Раніше цього дня посольство США в Таджикистані підтвердило, що 191 афганець, у тому числі 143 пілоти, готові вилетіти з Таджикистану після майже трьох місяців перебування там для переселення до США
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Poland has warned of a possible armed escalation on its border with Belarus. Europe accuses Belarus of directing the migrants towards the border as part of a campaign of ‘hybrid warfare’. Henry Ridgwell reports from London. Producer: Henry Ridgwell, Barry Unger
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МЗС Франції також заперечило твердження російського дипломатичного відомства про те, що Париж не відповів на пропозиції Москви
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As France approaches an election in which questions over the country’s image of itself are being raised, hunting has come under the spotlight. As the nation’s third most popular pastime, growing debate over the practice raises the issue of French tradition versus modernity. Jacob Russell reports for VOA from Charente-Maritime.
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Рішення ухвалили через гібридну атаку з використанням міграції білоруським режимом, вказує офіційний Брюссель
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Згідно з даними комісії, в окрузі номер 184 у Херсонській області народним депутатом України обрано Сергія Козиря, в окрузі номер 197 на Черкащині – Віталія Войцехівського
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9 листопада в Україні відзначають День української писемності та мови. До цієї дати в країні традиційно проходить Всеукраїнський радіодиктант національної єдності
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Australia’s electric car industry has criticized the government’s new policy to build thousands of charging stations as “far too little, too late.” The Australian government Tuesday pledged $132 million to speed up the rollout of hydrogen refueling and electric charging stations.
The Electric Vehicles Council says an Australian government plan to build electric vehicle charging stations and hydrogen-powered vehicle fueling stations doesn’t include subsidies, tax incentives or minimum fuel standards, and leaves Australia lagging the rest of the world.
Transport accounts for one-fifth of Australia’s emissions. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says electric- and hydrogen-powered vehicles are key in efforts to decarbonize the economy. There’s a plan to build 50,000 home charging stations and increase the government’s fleet of electric vehicles.
Morrison says it’s a bold strategy.
“Our plan, which is another key part of the overall national plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 — this is one of the key building blocks, the future fuels and the take-up of electric vehicles driven by Australians’ choices,” Morrison said.
The government has forecast that electric and hybrid electric vehicles will make up about a third of annual new car and light truck sales by 2030. Sales hit a record 8,688 in the first half of this year but made up a fraction — about 1.5% — of total sales.
During the 2019 election campaign, Morrison derided electric cars, insisting they would “end the weekend” because they wouldn’t be able to tow trailers or boats to go camping.
His stance has changed as environmental pressures grow on governments around the world.
But critics say the Australian strategy lacks ambition and does nothing to improve affordability of electric cars, which are more expensive than gasoline or diesel models. Morrison insists that costs will come down as technologies improve.
Opposition Labor leader Anthony Albanese says other countries are leaving Australia behind.
“There is this massive shift around the world to electric vehicles. Australia’s uptake last year was under 2%. In Norway, it was 70%. In the United Kingdom, it was 15% and rising. We are falling way behind,” Albanese said.
Australia has some of the world’s highest emissions per person and is a huge exporter of fossil fuels. Despite a pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the Morrison government said its coal and gas industries would not be phased out.
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Poland and Belarus traded accusations Tuesday as a group of migrants remained on the Belarus side of the border between the two countries.
Poland says the migrants, mostly from the Middle East, are being encouraged to push their way into European Union member Poland by the government of Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote on Twitter that it is in Poland’s interest to seal its border, and that with Belarus’ actions “the stability and security of the entire EU is at stake.”
Belarus denies the accusations, with its defense ministry saying in a statement Tuesday they are “unfounded and unsubstantiated.”
The Belarussian foreign ministry, in its own statement, further warned Poland “against the use of any provocations.”
Tensions were heavy along the border Monday, but Polish police said Tuesday the situation overnight was calm. Polish authorities shut an official border crossing in the area and shared a video showing a group of migrants with tents and campfires on the Belarus side.
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, the Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Four astronauts returned to Earth on Monday, riding home with SpaceX to end a 200-day space station mission that began last spring.
Their capsule streaked through the late night sky like a dazzling meteor before parachuting into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Recovery boats quickly moved in with spotlights.
