INDONESIA
Volcano spews ash
The Anak Krakatau volcano spewed a column of ash 500m into the sky in the longest eruption since the explosive collapse of the island caused a deadly tsunami in 2018, scientists said yesterday. Closed-circuit TV from the Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation showed lava flares on Friday night. The agency said that the volcano was continuously erupting until yesterday morning. A level 2 alert remained in place, the second-highest on a scale of four. No casualties were reported. Anak Krakatau, which means “Child of Kratakoa,” is the offspring of the famous Krakatoa volcano, whose monumental eruption in 1883 triggered a period of global cooling.
UNITED STATES
Inmates start fires
Inmates at a Kansas prison where at least 28 people have been sickened by COVID-19 rampaged through offices, breaking windows and setting small fires for several hours before the facility was secured, prison officials said on Friday. The disturbance involving about 20 men began about 3pm on Thursday in medium-security cell house C of the Lansing Correctional Facility, Kansas Department of Corrections spokeswoman Rebecca Witte said. The fires were set in a different living unit at the prison and did not involve the same inmates as the larger disturbance in cell house C, she said.
URUGUAY
Cruise passengers leave
More than 100 Australians and New Zealanders left the country on a chartered flight after two weeks stranded aboard a virus-infected cruise ship, Carrasco International Airport said yesterday. Of 217 people aboard the Greg Mortimer liner, 128 had tested positive for COVID-19 and had been blocked from docking. An agreement between the Uruguayan and Australian governments was made to create a “sanitary corridor” to take the mostly elderly tourists from Montevideo’s port to its international airport, where they boarded a flight for Melbourne, bringing to an end weeks of a virus nightmare.
UNITED STATES
Bird flu outbreak confirmed
An infectious and fatal strain of bird flu has been confirmed in a commercial turkey flock in South Carolina, the first case of the more serious strain of the disease in the country since 2017 and a worrisome development for an industry that was devastated by previous outbreaks. The highly pathogenic case was found at an operation in Chesterfield County, marking the first case of the more dangerous strain since one found in a Tennessee chicken flock in 2017. In 2015, an estimated 50 million poultry had to be killed at operations mainly in the upper midwest after infections spread throughout the region.
UNITED KINGDOM
Johnson walks in hospital
Prime Minister Boris Johnson was able to walk in hospital on Friday about 24 hours after leaving intensive care treatment for COVID-19 as the country recorded 980 daily deaths from the virus. “The Prime Minister has been able to do short walks, between periods of rest, as part of the care he is receiving to aid his recovery,” a Downing Street spokesman said. Johnson left intensive care at London’s St Thomas’ Hospital on Thursday evening, three days after being admitted. The total number of fatalities from coronavirus in the country’s hospitals have reached nearly 9,000, while the number of confirmed cases climbed to more than 74,600.
‘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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