she repeatedly clashed over minor details. Patterson's version of events – that she had included the deadly mushrooms by accident and she had not died herself after eating the tainted meal due to an eating disorder – was rejected by the jury as unreliable. "You're actually putting (the case) in the hands of your client, and lawyers don't tend to want to necessarily do that," Papas said. "We like to control the process if we can." Patterson, 50, grew up Melbourne, the daughter of an academic. She qualified as an air traffic controller and had been accepted to study nursing at the time of her arrest, after a life marred by a tempestuous marriage and problems with her weight and low self-esteem, the court heard. In her own testimony, she hinted at a strained relationship with her now-deceased parents, who were "in Russia, on a train" on her wedding day in 2007, she told the court. During a 2009 road-trip across Australia with her estranged husband Simon, she left abruptly in one of their many separations, leaving him alone with their son, then only a few months old. She frequently wept as she spoke of her close bond with the Patterson family, including her father-in-law, Don, with whom she shared a love of learning, she said. The judge presiding in the case, Justice Christopher Beale, instructed the jury that Patterson could only be found guilty if they rejected her testimony, which they did unanimously. Patterson initially told police she had bought the mushrooms used in the meal from a local supermarket, before then saying she had got them from an Asian grocer in Melbourne. A 2023 search of Asian grocers in the city found no evidence death cap mushrooms had been sold. During the trial, Patterson said she may have foraged for the mushrooms but did not ultimately know where they had come from. She had also lied about a cancer diagnosis to her guests because she was embarrassed to admit she was actually having gastric band surgery, Patterson said in evidence. She told the court she wanted her relatives' advice and assistance with looking after her two children while she had the surgery, and named a clinic in Melbourne that was later found never to have offered the procedure. From the wood-panelled dock at the back of Court 4 at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court in Morwell, where Patterson sat for most of the trial, she stared intently at the jury as they entered and exited the courtroom. Flanked by two custody officers, she appeared alert but relaxed during the proceedings, occasionally donning a pair of black-rimmed spectacles to study evidence on a court-issued tablet. The prosecution offered no motive for Patterson's decision to murder her in-laws. Under Australian law, it did not have to prove one to secure a conviction. Patterson will be sentenced at a later date, at a hearing that will consider the reasons for her offending. For now, the only person who truly knows why she poisoned the lunch is Erin Patterson herself.
The Star
17 hours ago
- The Star
Mushroom murderer Erin Patterson's decision to testify fails to convince jury
MORWELL, Australia (Reuters) -A month into the trial of the Australian woman accused of murdering three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives with poisonous mushrooms, her barrister Colin Mandy stood and delivered one of the case's pivotal moments. 'The defence will call Erin Patterson,' Mandy told the court. Patterson, who was convicted on Monday of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, was the only witness for her defence in a 10-week trial that gripped Australia. She told the court she had a loving relationship with the three people who died, including her mother and father-in-law, saying they were all she had in a frequently troubled life. In fact, she murdered three of them and attempted to kill a fourth by slipping lethal death cap mushrooms into individual Beef Wellingtons she served at a July 2023 lunch, a jury found. An alleged murderer testifying as a witness in their own defence is a rare strategy and normally a last resort, said Nicholas Papas, a veteran criminal barrister based in Melbourne who frequently acts in murder trials. 'The risk is that when you call your client, then suddenly people start focusing on your client,' he said. Patterson's decision also opened her up to five days of tense cross-examination by prosecutor Nanette Rogers, with whom she repeatedly clashed over minor details. Patterson's version of events – that she had included the deadly mushrooms by accident and she had not died herself after eating the tainted meal due to an eating disorder – was rejected by the jury as unreliable. 'You're actually putting (the case) in the hands of your client, and lawyers don't tend to want to necessarily do that,' Papas said. 'We like to control the process if we can.' TROUBLED LIFE Patterson, 50, grew up Melbourne, the daughter of an academic. She qualified as an air traffic controller and had been accepted to study nursing at the time of her arrest, after a life marred by a tempestuous marriage and problems with her weight and low self-esteem, the court heard. In her own testimony, she hinted at a strained relationship with her now-deceased parents, who were 'in Russia, on a train' on her wedding day in 2007, she told the court. During a 2009 road-trip across Australia with her estranged husband Simon, she left abruptly in one of their many separations, leaving him alone with their son, then only a few months old. She frequently wept as she spoke of her close bond with the Patterson family, including her father-in-law, Don, with whom she shared a love of learning, she said. The judge presiding in the case, Justice Christopher Beale, instructed the jury that Patterson could only be found guilty if they rejected her testimony, which they did unanimously. Patterson initially told police she had bought the mushrooms used in the meal from a local supermarket, before then saying she had got them from an