AZERBAIJAN
Ruling party wins poll
President Ilham Aliyev’s ruling Yeni Azerbaijan party yesterday celebrated a win in parliamentary polls, but the opposition claimed the election was “totally falsified.” Counting showed the Yeni Azerbaijan party with 65 seats in the 125-member parliament, after 87 percent of electoral precincts declared results in the first-past-the-post ballot, Central Election Commission chief Mazahir Panahov said. The sole opposition politician elected was Erkin Gadirly of Republican Alternative Party, while all the other parties represented in the parliament, the Milli Majlis, are seen as pro-Aliyev. “The elections were totally falsified,” opposition leader Arif Gadjily of the Musavat party said after the polls closed, denouncing what he claimed was widespread ballot stuffing and multiple voting. More than 5.3 million people were eligible to vote, and turnout stood at 47.8 percent, election officials said.
SYRIA
Russian strikes kill five
Russian airstrikes yesterday killed at least five civilians in the last major opposition bastion in the northwest, bringing the death toll to 25 in less than 24 hours, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The early morning raids hit a populous village in Aleppo Province, where battles between Russia-backed regime forces and their opponents have raged for weeks, the observatory said. It followed a night of heavy bombardment by Russia and the regime that left at least 20 civilians dead in the neighboring provinces of Idlib and Aleppo, the observatory said.
NEPAL
Legalizing pot proposed
Forty-six lawmakers of the ruling Communist Party of Nepal yesterday filed a proposal in parliament to legalize the production and use of marijuana. “Legalizing marijuana will help the poor farmers and since most of the Western world, which was reason for making it illegal in the first place, have already ended the prohibition, Nepal should also lift the ban,” lawmaker Birod Khatiwada said. Marijuana has been used in the country for generations, but was made illegal in 1976.
SWITZERLAND
Voters back rights law
Voters on Sunday gave their backing in a referendum to extending anti-racism legislation to cover sexual orientation, defying critics who had claimed such a move would be an infringement of free speech. A law passed in December 2018 specifically protected LGBTQ+ people from discrimination or hate speech, but an alliance of right-wing parties opposed the change and sought a referendum to prevent the law from coming into effect. On Sunday’s vote, 63.1 percent of the public voted in favor of expanding the anti-discrimination law, although in the German-speaking cantons of Schwyz, Uri and Appenzell-Innerrhoden, there were majorities in favor of blocking the law. In French-speaking Vaud, the law was endorsed by an 80 percent.
THAILAND
Speedboat crash kills two
Two Russian children died yesterday in a collision of two speedboats off Phuket, a 12-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl. Twenty other passengers from the boats were brought to hospitals to check their condition, police said. The boats were carrying 34 passengers in total, most of them Russian tourists, Marine Police Region 8 chief Colonel Prasert Srikhunrat said. Police said one boat was heading to the Royal Phuket Marina to pick up tourists when it was struck by another tour boat full of tourists.
‘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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