“On behalf of SpaceX, welcome home to Planet Earth,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed from Southern California. Within an hour, all four astronauts were out of the capsule, exchanging fist bumps with the team on the recovery ship.
Their homecoming — coming just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station — paved the way for SpaceX’s launch of their four replacements as early as Wednesday night.
The newcomers were scheduled to launch first, but NASA switched the order because of bad weather and an astronaut’s undisclosed medical condition. The welcoming duties will now fall to the lone American and two Russians left behind at the space station.
Before Monday afternoon’s undocking, German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who’s waiting to launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, tweeted it was a shame the two crews wouldn’t overlap at the space station but “we trust you’ll leave everything nice and tidy.” His will be SpaceX’s fourth crew flight for NASA in just 1 1/2 years.
NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide and France’s Thomas Pesquet should have been back Monday morning, but high wind in the recovery zone delayed their return.
“One more night with this magical view. Who could complain? I’ll miss our spaceship!” Pesquet tweeted Sunday alongside a brief video showing the space station illuminated against the blackness of space and the twinkling city lights on the nighttime side of Earth.
From the space station, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei — midway through a one-year flight — bid farewell to each of his departing friends, telling McArthur “I’ll miss hearing your laughter in adjacent modules.”
Before leaving the neighborhood, the four took a spin around the space station, taking pictures. This was a first for SpaceX; NASA’s shuttles used to do it all the time before their retirement a decade ago. The last Russian capsule fly-around was three years ago.
It wasn’t the most comfortable ride back. The toilet in their capsule was broken, and so the astronauts needed to rely on diapers for the eight-hour trip home. They shrugged it off late last week as just one more challenge in their mission.
The first issue arose shortly after their April liftoff; Mission Control warned a piece of space junk was threatening to collide with their capsule. It turned out to be a false alarm. Then in July, thrusters on a newly arrived Russian lab inadvertently fired and sent the station into a spin. The four astronauts took shelter in their docked SpaceX capsule, ready to make a hasty departure if necessary.
Among the upbeat milestones: four spacewalks to enhance the station’s solar power, a movie-making visit by a Russian film crew and the first-ever space harvest of chile peppers.
The next crew will also spend six months up there, welcoming back-to-back groups of tourists. A Japanese tycoon and his personal assistant will get a lift from the Russian Space Agency in December, followed by three businessmen arriving via SpaceX in February. SpaceX’s first privately chartered flight, in September, bypassed the space station.
NASA’s Kathy Lueders, head of space operations, said engineers would evaluate the lagging inflation of one of the four main parachutes, something seen in testing when the lines bunch together. Overall, though, “the return looked spotless.”
“I can’t tell you how excited I am to see all four of the crew members back on Earth,” she added, “and I’m looking forward to launching another set of four this week.”
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Втрат серед військовослужбовців Об’єднаних сил немає
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Екіпаж із двох американців, француза та японця приводнився 8 листопада приблизно через вісім годин після виходу з орбітальної космічної лабораторії
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Деякі представники та прихильники опозиційних партій провели ніч біля будівлі уряду в Тбілісі після мітингу на площі Свободи 8 листопада
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U.S. prosecutors on Monday said they had charged a Ukrainian man with launching a July ransomware attack on an American firm that had infected 1,500 businesses throughout the world.
Authorities also announced they had seized $6 million in ransom payments made to a Russian national accused of launching more than 3,000 other attacks targeting American companies.
An indictment filed in the southwestern state of Texas by the Justice Department accused Yaroslav Vasinskyi, a Ukrainian national arrested in Poland last month, of unleashing the ransomware attack known as REvil on Florida-based firm Kaseya, a global information technology software infrastructure supplier, which in turn affected its customers across the globe.
Vasinskyi and another alleged REvil operative, Russian national Yevgeniy Polyanin, who was accused in the other attacks, were charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, among other charges.
The U.S. Treasury Department also said the two men face sanctions for their roles in carrying out other ransomware attacks in the U.S., as well as creating a virtual currency exchange called Chatex “for facilitating financial transactions for ransomware actors.”
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Vasinskyi was in fact charged just six weeks after the July attack.
“His arrest demonstrates how quickly we will act, alongside our international partners, to identify, locate and apprehend alleged cybercriminals, no matter where they are,” Garland said.