Asian grocer in Melbourne. A 2023 search of Asian grocers in the city found no evidence death cap mushrooms had been sold. During the trial, Patterson said she may have foraged for the mushrooms but did not ultimately know where they had come from. She had also lied about a cancer diagnosis to her guests because she was embarrassed to admit she was actually having gastric band surgery, Patterson said in evidence. She told the court she wanted her relatives' advice and assistance with looking after her two children while she had the surgery, and named a clinic in Melbourne that was later found never to have offered the procedure. From the wood-panelled dock at the back of Court 4 at the Latrobe Valley Magistrates Court in Morwell, where Patterson sat for most of the trial, she stared intently at the jury as they entered and exited the courtroom. Flanked by two custody officers, she appeared alert but relaxed during the proceedings, occasionally donning a pair of black-rimmed spectacles to study evidence on a court-issued tablet. The prosecution offered no motive for Patterson's decision to murder her in-laws. Under Australian law, it did not have to prove one to secure a conviction. Patterson will be sentenced at a later date, at a hearing that will consider the reasons for her offending. For now, the only person who truly knows why she poisoned the lunch is Erin Patterson herself. (Reporting by Alasdair Pal in Morwell; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
The Star
a day ago
- The Star
Visa's 24/7 war room takes on global cybercriminals
From a small room called the Risk Operations centre in Virginia, employees analyse data streams on multiple screens, searching for patterns that distinguish fraudulent activity from legitimate credit card use. — Pixabay ASHBURN, United States: In the heart of Data centre Alley – a patch of suburban Washington where much of the world's internet traffic flows – Visa operates its global fraud command centre. The numbers that the payments giant grapples with are enormous. Every year, US$15 trillion (RM63.55 trillion) flows through Visa's networks, representing roughly 15% of the world's economy. And bad actors constantly try to syphon off some of that money. Modern fraudsters vary dramatically in sophistication. To stay ahead, Visa has invested US$12bil (RM50.84bil) over the past five years building AI-powered cyber fraud detection capabilities, knowing that criminals are also spending big. "You have everybody from a single individual threat actor looking to make a quick buck all the way to really corporatised criminal organisations that generate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars annually from fraud and scam activities," Michael Jabbara, Visa's global head of fraud solutions, told AFP during a tour of the company's security campus. "These organisations are very structured in how they operate." The best-resourced criminal syndicates now focus on scams that directly target consumers, enticing them into purchases or transactions by manipulating their emotions. "Consumers are continuously vulnerable. They can be exploited, and that's where we've seen a much higher incidence of attacks recently," Jabbara said. Scam centres The warning signs are clear: anything that seems too good to be true online is suspicious, and romance opportunities with strangers from distant countries are especially dangerous. "What you don't realise is that the person you're chatting with is more likely than not in a place like Myanmar," Jabbara warned. He said human-trafficking victims are forced to work in multi-billion-dollar cyber scam centres built by Asian crime networks in Myanmar's lawless border regions. The most up-to-date fraud techniques are systematic and quietly devastating. Once criminals obtain your card information, they automatically distribute it across numerous merchant websites that generate small recurring charges – amounts low enough that victims may not notice for months. Some of these operations increasingly resemble legitimate tech companies, offering services and digital products to fraudsters much like Google or Microsoft cater to businesses. On the dark web, criminals can purchase comprehensive fraud toolkits. "You can buy the software. You can buy a tutorial on how to use the software. You can get access to a mule network on the ground or you can get access to a bot network" to carry out denial-of-service attacks that overwhelm servers with traffic, effectively shutting them down. Just as cloud computing lowered barriers for startups by eliminating the need to build servers, "the same type of trend has happened in the cyber crime and fraud space," Jabbara explained. These off-the-shelf services can also enable bad actors to launch brute force attacks on an industrial scale – using repeated payment attempts to crack a card's number, expiry date, and security code. The sophistication extends to corporate-style management, Jabbara said. Some criminal organisations now employ chief risk officers who determine operational risk appetite. They might decide that targeting government infrastructure and hospitals generates an excessive amount of attention from law enforcement and is too risky to pursue. 'Millions of attacks' To combat these unprecedented threats, Jabbara leads a payment scam disruption team focused on understanding criminal methodologies. From a small room called the Risk Operations centre in Virginia, employees analyse data streams on multiple screens, searching for patterns that distinguish fraudulent activity from legitimate credit card use. In the larger Cyber Fusion centre, staff monitor potential cyberattacks targeting Visa's own infrastructure around the clock. "We deal with millions of attacks across different parts of our network," Jabbara noted, emphasising that most are handled automatically without human intervention. Visa maintains identical facilities in London and Singapore, ensuring 24-hour global vigilance. – AFP
