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International

China launches new crew for space station

BEIJING (AP) — China launched a new three-person crew for its orbiting space station on Tuesday, with an eye to putting astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade. The Shenzhou 16 spacecraft lifted off from the Jiuquan launch center on the edge of the Gobi Desert in northwestern China atop a Long March 2-F rocket just after 9:30 a.m. Tuesday. The crew, including China’s first civilian astronaut, will overlap briefly with three now aboard the Tiangong station, who will then return to Earth after completing their six-month mission.

Norway says Beluga whale with apparent Russian-made harness swims to Sweden

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Norwegian authorities said Tuesday that a beluga whale, which was first spotted in Arctic Norway four years ago with an apparent Russian-made harness and alleged to have come from a Russian military facility, has been seen off Sweden’s coast nearly around 1,250 miles to the south. “During the last few weeks, it has moved quickly and swam several hundred kilometers” before reaching waters off Sweden’s west coast, Olav Lekve of the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries said. He said it has been reported off Lysekill, which sits north of Goteborg, Sweden’s second-largest city. There was no immediate comment from Swedish authorities.

Worst cyberattack in Greece disrupts high school exams, causes political spat

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece’s Education Ministry says it has been targeted in a cyberattack described as the most extensive in the country’s history, aimed at disabling a centralized high school examination platform. It said the distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks aimed at overwhelming the platform occurred for a second consecutive day Tuesday. The attack involved computers from 114 countries, causing outages and delays in high school exams but failing to cripple the system, the ministry said. The cyberattacks prompted a judicial investigation ordered by a Supreme Court prosecutor, to be assisted by the police’s cybercrime division.

Number of new German citizens hits 20-year high as many Syrians naturalized

BERLIN (AP) — Germany saw a 28% increase in the number of people gaining its citizenship last year, with people from Syria accounting for more than a quarter of those who were naturalized, official data showed Tuesday. Preliminary figures show that about 168,500 people were granted German citizenship in 2022, the Federal Statistical Office said. That was the highest number since 2002. Of those, 48,300 — or 29% — were Syrian citizens.

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