UNITED STATES
NASA mathematician dies
Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who calculated rocket trajectories and Earth orbits for NASA’s early space missions and was later portrayed in the 2016 hit film Hidden Figures, about pioneering black female aerospace workers, has died. She was 101. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Twitter that she died on Monday morning. No cause was given.
Photo: EPA-EFE / NASA
INDONESIA
Floods paralyze Jakarta
Torrential rain yesterday brought floods to Jakarta, paralyzing large parts of the capital, as rescue workers used boats to navigate streets turned into murky waterways to get people to safety. More than 200 neighborhoods were affected by the floods, Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan said. Evacuation posts had been set up with health facilities, he said.
SYRIA
Turkish shelling kills nine
Turkish shelling on Monday killed nine regime fighters in the northwest, where Ankara-backed rebels are fighting off advancing regime forces, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said. Fighting on Monday killed almost 100 fighters on both sides: 41 pro-regime fighters, as well as 53 militants and allied rebels, the observatory said. Overall on Monday, the regime advanced rapidly in the south of the bastion, but lost the town of Nayrab along the M4 highway to Turkish-backed rebels in the southeast.
UNITED STATES
Funds for virus fight sought
The White House plans to spend US$2.5 billion to fight COVID-19, the Washington Post said on Monday. The administration has asked Congress asked for US$1.8 billion in emergency spending, the Post said. The request was for US$1.25 billion in new funding for the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the transfer of an additional US$535 million originally set aside to fight Ebola. The White House said it expected to draw additional money from other agencies for a total of US$2.5 billion. Democratic lawmakers slammed the request as too low, and the House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations called it “woefully insufficient.”
NORWAY
More samples for seed ark
An Arctic “doomsday vault” was yesterday set to receive 60,000 samples of seeds from around the world. “As the pace of climate change and biodiversity loss increases, there is new urgency surrounding efforts to save food crops at risk of extinction,” said Stefan Schmitz, who manages the reserve as head of the Crop Trust. The latest shipment would bring to about 1.05 million the number of seed varieties placed in three underground alcoves in the vault inside a mountain near Longyearbyen on Spitsbergen Island.
BRAZIL
Crime rises as police strike
Violent crime has been rising in Ceara state on the seventh day of a police strike, Minister of Justice Sergio Moro said on Monday. Officials said the state had recorded 147 homicides in the past five days, a fivefold increase from the same five-day period last year. “There are signs that some violent crimes have been increasing, but it’s not a situation of total disorder in the streets,” Moro said, although he said the situation was “relatively difficult.”
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
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
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
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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