CHINA
Satellite to monitor Amazon
An Earth observation satellite jointly developed by China and Brazil was yesterday launched into space under a bilateral program seen as a template for broader cooperation among BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The satellite was the sixth developed under the China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) program that began in 1988. CBERS 4A was launched on a Long March 4B rocket in northern Shanxi Province, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The satellites are designed for Earth observation from orbit for nonmilitary use. CBERS-4A is to support the Brazilian government’s monitoring of the Amazon rainforest and changes in the country’s environment, Xinhua said. Another eight satellites were put into orbit by the same rocket, including a wide-range, multispectral, remote-sensing microsatellite donated to Ethiopia. Before dawn yesterday, Ethiopian senior officials and citizens gathered at the Entoto Observatory and Research Centre just north of the capital, Addis Ababa, to watch a live broadcast of the satellite’s launch. BRICS have been in talks on a framework agreement to create a constellation of satellites for Earth remote sensing and to share data obtained by each other’s satellites. Each country is to provide one to two satellites to the constellation, the China National Space Administration said last year.
PHILIPPINES
Hundreds of Chinese caught
Authorities yesterday said that they arrested 342 Chinese workers in a raid on an unlicensed gambling operation, part of a crackdown on illegal migration and an illicit gaming industry that is being fueled by China’s appetite for betting. Licensed online gaming operations introduced in 2016 have been a boon for the economy, but illegal businesses attracting massive numbers of Chinese migrants have also mushroomed, due largely to vested interests, corruption and weak law enforcement. Illegal operations far outnumber those being regulated and do not pay tax. Law enforcement bodies and the Chinese government suspect some are fronts for crime, including money laundering. The Chinese arrested late on Thursday were at a registered gambling firm that had yet to secure a license from the state gaming regulator. “We had reason to suspect that the company is a front for illegal cyberactivities and investment scams,” Bureau of Immigration Intelligence Division Chief Fortunato Manahan said. Although President Rodrigo Duterte has good relations with China, where gambling is prohibited, he has refused its request to ban gaming operations that cater to Chinese. Chinese gaming companies and their employees have been blamed for driving up office and residential rents, so much so that Makati City, Manila’s main business hub, has banned the issue of new licenses to gaming firms.
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
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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