News in Brief

Date: 31 October 2023 - 21:56

News ID: ۱۲۰۹۳۹

PARIS (AFP) -- French police on Tuesday shot and wounded a woman who was making threats at a train station in Paris, a police source told AFP. According to witnesses the woman, who was completely veiled, “made threats”, the source said, adding that “police fired because they feared for their safety”. After passengers on a suburban train alerted police, agents managed to “isolate” the woman at the Bibliotheque Francois Mitterrand station on the capital’s south bank, the source said. She threatened “to blow herself up”, the Paris prosecutor’s office said, adding that police fired one shot, inflicting a life-threatening injury. Police have launched two investigations, prosecutors said. One will probe the woman’s actions, while another is to elucidate whether the police’s use of a firearm was justified. France has been under “attack alert” since October 13, when a teacher in the northern city of Arras was stabbed to death by an Islamist former pupil.

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JAKARTA (AFP) -- Indonesian counter-terrorism police have arrested dozens of militants from groups linked to Al-Qaeda and Daesh over suspected plots targeting next year’s presidential election, an official said Tuesday. Police arrested the 59 suspected militants earlier in October and seized weapons, propaganda material and bomb-making chemicals, a spokesman for Indonesia’s anti-terrorism unit Densus 88 said. The forty suspects arrested from Daesh-linked Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) were planning an attack on the presidential elections due to be held in February, spokesman Aswin Siregar said at a press conference in capital Jakarta on Tuesday   Another 19 suspects were linked to the Jemaah Islamiyah network, which has ties to Al-Qaeda, Siregar said. Jemaah Islamiyah was behind the 2002 Bali bombings that ripped through a nightclub and bar on the Indonesian resort island, killing 202 people including 88 Australians.

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ACAPULCO, Mexico (Reuters) -- The number of people dead and missing due to Hurricane Otis, a Category 5 storm which hammered the Mexican Pacific resort city of Acapulco last week, has risen to 100, the government of the southern state of Guerrero said. Otis battered Acapulco with winds of 165 miles per hour (266 km per hour) on Wednesday, flooding the city, tearing roofs from homes, hotels and other businesses, submerging vehicles, and severing communications as well as road and air connections. Looting broke out as the city’s population of nearly 900,000 became increasingly desperate for food and water. The government of Guerrero, Acapulco’s home state, said in a statement 46 people were dead and 54 others were missing.

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BEIJING (AFP) -- Three Chinese astronauts safely returned to Earth on Tuesday after five months in orbit at the country’s space station, state media reported. Jing Haipeng, Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao touched down at China’s Dongfeng landing site at 8:11 am (0011 GMT), according to state broadcaster CCTV. Footage showed their return capsule parachuting down into the barren Gobi Desert, kicking up a cloud of orange dust as it hit the ground. Jing, Zhu and Gui travelled to China’s Tiangong space station in late May and were in orbit for 154 days. They spent the time conducting scientific experiments and carried out a nearly eight-hour spacewalk. A fresh crew replaced them last week after the Shenzhou-17 mission blasted off from the Jiuquan launch site in the country’s northwest. Beijing has accelerated plans to become a major space power since President Xi Jinping took the reins a decade ago.

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NEW DELHI (Reuters) -- Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of trying to hack into senior opposition politicians’ mobile phones, after they reported receiving warning messages from Apple. Some of the lawmakers shared screenshots on social media of a notification quoting the iPhone manufacturer as saying: “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID.” “Hack us all you want,” Gandhi told a news conference in New Delhi, in reference to Modi. “But we (opposition) will not stop questioning you.” Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw expressed concern at the lawmakers’ statements and said the government had asked Apple to join its investigation into the matter. The company said it did not attribute the threat notifications to “any specific state-sponsored attacker”.

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SEOUL (Reuters) -- South Korean authorities on Tuesday detained a man after two police officers were stabbed outside a compound housing the presidential office in the capital, Seoul, city police said. One officer was stabbed in the stomach and the other in the left arm at 1:20 p.m. (0420 GMT) after the officers tried to subdue a man in his 70s who was shouting in front of the compound, the Yonhap news agency reported. The two officers were being treated in hospital, it said. The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency confirmed the incident but did not give any details or comment on a suspected motive for the attack outside the compound where the ministry of defense is also located.