UNITED NATION
Chief to meet warring sides
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is set to meet separately with the presidents of Russia and Ukraine next week to make urgent, face-to-face pleas for peace, the world body said on Friday. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Guterres is on Tuesday to meet with Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov and that Russian President Vladimir Putin would also host the UN chief. The UN later said that Guterres would on Thursday head to Ukraine to see Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba. In both visits, Guterres aims to discuss “steps that can be taken right now” to stop the fighting and help people get to safety, UN spokesperson Eri Kaneko said. “He hopes to talk about what can be done to bring peace to Ukraine urgently,” she said.
UNITED STATES
Washington shooter dies
A lone shooter who wounded four people in an upscale Washington neighborhood killed himself, the city’s police chief said on Friday evening. The Connecticut Avenue-Van Ness neighborhood of the capital — where multiple schools and embassies are located — was swarmed by law enforcement and locked down after gunfire erupted in the area on Friday afternoon. Assistant Police Chief Stuart Emerman said three people had been taken to hospital — two adults, who were in critical but stable condition, and a 12-year-old girl with a minor gunshot wound. Another individual with a graze wound to the back was treated at the scene, Emerman said. “The suspect that we believe is responsible for this is now deceased,” Washington Police Chief Robert Contee told a news conference. He said the suspected shooter took his own life as police officers breached the fifth-floor apartment where he was located and that they found a “sniper-type set up with a tripod.”
IRAN
General’s bodyguard killed
Gunmen yesterday morning opened fire on a vehicle carrying a general of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, killing a bodyguard, state media reported. The report said General Hossein Almasi survived the ambush — in Zahedan in the southeastern Sistan and Baluchistan Province — without any injury. It identified the fallen bodyguard as Mahmoud Absalan. Authorities have arrested some suspects, but did not identify them, the report added. The area, neighboring Pakistan and Afghanistan, has been the scene of occasional clashes between Baluch militants and Iranian forces.
UNITED KINGDOM
Cat reunited with owner
A long-lost cat has been reunited with its owner in Scotland after being found at a North Sea oil rig in a shipping container, the Scottish SPCA animal charity said on Friday. The one-eyed black cat was found at an oil rig off the port of Peterhead, the charity said. The day after workers on the rig contacted the charity, the cat was flown back by helicopter. It emerged the cat had spent five years living as a stray around Peterhead’s port area, where staff at the nearby prison fed him and he was known as “One-eyed Joe.” It seems likely that he somehow crept into a shipping container at the port and found himself heading out to the oil rig. When a veterinarian checked him for a chip, it turned out that the seemingly stray cat had an owner waiting for him. It emerged that “his real name is Dexter and he has been missing for five years,” the animal charity said. It was able to contact his owner and return the cat.
‘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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