Ballot boxes vandalised as presidential vote starts
The first day of voting in Russia’s presidential election was marred by acts of vandalism at polling stations on March 15, with at least nine arrests for pouring dye into ballot boxes and arson attacks.
Vladimir Putin is set to secure another six years in the Kremlin after a three-day vote he has cast as a show of Russians’ loyalty and support for his invasion Ukraine, now in its third year.
Despite authorities warning that election-day protesters faced heavy punishment, at least nine were arrested for acts of vandalism at polling stations.
In Moscow, video showed a woman setting a voting booth alight, filling a polling station with smoke, while another showed a woman pouring green dye into a ballot box.
Russia kills 20 in ‘vile’ attack on Ukraine’s Odesa
Russian missiles pounded Ukraine’s Black Sea port city of Odesa on March 15, killing more than a dozen people including rescue workers in an attack President Volodymyr Zelensky described as “vile”.
AFP journalists on the scene saw bodies covered by blankets strewn on the street, while images from officials showed exhausted emergency service workers smeared with blood and dirt dousing flames and treating wounded colleagues.
Mr Zelensky said Russian forces had launched a type of attack known as a double-tap strike on the port hub, with the second projectile ploughing into rescue workers at the scene.
Trump launched CIA covert influence op against China
Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorised the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former US officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation.
Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus Internet identities to spread negative narratives about Mr Xi Jinping’s government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets.
The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.
Czechs see record spread of whooping cough
More than 3,000 Czechs have caught whooping cough so far in 2024, the highest figure since the 1960s, with teenagers the worst hit, health authorities said on March 15.
Doctors have registered 810 cases this week alone, and 80-year-old Prague mayor Bohuslav Svoboda said earlier this week he had overcome the respiratory illness in recent days.
But after he attended a political meeting without a face mask on March 13, the Green Party filed a criminal complaint against him for spreading an infectious disease.
HK woman loses uterus, ovaries after sample mix-up
A 59-year-old woman in Hong Kong had to give up her uterus, ovaries and oviduct after she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. The thing is, she does not have cancer.
It turned out that her biopsy samples got mixed up with those of a 71-year-old patient at Pok Oi Hospital in Yuen Long district who actually had cancer.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that the woman had surgery on Feb 26 to have her reproductive organs removed about five weeks after she was told she had cancer.
