UNITED STATES
Thousands may be infected
More than 3,000 patients at a surgery center might have been exposed to HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C, the New Jersey Department of Health said. Patients who had procedures done at the HealthPlus Surgery Center in Saddle Brook between January and Sept. 7 might have been exposed, officials said. The exposure was due to “deficiencies in infection control” involving the cleaning of instruments and injection of medications, surgery center administrator Betty McCabe said, adding that 3,778 patients are being urged to get their blood tested. The health department said that the risk of infection is low and no illnesses have been reported. The department called it “an abundance of caution” to suggest that people be tested.
MEXICO
Governor dies in crash
The governor of the state of Puebla and her husband, a senator and former governor, were killed on Monday in a helicopter crash, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said. “My deepest condolences to the relatives of Senator Rafael Moreno Valle and his wife, governor of Puebla Martha Erika Alonso,” he wrote on Twitter. “I assume the commitment to investigate the causes” and “tell the truth about what happened,” he added. The two pilots and an assistant to the senator also died in the crash. The aircraft went down 10 minutes after taking off in the Santa Maria Coronango area of Puebla and the cause of the crash was still unknown. The state legislature will have to appoint an interim governor and call an extraordinary vote that must be held in three to five months, the constitution says.
UNITED STATES
Trump asks boy about Santa
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump on Christmas Eve took calls from children anxious to find out where Santa was on his gift-giving journey. In one conversation, Trump asked a seven-year-old named Coleman: “Are you still a believer in Santa?” He listened for a moment before adding: “Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?” Trump listened again and chuckled before saying: “Well, you just enjoy yourself.” The first lady told a caller that Santa was in the Sahara. Several minutes later, she reported that Santa was far away in Morocco, but would be at the caller’s home on Christmas morning. She later tweeted that helping children track Santa “is becoming one of my favorite traditions!” The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) Tracks Santa program became a Christmas Eve tradition after a child mistakenly called the forerunner to NORAD in 1955 and asked to speak to Santa. The program was not affected by the government shutdown. It is run by volunteers at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado using preapproved funding
ISRAEL
Barr to address parliament
Former television star Roseanne Barr on Monday said she would be traveling to Israel next month and has been invited to address the nation’s parliament. Barr said her aim is to “further my own knowledge of Jewish and Israeli history” and speak out “against the insidious and anti-Semitic BDS movement.” BDS refers to a Palestinian-led movement calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel. ABC canceled its reboot of Roseanne in May after Barr tweeted racist remarks about former US president Barack Obama’s administration adviser Valerie Jarrett. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whose organization is sponsoring Barr’s trip, said that “bringing an incredibly proud Jewish woman like Rosanne to Israel will be a great boost to its citizens.”
‘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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