Nine people have been detained so far, Anadolu news agency said, adding that the suspects were accused of using a messaging app allegedly used by Gulen to mobilise followers in Turkey and of belonging to a “terror” group.

Thousands of people have already been arrested in Turkey for using the Bylock messaging app, which the authorities say was used by Gulen supporters to coordinate actions ahead of the plot.

The latest arrests come amid growing alarm over press freedom in Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in particular under the state of emergency imposed in the wake of the failed July 2016 coup and which remains in place.

Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in the US state of Pennsylvania, denies any link to the botched putsch.

Those detained include a former columnist for the Turkiye daily Ahmet Sagirli and the current website editor at the leftist opposition Birgun daily Burak Ekici.

Turkey ranks 155 on the latest Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) world press freedom index, below Belarus and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to the latest figures from the P24 press freedom website, there are 164 journalists behind bars in Turkey, most of whom were detained under the state of emergency.

In one of the highest profile cases, 17 staff from the Cumhuriyet daily — one of the few voices in the media in Turkey to oppose Erdogan — last month went on trial for aiding “terror” groups.

While most of the suspects in that case have been released from pre-trial detention, four Cumhuriyet journalists, most of whom have been held for eight months, remain behind bars.

The crackdown has also affected foreign reporters and freelance French journalist Loup Bureau was detained last month on charges of links to a Kurdish militia Ankara regards as a terror group.

Kem Ley was gunned down in July last year while drinking coffee outside a petrol station in the capital in a brazen daylight murder that sent a tremor through civil society groups.

A former soldier, who calls himself “Meet to Kill”, was sentenced to life imprisonment in March for the killing.

Political analyst Kim Sok was charged with defamation and inciting unrest for comments in a radio interview suggesting links between the ruling Cambodia People’s Party and the shooting.

The complaint was brought by Cambodia’s strongman premier Hun Sen who has ruled the country for over three decades.

A Phnom Penh court on Thursday found Kim Sok guilty of the charges and sentenced him to 18 months in prison, ordering him to pay $200,000 in compensation to the ruling party.

Kim Sok’s comments could have ignited anger among the public “that would lead to chaos in the society”, Judge Ky Rithy said.

A defiant Kim Sok refused to stand up before the judge, prompting four prison guards to force him to his feet.

He also demanded a re-trial, yelling “I don’t respect a scarecrow judge.”

Hun Sen is renowned for using Cambodia’s pliant courts to tie-up his critics — including activists and the opposition party, which is hoping to oust him in elections next year.

Some 27 political prisoners have been thrown in jail since 2013 with dozens of ongoing prosecutions against others, according to a tally by Amnesty International.

Hun Sen, one of the world’s longest serving leaders, portrays himself as a premier who has brought growth and stability to an impoverished country ravaged by decades of war.

But many Cambodians, especially the young and city-dwellers, say corruption, inequality and rights abuses have flourished under his watch, raising the prospect of a tight general election next year.

Pictures on social media showed shattered glass and paramedics tending to passengers on the upper deck of the red double-decker bus.

Passenger Amy Mullineux, a nurse, said the driver told her he had lost consciousness.

“He said he blacked out before the bus hit the shop,” the 40-year-old said. “He doesn’t remember hitting anything.”

The accident happened on Lavender Hill, in southwest London, known for the 1951 British comedy film “The Lavender Hill Mob”, starring Alec Guinness, Sid James and a young Audrey Hepburn, which won an Oscar for best screenplay.

Another passenger, Andrew Matthews, 34, said around a dozen were on board when the bus began to drift off the road.

“As soon as the bus came to a stop there was yelling, screaming,” he said. “I noticed a lady wedged in the front right-hand side. She was screaming for help. There was a lot of blood.”

The two passengers initially trapped were freed by firefighters and the bus driver was taken to hospital. London Ambulance Service said they had treated six patients.

 Court officials took two days to read out all 626 charges against the 36-year-old divorcee, and finished Thursday afternoon.

They included 599 charges of sodomy against the 15-year-old girl, as well as counts of incest, rape and other sex crimes.

The bespectacled suspect, in a grey T-shirt and blue trousers was calm when the charges were read in court. He pleaded not guilty and the case will now proceed to trial.

“He faces a prison sentence of over 12,000 years,” Aimi Syazwani, a deputy public prosecutor, told AFP at a newly-established special court for sex crimes against children in the administrative capital Putrajaya.

For each charge of sodomy, the man can be punished with a maximum jail term of 20 years, as well as caning. He faces a rape charge that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years, and 30 other charges of sexual assault, each punishable by up to 20 years in jail.

Judge Yong Zarida Sazali denied the man bail after prosecutors warned there was a danger of him fleeing or intimidating witnesses.

