RUSSIA
Astronauts return to Earth
Three astronauts yesterday returned to Earth after more than six months aboard the International Space Station. A Russian Soyuz capsule with NASA’s Serena Aunon-Chancellor, Russian Sergey Prokopyev and German Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency (ESA) landed on the snow-covered steppes in Kazakhstan, about 140km southeast of the city of Dzhezkazgan. They touched down a minute ahead of schedule at 11:02am. The crew radioed that they were feeling fine. Russian rescue teams in helicopters and all-terrain vehicles rushed to the landing site to extract the astronauts from the capsule charred by a fiery ride through the atmosphere. The trio had spent 197 days in space. It was the first mission for Aunon-Chancellor and Prokopyev, while Gerst flew his second to a total of 362 days in orbit, setting the ESA’s flight duration record.
UNITED KINGDOM
Drones halt Gatwick flights
Gatwick Airport in Britain was forced to ground flights after reports of drones flying over the airfield, the airport said yesterday. Flights into the airport, which is south of London, were diverted to other cities across the country, while passengers waiting to take off faced long delays just days ahead of Christmas, the UK’s Press Association news agency reported. “Following reports of two drones flying over the Gatwick Airport airfield, we have had to suspend flights while this is investigated,” Gatwick Airport said in a statement late on Wednesday night. “We apologize to any affected passengers for this inconvenience, but the safety of our passengers is our foremost priority.” The runway has since reopened, but passengers continue to face delays while airlines “catch up on the flight schedule,” the airport said yesterday morning. Sussex Police was investigating the incident, it added. Gatwick is the eighth-busiest airport in Europe.
UNITED STATES
Officers die in railway pursuit
Edward Brown of Chicago, 24, was on Wednesday charged with two felony weapons contraventions in connection with the deaths of two Chicago police officers who were hit and killed by a speeding commuter train earlier this week. Officers Eduardo Marmolejo, 37, and Conrad Gary, 31, were investigating a report of gunfire near railroad tracks on the city’s Far South Side on Monday when they were hit by a southbound train going at least 96.5kph, police said. The two officers, assigned to the Chicago Police Department’s Calumet District, were on foot and on the tracks during rush-hour while pursuing a suspect along the Metra railway line when they were killed, police said.
UNITED STATES
Obama visits kids as Santa
Former US president Barack Obama on Wednesday took on a new high-profile role as Father Christmas for a surprise visit to sick children in Washington. Sporting a festive Santa hat and armed with a sack of gifts, he delighted young patients at Children’s National hospital with gifts and hugs. “I just want to say thank you to all of you guys,” Obama told staff, who greeted him with rapturous cheers, in a video he shared on his Twitter account. “We’ve had the chance to talk to some of the wonderful kids and their families,” he said. “As the dad of two girls, I can only imagine in that situation to have nurses and staff and doctors and people who are caring for them, and looking after them ... that’s the most important thing there is.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
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
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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