Greeks detain six
ATHENS: The Greek authorities detained six foreigners for suspected human trafficking yesterday as the interim government announced new measures to tackle a crisis where hundreds of migrants arrive every day.
Four Bulgarians and two Turkswere detained in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki for trafficking 103 migrants. – Reuters
Polio lames two
GENEVA: Two children in south-west Ukraine had been paralysed by polio, the World Health Organisation said yesterday, in a setback for a global eradication campaign.
The outbreak occurred because only half of Ukrainian children were immunised against polio, and the risk of its spreading was high, it said. – Reuters
Asian rail-link race
JAKARTA: Indonesia has delayed the announcement of the winner of a hotly contested race between China and Japan to build the first high-speed railway in South-east Asia’s biggest economy, a senior government official said yesterday.
It will provide a 150km link between Jakarta and textile hub Bandung. – Reuters
Aid workers killed
DUBAI: Two Red Cross employees were shot dead in the northern Yemeni province of Amran by an unknown attacker yesterday in a rare case of violence against humanitarian workers in a five-month war.
A statement from the group identified the murdered employees as a field officer and a driver. – Reuters BAIKONUR: A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying a three-man international crew, including Denmark’s first astronaut, roared off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan yesterday on a two-day journey to the International Space Station.
The rocket, carrying the Soyuz TMA-18M spaceship, lifted off to the orbiting laboratory leaving just a puff of white smoke in the sky.
The crew is commanded by veteran Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov, joined by rookie Andreas Mogensen from the European Space Agency (ESA) and Aidyn Aimbetov, another first-time space flyer from Kazakhstan’s space agency Kazcosmos.
The ESA dubbed Mogensen “Denmark’s Gagarin”, a reference to the Soviet cosmonaut and first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.
The Dane told a pre-flight news conference on Tuesday that he had shaved his right leg to allow Volkov to better apply electrodes during scientific experiments in space.
One of Mogensen’s jobs would be to test new equipment on Danish-made exercise bikes, the ESA said.
The Danish bikes – with no seats as none are needed in gravity-free conditions – were launched in 2001 and have been replaced or upgraded several times since. They help astronauts battle the negative impact of weightlessness.
Aimbetov, the third ethnic Kazakh in space, said he was taking dried mare’s milk and traditional Kazakh cheese into orbit. Fermented mare’s milk, or “kymyz”, is popular among nomadic cultures of Central Asia. While in space, he will wear a special dosimeter to study the effects of space radiation on the brain.
Volkov is the first son of a cosmonaut who has flown to the 15-nation space outpost.
“It’s our family tradition already to carry Kazakhs into space,” joked Volkov, whose father, Alexander Volkov, commanded a Soyuz spaceship that took the first Kazakh cosmonaut, Tokhtar Aubakirov, into space in 1991.
Mogensen and Aimbetov are set to return to Earth on September 12, together with veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, 57, who has been working aboard space station since March.
By then, Padalka will have racked up 878 days in space, more than any other person.
Volkov will return to Earth in March together with Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian Mikhail Kornienko, who will have spent one year in space by then.
The Soyuz rocket will take two days to reach the space station, rather than the six-hour approach usually taken in recent years. – Reuters