The suspect cannot be named to protect the identity of the victim.

The man, who sold investment products, was arrested on July 26 after the girl’s mother lodged a police report. The offences were allegedly committed between January and July this year, when the daughter was living with her father.

The special court for sexual crimes against children was launched in June.

This is the new AirAsia’s destination, said Mr. Spencer Lee, Head of Commercial for AirAsia Berhad.

Sihanoukville was added into our extensive network map of over 120 destinations, he underlined.

“This new destination will enable travellers in the region to experience a hidden side of Asean that has yet to be discovered. More importantly through this direct route, we also want to open up air travel for the people of Sihanoukville to explore Asean and the world using our wide connectivity across 27 countries,” he added.

Mr. Éric Delobel, CEO of Cambodia Airports, the company that operates the Kingdom’ network of international airports said AirAsia is moving up another step and it is a key driver in connecting Cambodia to the world.

Cambodia Airports want to welcome more visitors and airlines to Sihanoukville as we are confident in its potential, he added.

This AirAsia’s new service will operates on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

The Global Slavery Index, from the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation, defines slavery as “situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power or deception”

More than 45 million people globally are living in modern slavery with Asia accounting for two thirds of the victims. Modern forms of slavery can include debt bondage, forced marriage, child slavery, commercial sexual exploitation and forced labour, where victims are made to work through violence and intimidation.

According to the index, which ranks 167 countries, half the population of modern slaves are in five countries — India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.

India, however, has the dubious distinction of having the highest number of people in the world trapped in modern slavery with 18.35 million victims among its 1.3 billion population.

India is followed by China (3.38 million), Pakistan (2.13 million) and Bangladesh (1.53 million).

North Korea remains the only nation in Asia and the world that has not explicitly criminalised any form of modern slavery. The country has the highest per capita level of modern slavery, at 4.37 per cent of the population.

Among Southeast Asian countries, Indonesia has highest number of victims of modern slavery.

In other Asian countries modern slavery is equally widespread.

Myanmar has significant discrimination against minorities while Thailand is unable to protect migrant workers on fishing trawlers from starvation and murder, with trafficking and forced labour.

Large numbers of women and girls continued to migrate internally and internationally for jobs as domestic workers. While this offers an important economic opportunity, reports of abuse, exploitation and servitude persist, particularly in wealthy countries within the region where there was high demand for live-in help like Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan.

In Philippines, large numbers of women and girls continue to migrate for jobs as domestic workers.

Even in the world’s third largest economy, Japan human trafficking is on a rise. In neighbouring South Korea, slavery is thriving on rural islands off South Korea’s rugged southwest coast.

In Malaysia and in Singapore as well, the governments have not been able to protect people from living in slave-like conditions.

A team from the National University of Singapore (NUS) beat 73 teams from 18 countries to win the United Asian Debating Championships.

The team – one of three that NUS sent to the event- defeated a team from Ateneo De Manila University in the finals last Friday.

The two teams slugged it out over a topic involving the United States Democratic Party and the issue of class and identity politics. Eight out of nine judges voted to declare NUS the winner.

The competition was held in the Cambodian city of Siem Reap.

Chief judge Mifzal Mohammed Mohd Murshid Kieron told The Straits Times that the NUS team won because it showed a strong understanding of US politics and was able to address its opponent’s criticisms.

“This was a thoroughly well-deserved win,” he said. Nar Sher May, 23, who was part of the three-member team, said it was the first time she had won at an international debate competition. All the effort, she added, was worth it in the end.

Nar, who is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree, is now looking forward to the Asian British Parliamentary Debate Championships, which will take place in October in Krabi, Thailand.

Singapore, whose crime rates are among the world’s lowest, has tough laws for minor offences such as vandalism, which can be punished with caning. The import and sale of chewing gum is banned except for medical reasons.

Police launched an investigation after a bus company in the city-state reported last week that one of their vehicles’ passenger seats was perforated with toothpicks.

“Through extensive ground enquiries and with the assistance of CCTV footages, officers… established the identity of the suspect,” they said in a statement on Tuesday.

A Facebook user posted pictures at the end of last month of three toothpicks sticking out of a bus seat, with the post shared more than 2,500 times.

“This happens to me this morning (Thank God, I did check before I sat down),” the female user wrote.

If found guilty of the offence of mischief, the suspect — whose identity was not revealed — could be jailed for up to two years or fined, or both.

Singapore has faced criticism from rights groups about cracking down hard on relatively minor crimes. In 2015 two young German men were sentenced to nine months in prison and three strokes of the cane for spray-painting a metro train.

