News in Brief

Date: 22 February 2021 - 21:37

News ID: ۸۷۹۰۵

ALGIERS (Reuters) -- Thousands of demonstrators defied a heavy police presence in Algiers on Monday for a march to mark the second anniversary of a mass protest movement that convulsed Algeria before the COVID-19 pandemic forced it off the streets. Chanting "A civilian state not a military state!”, "Enough is enough!” and "The people want independence!”, protesters walked through the centre of the capital, waving national flags, watched by large numbers of police. Some of the protesters hope to revive the twice-weekly protests that surged through Algerian cities from February 2019 for more than a year, regularly bringing tens of thousands of people to the streets until the global pandemic began. Though the 2019 protests led the army to push veteran president Abdelaziz Bouteflika from power after two decades in office and jail many senior figures for corruption, many of the demonstrators wanted a more thorough change.

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) -- The European Commission on Monday announced three flagship projects - in drone technologies, space communication and space traffic management - aimed at giving the 27-country bloc a competitive edge in these new fields. Called the Action Plan on Synergies between the civil, defense and space industries, the scheme’s objective is to harness research and innovation in the three sectors for the projects and other ventures. The EU executive said the drone project would reinforce the competitiveness of EU industry in this key area with a strong defense dimension, while space communication would provide for a resilient and high-speed connectivity in Europe based on quantum encryption. It said space traffic management was required to avoid collisions resulting from the proliferation of satellites and space debris, while ensuring autonomous EU access to space. EU industry commissioner Thierry Breton said the projects would help the bloc stand on its own feet instead of relying on other countries.

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CANBERRA (Reuters) -- Australia will quickly deliver the result of a planned independent inquiry into parliament’s workplace culture, the government said on Monday, as pressure grows after a newspaper published a third accusation of rape. Two female employees of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal party said last week they had been raped by the same man in 2019 and 2020. Both have yet to make a formal police complaint, but Brittany Higgins, who has spoken publicly about her alleged rape, said last week that she would do so, though it is unclear if she has lodged one with police. Fuelling pressure on Morrison, the Australian newspaper published on Monday the account of a third woman, who said she had also been raped by the unnamed former Liberal party worker on the night of June 29 and the morning of June 30 in 2016. Already dogged by accusations of improper behavior towards women, Morrison’s Liberals face a barrage of criticism about the way it handled Higgins’ internal complaint to Linda Reynolds, who is now defense minister.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for a New York City prosecutor to obtain former President Donald Trump’s tax returns and other financial records as part of a criminal investigation, a blow to his quest to conceal details of his finances. The justices rebuffed Trump’s request to put on hold an Oct. 7 lower court ruling directing the former Republican president’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, to comply with a subpoena to turn over the materials to a grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat.

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GENEVA (Reuters) -- The United Nations refugee agency called on Monday for the immediate rescue of a group of Rohingya refugees adrift in their boat in the Andaman Sea without food or water, many of them ill and suffering from extreme dehydration. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said it did not know the exact location of the vessel and understood that some passengers had died. The boat had left southern Bangladesh about 10 days ago and experienced engine failure, it said. At least eight people had died on the boat, according to Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, a group that monitors the Rohingya crisis. According to UNHCR, the boat set out from the Bangladesh coastal district of Cox’s Bazar, where about a million Rohingya live in dire conditions in sprawling refugee camps. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh after a deadly crackdown by security forces in Myanmar in 2017.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Chinese spies used code first developed by the U.S. National Security Agency to support their hacking operations, Israeli researchers said on Monday, another indication of how malicious software developed by governments can boomerang against their creators. Tel Aviv-based Check Point Software Technologies issued a report noting that some features in a piece of China-linked malware it dubs "Jian” were so similar they could only have been stolen from some of the National Security Agency break-in tools leaked to the internet in 2017. Yaniv Balmas, Checkpoint’s head of research, called Jian "kind of a copycat, a Chinese replica.” The find comes as some experts argue that American spies should devote more energy to fixing the flaws they find in software instead of developing and deploying malicious software to exploit it.