U.S. President Joe Biden has urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to stop providing a haven for cybercriminals in Russia, where many of the attacks are believed to originate. Hackers have locked up companies’ computer operations from afar and demanded millions of dollars in ransom payments to let the companies resume their operations.
Authorities said the July attack corrupted a widely used software tool made by Kaseya, and its customers were immediately infected with REvil encryption. Some of the companies paid ransoms totaling millions of dollars in cryptocurrencies to resume business operations, though a master decryption key was eventually recovered by authorities and distributed weeks later.
Many of the 1,500 companies affected by the attack on Kaseya use its software to handle back-office functions because they are too small to have their own technology departments.
Vasinskyi, 22, is being held in Poland pending U.S. extradition proceedings, while Polyanin, 28, remains at large.
The indictment of Vasinskyi alleged that he and other conspirators launched the hacking software around April 2019 and “regularly” updated and refined it.
Europol said Monday that Romanian authorities last week arrested two individuals suspected of cyberattacks using the REvil ransomware, with three others arrested earlier in the year.
Europol said Friday that 12 people suspected of mounting ransomware attacks against companies or infrastructure in 71 countries were “targeted” in raids in Ukraine and Switzerland.
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An original Apple computer, hand-built by company founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak 45 years ago, goes under the hammer in the United States on Tuesday.
The functioning Apple-1, the great, great grandfather of today’s sleek chrome-and-glass Macbooks, is expected to fetch up to $600,000 at an auction in California.
The so-called “Chaffey College” Apple-1, is one of only 200 made by Jobs and Wozniak at the very start of the company’s odyssey from garage start-up to megalith worth $2 trillion.
What makes it even rarer is the fact it is encased in koa wood — a richly patinated wood native to Hawaii. Only a handful of the original 200 were made in this way.
Apple-1s were mostly sold as component parts by Jobs and Wozniak. One computer shop that took delivery of around 50 units decided to encase some of them in wood, the auction house said
“This is kind of the holy grail for vintage electronics and computer tech collectors,” Apple-1 expert Corey Cohen told the Los Angeles Times. “That really makes it exciting for a lot of people.”
Auctioneers John Moran say the device, which comes with a 1986 Panasonic video monitor, has only ever had two owners.
“It was originally purchased by an electronics professor at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California, who then sold it to his student in 1977,” a listing on the auction house’s website says.
The Los Angeles Times reported the student — who has not been named — paid just $650 for it at the time.
That student now stands to make a pretty penny: A working Apple-1 that came to the market in 2014 was sold by Bonhams for more than $900,000.
“A lot of people just want to know what kind of a person collects Apple-1 computers and it’s not just people in the tech industry,” Cohen said.
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Представник уряду Польщі Пьотр Мюллер розповів, що біженці намагалися зруйнувати паркан на кордоні, також зафіксовано факти нападу на прикордонників, поліцейських і солдатів
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За його словами, Україна, Франція, Німеччина готові до контактів на рівні міністрів і лідерів найближчим часом, на відміну від Росії
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The eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma entered its eighth week Monday, powerful as ever and showing no signs of stopping.
From its official Twitter account, INVOLCAN, the Canary Islands Volcanology Center, reported lava and huge plumes of smoke and ash have been spouting from the crater all day.
Citing a report from Italy’s volcano department, INVOLCAN said the minimum height of the volcano’s plume Monday was 1,600 meters.
The eruption has alternately surged and ebbed since September 19 and scientists say the eruption could last for up to three months.
But experts have said that predicting the end of the eruption is difficult because the lava, ash and gases coming to the surface reflect complex geological activity happening deep inside the Earth, far from the reach of currently available technology.
An area of more than 8,200 hectares between the Cumbre Vieja volcano and the Atlantic Ocean has been declared off limits.
Lava from the volcano has destroyed several hundred homes and industrial buildings, and scorched hectares of farmland in the largely agricultural area. Officials evacuated more than 7,000 residents and tourists to prevent loss of life.
The previous eruption on La Palma happened 50 years ago and lasted about three weeks. The island of roughly 85,000 residents is part of Spain’s Canary Islands off the northwestern coast of Africa.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
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