ALBANIA
Ex-minister arrested: police
Police said former minister of labor, social affairs and equal opportunities Spiro Ksera has been arrested on charges of abuse of power. Police on Friday said that 48-year-old Ksera is accused of issuing a 30 million lek (then US$285,000) tender for activities that never took place. At the time, Ksera was minister of labor, social affairs and equal opportunities in the Cabinet of then-prime minister Sali Berisha. He left the post in 2013. The arrest comes as the country hopes to launch full membership talks soon with the EU. The EU has asked the government to step up its fight against corruption.
CANADA
Avalanche kills five: officials
Five snowmobilers were killed on Friday after being buried in an avalanche in British Columbia, officials said. The deaths were confirmed by the British Columbia Coroners Service, which said the accident occurred on Friday afternoon in the western hamlet of McBride, about 800km northeast of Vancouver. Officials told reporters that six other people trapped by the avalanche were rescued alive. Rescuers said the snowmobilers had strayed to a part of the area that was off-limits to skiers and other winter sport enthusiasts. British Columbia Coroners Service spokeswoman Barbara McLintock said the site of the disaster “is not a resort” area. Avalanche Canada said the disaster was likely caused by human activity. The non-profit group said the area had just received about 30cm of fresh snow and conditions in the region were windy, which, combined with recent mild temperatures, created an unstable snowpack.
EUROPEAN UNION
Rocket starts building EDRS
A Russian Proton rocket on Friday night blasted off from Kazakhstan to put into orbit both the first part of Europe’s new space “data highway” and a Eutelsat communications satellite. The 19-story-tall Russian-built rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 4:20am. The rocket was carrying the first building block of the European Data Relay System (EDRS), a “big data” highway costing nearly 500 million euros (US$541.5 million) that is to harness new laser-based communications technology.
RUSSIA
Earthquake strikes Far East
A powerful magnitude 7 earthquake yesterday morning struck in the Russian Far East, US and Russian authorities said, although there were no reports of any casualties. The US Geological Survey said the earthquake occurred at 3:25am GMT at a depth of 160km, in the mountainous Kamchatka Krai region on the eastern coast. The local branch of the Ministry of Emergency Situations said the origin of the earthquake was located northwest of regional capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. “The epicenter was in the region of Yelizovo, 84km northwest of Yelizovo and 87km northwest of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky,” the ministry said in a statement. “Inhabitants of populated areas felt the tremor at magnitude of 5.0,” it said, adding: “Preliminary information indicates the earthquake caused no damage or casualties.” The Russian Academy of Sciences said on its Web site the first tremor was followed minutes later by a magnitude 5.2 aftershock. The earthquake struck in an area close to the “Ring of Fire,” an arc of fault lines that circle the Pacific Ocean that is prone to frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The US’ National and Pacific tsunami warning centers said there was no risk of a tsunami.
‘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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