An Ethiopian asylum seeker has been sentenced to 12 months in prison after being convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman in Epping, Essex. Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, 38, was found guilty of five offences following a three-day trial at Chelmsford and Colchester magistrates' courts. The incidents occurred just days after Kebatu arrived in the UK on a small boat and while he was accommodated at The Bell Hotel as part of the UK's asylum seeker housing program.

The court heard that Kebatu approached the teenager and her friends in Epping town center on July 7 and 8, inviting them back to the hotel and making unwanted advances. According to testimony, he told the girls "come back to Africa, you would be a good wife" and stated he wanted "one baby from you and one baby from your friend." The following day, Kebatu attempted to kiss the 14-year-old and placed his hand on her thigh, with the victim reporting she repeatedly said "no, I'm 14" but alleged he responded that "age did not matter."

Kebatu also sexually assaulted a woman who had been assisting him with his CV, placing his hand on her thigh after what she described as him "taking advantage of my kindness." During sentencing, District Judge Christopher Williams criticized Kebatu's account and said he had sought to portray himself as a victim and "scapegoat." The judge noted that while Kebatu had attempted suicide while on remand, there was "no realistic prospect" of rehabilitation, making a suspended sentence inappropriate.

The case sparked significant protests outside The Bell Hotel and other asylum seeker accommodations across the country. In victim impact statements, the 14-year-old said she now feels vulnerable wearing skirts and checks over her shoulder when with friends, while the adult victim expressed frustration that Kebatu "did not even appear to know that what he's done was wrong." The court also heard that Kebatu now wishes to be deported, a position he held even before the trial according to his lawyer Molly Dyas.

A major outage at Amazon Web Services has disrupted operations for numerous popular applications and platforms globally, affecting millions of users. The cloud computing infrastructure failure began early Monday morning, with users reporting widespread issues accessing services including Snapchat, Duolingo, Zoom, and various gaming platforms. Amazon confirmed it was investigating increased error rates and latency across multiple AWS services, though the company has not yet identified the root cause of the system failure.

The disruption appears to have originated with servers hosted in the US-EAST-1 region, according to initial reports. This triggered a cascade effect that impacted AWS infrastructure supporting millions of websites and applications worldwide. Downdetector, a platform that monitors service outages, reported receiving over four million problem reports in a single morning—more than double the typical weekly volume—indicating the scale of the disruption across affected services.

Among the services experiencing significant operational problems are communication platforms like Zoom, Signal, and Slack; gaming services including Roblox, Fortnite, and PlayStation Network; social media applications such as Snapchat; and financial services from banks including Lloyds and Bank of Scotland. Streaming platforms Prime Video and Crunchyroll, along with educational tool Duolingo and design platform Canva, have also been affected by the cloud service failure.

The outage has manifested differently across regions, with Amazon's own websites remaining operational in Europe while still experiencing service-specific errors. AWS engineers are actively working to mitigate the issues and restore normal operations. The company has committed to providing regular updates as they work to resolve the widespread service disruption that has highlighted the internet's heavy reliance on cloud infrastructure providers.