News in Brief

Date: 08 May 2021 - 22:04

News ID: ۹۰۰۰۸

LONDON (AP) — Passengers faced significant travel disruption Saturday in Britain as a number of high-speed trains were taken out of service to undergo precautionary checks for cracks. Network Rail, which runs the nation’s tracks, said cracks were discovered on several Hitachi 800 trains. The trains are used by several train operators, including Great Western Railway, which serves passengers between London and the west of England and south Wales, and London North Eastern Railway, which connects links Edinburgh and London. It was unclear specifically where the cracks were found and whether the inspections will also interfere with train services on Sunday. High-speed train services between cities were affected, but suburban rail routes were still running. Hitachi Rail has apologized for the disruption caused. Manuel Cortes, general secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, said the trains "must not be allowed back into service until we are 100% certain these trains are safe.” He said passengers should not be charged extra in the future to cover the cost of any needed repairs.

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MALE (Reuters) -- Former Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed is conscious after life-saving surgery, his family said on Saturday, as police made two arrests in connection with a blast they said was being treated as a terror attack. Nasheed, the president of the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party and the current parliament speaker, was critically injured after a bomb exploded as he left his family home in the capital Male on Thursday. Police on Saturday said they had made two arrests in connection with the blast, without giving further details. "I’m good,” Nasheed said after coming off life support, according to a tweet by his sister Nashida Sattar. Nasheed, the Maldives’ first democratically-elected president, is an outspoken critic of takfiri extremism in the Sunni Muslim island archipelago, and has been instrumental in investigating graft allegations against opposition leaders. Nasheed was deposed and exiled in what he called a coup in 2012, while in 2015, former President Abdulla Yameen escaped unharmed after an explosion on his speedboat.

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SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Remnants of China’s largest rocket launched last week are expected to plunge back through the atmosphere late Saturday or early Sunday, a U.S. federally funded space-focused research and development centre said. China’s foreign ministry said on Friday that most debris from the rocket will be burned up on re-entry and is highly unlikely to cause any harm, after the U.S. military said that what it called an uncontrolled re-entry was being tracked by U.S. Space Command. In a tweet sent on Friday evening in the United States, the Aerospace Corporation said that the latest prediction for the re-entry of the Long March 5B rocket body by its Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies (CORDS) was for eight hours on either side of 0419 GMT on Sunday. CORDS’ latest "informed prediction” of the rocket body’s re-entry location was given near the North Island of New Zealand, but it noted that re-entry was possible anywhere along paths covering large swathes of the globe. The Long March 5B – comprising one core stage and four boosters – lifted off from China’s Hainan island on April 29 with the unmanned Tianhe module, which contains what will become living quarters on a permanent Chinese space station.

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RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) -- The death toll from a police raid on a drug gang in a poor Rio de Janeiro neighborhood on Thursday has risen to 28, civil police said, the deadliest operation ever carried out by the security forces in the Brazilian city. The bodies of three more victims removed from the favela on Friday were men with links to organized crime, according to police. Twenty-four other people and a police officer also died in the operation in the northern Rio neighborhood of Jacarezinho. "Intelligence confirmed that the dead were drug dealers. They fired at officers, to kill. They had orders to confront,” Civil Police chief Allan Turnowski told reporters. The United Nations human rights office on Friday called for an independent investigation into the operation. UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said the police deployed a "disproportionate and unnecessary” use of force.

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BERLIN (AP) — Leaders of Germany’s Greens on Saturday slammed the mayor of Tuebingen, a member of their own party, for using a racist slur in a social media post about a black soccer player. Boris Palmer, who has regularly irked fellow members of the center-left party with his comments about migrants and minorities, had used the racist term in reference to former Germany player Dennis Aogo. "The comments by Boris Palmer are racist and repulsive,” Annalena Baerbock, the Green’s candidate for chancellor, wrote on Twitter. She said Palmer’s repeated "provocations, which exclude and hurt people,” meant he had lost the party’s support and it would now discuss consequences "including expulsion proceedings.” Palmer was elected to a second eight-year term as mayor in 2014 and remains a popular figure in Tuebingen, a university town in southwest Germany. Aogo was earlier this week embroiled in a racism row with former Germany goalkeeper Jens Lehmann.