SIERRA LEONE
Center irked by Ebola pranks
Eighty percent of people phoning a toll-free Ebola help number are prank callers, Ebola Call Center head Reynold Senessie said in Freetown on Tuesday. “Such prank calls are affecting the smooth operation of the center,” Senessie said while briefing Palo Conteh, head of the National Ebola Response Center, who paid an unannounced visit to the facility. The good news is that “genuine calls are dwindling and response to such calls have been swift,” Senessie added. Conteh warned that the mobile numbers of the prank callers “will be traced and legal action taken against them.”
KENYA
Journalists ejected at UN
A group of Nairobi-based journalists were ejected from a reception area at the UN complex in Nairobi on Tuesday after launching a protest over al-Jazeera journalists jailed in Egypt. Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shukri was attending the reception. About a dozen journalists were removed from the reception by UN security after waving placards with “#FREEAJSTAFF” written on them while wearing black masking tape over their mouths. Three al-Jazeera English journalists — Canadian-Egyptian Mohammed Fahmy, Australian Peter Greste and Egyptian Baher Mohammed — have been held for more than a year in Egypt on terror-related charges.
SOUTH AFRICA
Court denies Mandela ex
A court on Tuesday threw out an application by former president Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife to block a planned meeting to discuss infighting in the late peace icon’s family. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who is claiming ownership of the former president’s rural home, was trying to stop the Mandela family from holding talks at the Qunu property without her permission. The meeting is planned for tomorrow.
FRANCE
Work, drink linked: study
Working too hard can drive you to drink, researchers said on Wednesday, warning of the health risks of dual excess. An overview of studies covering more than 400,000 people showed that individuals who exceed 48 working hours per week are likelier to consume “risky” quantities of alcohol, they said. The paper, published in The BMJ general medicine journal, reported that long working hours boosted the likelihood of higher alcohol intake by 11 percent overall. People who worked 49 to 54 hours a week ran a 13 percent higher risk of developing a “risky alcohol use” habit compared with counterparts who worked a 35 to 40-hour work week. The findings add statistical backing to anecdotal evidence for a link between excessive work and alcohol abuse, the authors said. More than a dozen developed economies were covered by the research, including Taiwan.
BRAZIL
Animals get iced treats
Rio de Janeiro is experiencing high summer temperatures, but animals at the city’s zoo have won a little relief with icy treats. With the heat index hitting 46oC, keepers at the zoo on Tuesday tossed 30kg bucket-sized “meatsicles” to Siberian tigers as they swam about in a pool. Brown bears won giant blocks of iced watermelon, papayas and grapes. Monkeys delicately nibbled at their own frozen treats — all the while staring at children visitors themselves cooling down with ice cream. The treats are to keep coming, as there is no end in sight for the heatwave.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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