Quito, Aug 11,2023: Six suspects arrested in connection with the assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio and another suspect who was shot dead are all foreigners, said authorities on Thursday.
The six weaponized suspects, all members of organized crime groups, were captured hiding in a house in Quito, the country’s capital, said a police report.
Describing the killing as “a political crime of a terrorist nature,” Ecuadorian Interior Minister Juan Zapata confirmed all suspects are foreigners without revealing their nationalities.
The minister noted that the police will continue investigating and seeking a motive for the crime.
Fernando Villavicencio, Ecuador’s candidate for the presidential election later this month, was killed on Wednesday in an armed attack following a political rally in Quito.
Aug 08,2023: China’s foreign ministry has repeated a call for the Philippines to remove a grounded World War II warship, which Manila uses as a makeshift military base, from a reef in the disputed South China Sea.
The renewed demand to tow the ship comes after the Philippines at the weekend accused China’s coastguard of firing water cannon at boats on a mission to resupply the Philippine garrison stationed on the grounded vessel.
The BRP Sierra Madre – deliberately grounded in the late 1990s in an effort to check the advance of China in the hotly contested waters – has long been a flashpoint between Manila and Beijing.
“China once again urges the Philippine side to immediately remove the warship from Second Thomas Shoal and restore it to its unoccupied state,” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Tuesday.
China, the ministry said, has communicated to the Philippines on the Second Thomas Shoal issue “many times” through diplomatic channels, but its goodwill and sincerity have been “ignored”.
“The Philippine side has repeatedly made clear promises to tow away the warship illegally ‘stranded’ on the reef,” a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said.
Aug 7,2023: Scientists in the United States have achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the second time since December in efforts to find a clean source of energy, according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Scientists at the California-based lab repeated the fusion ignition breakthrough in an experiment in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on July 30 that produced a higher energy yield than in December, a Lawrence Livermore spokesperson said on Sunday.
Final results are still being analysed, the spokesperson added.
Nuclear fusion reaction involves combining two atomic nuclei to form a single heavier one, releasing an enormous amount of energy. Scientists have known for about a century that fusion powers the sun and have pursued developing fusion on Earth for decades, as they look for limitless clean and safe source of power to help curb climate change.
If technology around fusion reaction is further advanced, it can be used to produce power at an industrial scale.
The US Energy Department called it “a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defence and the future of clean power”.
The scientists focused a laser on a target of fuel to fuse two light atoms into a denser one, releasing the energy.
That experiment briefly achieved what is known as fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target, the Energy Department said.
In other words, it produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it, the department said.
Nuclear scientists outside the lab said the achievement will be a major stepping stone, but there is much more science to be done before fusion becomes commercially viable.
Chennai, Aug 7,2023: A day after it was slinged into the moon’s orbit, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Sunday night reduced the third Lunar mission Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft’s Orbit inside the Lunar sphere.
In an updated tweet, ISRO said “The Chandrayaanl-3 spacecraft successfully underwent a planned Orbit reduction maneuver”.
The retrofiring of engines brought it closer to the Moon’s surface now to 170 X 4313 km.
Srinagar, Aug 5,2023: Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha said on Saturday that the biggest change after the abrogation of Article 370 has been that people in Jammu and Kashmir are living freely.
He said not only has the street violence ended, but the schools, colleges, and business establishments remain open.
“Street violence has ended. The schools and colleges that used to shut for 150 days a year on the directions of Pakistan, terrorists, and separatists have ended,” Sinha told reporters on the sidelines of a function in Srinagar.
August 5 marks the fourth anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution, which resulted in the withdrawal of the special status granted to J&K, which was also downgraded from a state to two Union Territories.
Sinha said people, especially youth, used to return home before sunset in Kashmir, but now things have changed.
“Today, shops are open in Polo View Market till late at night. Youth spend quality time holding a guitar and enjoying ice cream on the riverfront. This is the biggest change that has happened after long time,” he said, adding that people in Jammu and Kashmir are living freely now.
LG Sinha said the youth in J&K have got wings to fly in the last four years.