The call for police officers to kill their colleagues is the latest inflammatory comment by Duterte in his controversial drug war, which has claimed thousands of lives, and comes shortly after a meeting with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Duterte made the offer during a speech at national police headquarters, offering two million pesos ($40,000) for an unspecified number of officers who allegedly helped a mayor killed in an anti-drug operation on July 30.

“Each of those policemen carry on their heads now, I am announcing, two million per head and you are free to go on leave (to pursue them),” Duterte told the officers in the audience.

“I’ll cut short my speech so that you will have a chance for a crack at the two million for those idiots.”

Duterte added the bounty would be paid if the policemen were found “dead or alive — better dead”.

He said the unidentified policemen had worked with Reynaldo Parojinog, the mayor of the southern city of Ozamiz, who was killed in the pre-dawn raid along with his wife, his brother and 13 other people.

Police said they were forced to kill the 16 people in self-defence, but Parojinog’s lawyer has insisted the mayor and others had not resisted arrest.

Duterte had accused Parojinog of being a major drug trafficker.

As he has done in similar cases of alleged extrajudicial killings, Duterte on Wednesday also vowed to give legal protection to the policemen who killed Parojinog and the other 15.

If they were found guilty of murder, he would pardon them, he vowed.

Duterte easily won presidential elections last year after promising an unprecedented war on drugs in which tens of thousands of people would be killed.

Since he took office in the middle of last year, police have confirmed killing more than 3,400 people in anti-drug operations.

More than 2,000 other people have been killed in drug-related crimes and thousands more murdered in unexplained circumstances, according to police data.

Rights groups say many of those victims have been killed by government-backed vigilantes, and Duterte has boasted that he would be “happy to slaughter” three million drug addicts.

Former US president Barack Obama was among the many international critics of Duterte’s tactics.

But criticism from the United States, the Philippines’ former colonial ruler and mutual defence partner, has been toned down under the administration of Donald Trump.

Tillerson met Duterte in Manila on Monday on the sidelines of a regional security forum. Duterte said American officials did not raise any concerns with him.

The car sped off after the incident described by local mayor Patrick Balkany as “without doubt a deliberate act”.

The Paris prosecutors’ office said its anti-terrorism unit has launched a probe into “attempted killings… in relation to a terrorist undertaking”.

Defence Minister Florence Parly condemned the car ramming as a “cowardly act”, saying it did “nothing to dent soldiers’ determination to work for the security of the French people”.

“Security forces are actively seeking the perpetrator who is on the run. The ongoing probe will determine his motives and the circumstances in which he acted,” Parly said.

France, which has been under a state of emergency since the November 2015 attacks in Paris, has seen a string of assaults on security forces, including those guarding key tourist sites.

Parly said three of the soldiers were “more seriously injured”. All six were hospitalised, but none have life-threatening injuries, Balkany said.

They are part of the 7,000-strong anti-terrorism Sentinelle force set up after the November 2015 bombings and shootings that killed 130 people in the French capital and were claimed by the Islamic State (IS) group.

IS has repeatedly said that France is a target because of its participation in the US-led international coalition fighting the jihadist group, with French jets carrying out air strikes against the extremist group in Syria.

– ‘Car accelerated very fast’ –

Wednesday’s incident took place at about 8:00 am (0600 GMT) outside the barracks in the northwestern Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret.

“This morning, as a group of our soldiers were leaving their barracks to go out on patrol, a BMW vehicle parked in the alley rammed into them,” Balkany told news channel BFMTV, adding that the car had “accelerated very fast”.

The incident came just four days after Sentinelle soldiers arrested an 18-year-old with a history of psychological problems at the Eiffel Tower where he brandished a knife and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest).

He told investigators he wanted to kill a soldier, sources close to the case told AFP.

In February, a man armed with a machete attacked four soldiers on patrol at Paris’s Louvre Museum, while in April another extremist shot and killed a policeman on the Champs Elysees, the French capital’s most famous boulevard.

In June, a 40-year-old Algerian doctorate student who had pledged allegiance to IS attacked a policeman with a hammer outside Notre Dame cathedral.

The wave of attacks in France has had a serious impact on tourism in the world’s top tourist destination, but the industry has begun to recover as incidents have become more widespread and generally less deadly.

With terror attacks hitting not just France but also Belgium, Britain and Germany, potential travellers show “a kind of fatalism”, said Josette Sicsic, head of Touriscopie, a firm that tracks tourist behaviour.

The French tourism ministry expects a five to six per cent increase in overall arrivals to France this year, for a new record of 89 million visitors.

The lowest point for Paris came at the end of March 2016 — four and a half months after the Paris attacks when IS jihadists targeted people enjoying an evening out at trendy eateries, a concert hall and the national stadium.

In a rebound that began at the end of 2016, Paris saw a record 2.6 million foreign arrivals in the first four months of this year — a 19 per cent increase over the same period last year.