BIREUN, Indonesia (AFP) – Indonesia on Wednesday said it will let dozens of Rohingya refugees come ashore after protests from locals and the international community over its plan to push them into Malaysian waters. At least 100 mostly women and children aboard a stricken wooden vessel off Aceh province were denied refuge in Indonesia, where authorities on Tuesday said they planned to push them into the neighboring Southeast Asian country after fixing their boat. After a day-long meeting on Wednesday between officials in the coastal town of Bireun, Jakarta backtracked and said the refugees’ boat would be towed to shore on humanitarian grounds.

***
MOSCOW (TASS) - The Moscow City Court handed down a verdict to dissolve the Memorial Human Rights Center (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia), satisfying the lawsuit of Moscow’s Public Prosecutor’s office, a TASS correspondent reported from the court. “The court decreed to fully satisfy the stated claims of the Public Prosecutor’s office on the liquidation of the Memorial Human Rights Center interregional civic organization,” the judge said.

***
BEIJING (AP) — China is calling on the United States to protect a Chinese space station and its three-member crew after Beijing complained that satellites launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX nearly struck the station. A foreign ministry spokesman accused Washington of ignoring its treaty obligations to protect the safety of the Tiangong station’s three-member crew following the July 1 and Oct. 21 incidents. The Tiangong performed “evasive maneuvers” to “prevent a potential collision” with Starlink satellites launched by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the government said in a Dec. 6 complaint to the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

***
MOSCOW (RT) - The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) allegedly backed secret experiments into schizophrenia on 311 Danish children, many adopted or from orphanages, during the early 1960s, according to a newly released documentary. Danish Radio’s documentary ‘The Search for Myself’ accuses the U.S. spy agency of supporting the experiments at the Municipal Hospital in Cophenhagen. The studies were reportedly investigating the link between schizophrenia and heredity or the environment.

***
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Mourners held a candlelight prayer ceremony outside the Soweto home of late Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Wednesday, weeping over the memory not only of a world-renowned lion of the anti-apartheid movement but of a kind and loyal neighbor. Tutu, who died at 90 on Sunday, lived for a while on the same township street as his longtime friend Nelson Mandela, where residents take pride in being the only people in the world to grow up with two Nobel Peace Prize winners for neighbors.