GERMANY
Merkel’s coalition battered
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Saturday salvaged her fragile ruling coalition with the resignation of two officials, including one junior minister, who had aligned themselves with the far-right in a regional election. The surprise election of Thomas Kemmerich as premier in Thuringia on Wednesday with the help of lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for German on Wednesday shattered a political taboo, as mainstream parties have vowed never to work with the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant party. Merkel dismissed junior minister Christian Hirte after he congratulated Kemmerich on his success, but Kemmerich also stood down under pressure. Media reports said the center-left Social Democrats had demanded Kemerich’s resignation as a condition for remaining in Merkel’s governing coalition.
TURKEY
Syrian outposts fortified
The military is deploying additional military supplies to fortify its outposts in Syria’s Idlib Province, Minister of Defense Hulusi Akar told the Hurriyet newspaper, as its forces prepare for a bigger confrontation with Russian-backed Syrian fighters in the area. The province has become a flashpoint between Ankara and Moscow since Syrian troops killed seven Turkish soldiers and a civilian there last week, but Akar said Ankara was keeping Russia in the loop about its operations in Idlib.
IRAN
Satellite countdown begins
The nation’s space agency yesterday started counting down to the launch of a new scientific observation satellite. “Beginning countdown to launch #Zafar_Satellite in the next few hours... In the Name of God,” Minister of Information and Communications Technology Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi wrote on Twitter. The agency has said Zafar’s “primary mission” would be collecting imagery needed to study earthquakes, deal with natural disasters and help develop the nation’s agriculture.
UNITED STATES
NYC cops in van ambushed
Two New York City police officers narrowly escaped with their lives when a gunman fired into their patrol van on Saturday night, wounding one of them in an attack that officials called an attempted assassination. The ambush, which New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said “should outrage all New Yorkers,” happened just before 8:30pm in the South Bronx. The officer at the wheel of the van was grazed in the chin and neck, but he avoided serious injury, and was expected to released from the hospital yesterday. The uniformed officers were sitting in their van with emergency lights activated when a man approached them and engaged them in conversation, Shea said. The man asked the officers for directions, then pulled out a gun and fired multiple shots, striking the officer behind the wheel, Shea said. The officer’s partner drove him to a nearby hospital.
UNITED STATES
‘Wild, Wild West’ star dies
Robert Conrad, the rugged, contentious actor who starred in the hugely popular 1960s television series Hawaiian Eye and The Wild, Wild West, died on Saturday. He was 84. He died of heart failure in Malibu, California, family spokesperson Jeff Ballard said. Conrad became a star after Hawaiian Eye debuted in 1959. He interspersed his long TV career with numerous roles in films, while finding plenty of time for arguments. Conrad had a reputation as a tough customer and was sued more than a half-dozen times as a result of fist fights.
‘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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