UNITED KINDOM
Carriers cancel Cairo flights
British Airways and Lufthansa on Saturday said they were suspending flights to Cairo for unspecified reasons related to safety and security. The British carrier said it was canceling flights to the Egyptian capital for a week. The German airline said normal operations would resume yesterday. Both carriers delivered two-sentence statements via e-mail. British Airways attributed its cancelations to what it called its constant review of security arrangements at all airports, calling them “a precaution to allow for further assessment.” Lufthansa said it was suspending its flights as a precaution, mentioning “safety,” but not “security” as its concern.
INDIA
Four killed for witchcraft
Four members of a family, including two women, were killed by fellow villagers in the country’s tribal heartland over allegations of witchcraft, authorities said yesterday. Four elders of a tribal family, all aged in their 60s, were attacked by about a dozen villagers outside their home late on Saturday. “It is linked to some local occult practitioner who blamed some negative development in the tribal village to the members of this family,” Gumla District Deputy Commissioner Shashi Ranjan told reporters in Jharkhand State. “Additional forces have been at the Siskari village since authorities found out about the incident,” he added. “It is peaceful, but no one, not even survivors from the family, are saying anything, probably out of fear,” he said.
MEXICO
Five new reefs found
Researchers on Saturday said that they have discovered five previously unknown coral reefs off the country’s Gulf coast. The reefs collectively cover an area of more than 1,100 hectares, the Department of Education said. They lie both inside and outside a marine protected area, and scientists have asked for them to be legally protected against oil extraction and development projects, it said. The discovery includes a 5km-long, 700m-wide reef off the Tamiahua Lagoon, near the city of Tampico, the longest and northernmost reported in the area to date, the department said.
VENEZUELA
US accused of intrusion
A US intelligence aircraft flew over the country’s airspace on Friday in “a clear provocation” and in violation of international treaties, Ministry of Defense officials said. The US military aircraft entered local airspace over the Caribbean in a one-hour flight in breach of international treaties until it was pursued by the country’s air force, officials said. They identified the US plane as an “EP-3E Aries II, a four-engine, low-wing aircraft.”
SERBIA
Man calls in threat for date
A man has confessed to calling in a fake bomb threat to Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport because he was hoping for a date with a stewardess, local media reported on Saturday. The 65-year-old man told a court that he had met a Lufthansa flight attendant in Belgrade and wanted to date her. On Wednesday, having failed to find her in her hotel, he called the airport and reported that a bomb had been placed in a Lufthansa plane. The idea, he said, was to keep her in town, local media reported. Police tracked down the culprit after tracing the landline he had used to make the call. The court ordered the man held in custody for 30 days and he was to be charged with causing panic and unrest.
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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