NEWS OF THE DAY
Joint patrols: Turkish and U.S. troops on Thursday began jointly patrolling areas around the northern Syrian town of Manbij, part of a road map for easing tensions between the two NATO allies, Turkey’s defense minister announced. Ankara and Washington agreed to the patrols in June amid Turkish demands for the withdrawal of the U.S.-backed Kurdish militia that freed Manbij from the Islamic State in 2016. Joint patrols are considered a way to tamp down potential violence between the various groups in the region. Turkey considers the Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units, a terrorist group because of its links to the Kurdish insurgency in southeastern Turkey. It had threatened to storm Manbij to oust the group from the region.
Ex-president returns: The first democratically elected president of the Maldives returned home Thursday after more than two years in exile to escape a long prison term. The plane carrying Mohamed Nasheed from Sri Lanka landed in Maldives’ capital, Male, where he was welcomed by his party members and supporters. Nasheed was sentenced to 13 years in jail in 2015 after being convicted of terrorism for ordering the arrest of a top judge in 2012 while he was president. His trial was criticized internationally for lack of due process, along with those of many other political opponents jailed by strongman President Yameen Abdul Gayoom’s administration.
Justice minister: The Brazilian judge at the center of one of the largest corruption investigations in history says he will become justice minister in the incoming government of President-elect Jair Bolsonaro. The appointment will likely be hailed by Brazilians who want to see a crackdown on corruption. But it will also likely add to polarization: Many accuse Judge Sergio Moro of going after left-leaning politicians.
Plane crash: An Indonesian Navy diving team retrieved one of the flight recorders from Lion Air Flight 610 on Thursday from the depths of the Java Sea northeast of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, raising hopes that investigators will be able to solve the mystery of what led a brand-new Boeing jet to fall from the sky this week. Without the flight recorders, investigators despaired of figuring out what caused the plane to crash on Monday with 189 people on board. The weather en route was fine, and the plane had only begun flying in August for Lion Air, a low-cost carrier with a history of safety issues.
Rocket failure: A Russian space investigation has found that a sensor that was damaged during assembly forced a Russian rocket to abort its trip two minutes after it was launched, a top Russian official said Thursday. The Soyuz-FG rocket carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin failed shortly into the Oct. 11 flight, sending their capsule into a sharp fall back to Earth. The two men landed safely on the steppes of Kazakhstan despite the failed launch, the first of its kind for Russia’s manned program in over three decades.
Tire shortage: Palestinians in Gaza have coped with shortages of just about everything in more than a decade of border closures — from chocolate to medicines to fuel and building supplies. Now, six months of protests against an IsraeliEgyptian blockade have added an unexpected item to that list: car tires. Tires are a favored item by demonstrators during the weekly protests — they are set on fire, then tossed toward Israeli troops across the border.
Chronicle News Services