EL SALVADOR
Former president dies
Former president Francisco Flores has died, officials in his political party announced late on Saturday, days after he slipped into a coma following a massive stroke. “We mourn the death of president Francisco Flores and express solidarity with his family at this time,” read a message issued from the Twitter account of his rightist National Republican Alliance party. The announcement of the death of Flores, 56, who led the Central American country from 1999 to 2004, comes as he faced a corruption trial on charges of stealing US$15 million donated by Taiwan for victims of a 2001 earthquake. Flores turned himself in to authorities in 2014 to face the allegations, which he steadfastly denied. The former president, who was under house arrest at the time of his death, was rushed to a hospital the previous weekend after suffering a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body and slipped into a coma from which he never awakened.
BRAZIL
One killed in shooting
At least one person was killed and two were wounded on Saturday in a shooting in a tourist district of Rio de Janeiro during a pre-carnival celebration, the military police announced. The streets of the Brazilian city, which is to play host to the Olympic Games in August, have been filled in recent days with people celebrating in advance of its famous carnival, which officially begins on Friday. The shooting occurred as the musical group Ceu na Terra was parading before a crowd of about 8,000 people in the Santa Teresa district of central Rio. “Three people were wounded and one of them has died,” a military police spokesman said. The Brazilian government is expecting a million tourists for this year’s rendition of the world-famous carnival. However, with the Olympics only months away, Rio remains a dangerous city, with regular clashes between criminal gangs and the police and at least three murders every day, mainly in the poorer neighborhoods.
CANADA
Ex-mafia don gunned down
A former mafia don with a long history as a leading figure in Canada’s crime underworld has been gunned down at his home in Toronto, police said on Saturday. Authorities said Rocco Zito, 87 — for years a senior member of the notorious ’Ndrangheta, or Calabrian mafia — was found fatally shot at his home late on Friday. A suspect, Domenico Scopelliti, 51, identified in the Canadian media as the dead man’s son-in-law, has turned himself in, according to news reports, which said he faces a first-degree murder charge in the case.
SLOVENIA
Four killed in pile-up
At least four people died and 25 were injured on Saturday in a pile-up caused by thick fog in western Slovenia involving more than 50 vehicles, local police said. “Four people died and about 25 were injured, the clean-up operation continues, but we do not expect that figure to change,” police spokeswoman Anita Leskovec said. She said at least 55 vehicles, including a bus and four trucks, were involved in the accident. Due to bad visibility, “another three or four collisions” later took place at the same site, she added. Public Radio Slovenija earlier quoted unofficial sources as saying that five people had died in the pile-up which happened early in the afternoon near Senozece, about 60km southwest of Slovenian capital Ljubljana. Due to the accident the highway connecting the Adriatic coast with Ljubljana remained closed for several hours.
‘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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