LONDON – Three Bulgarian nationals based in Britain were convicted Friday by a London jury of spying for Russia on what police said was “an industrial scale.”
The trio, nicknamed “the Minions” by one of their ringleaders, was accused of putting lives in danger as they followed orders on behalf of Russian intelligence to carry out surveillance across Europe on Kremlin opponents, including journalists, diplomats and Ukrainian troops.
Katrin Ivanova, 33, Vanya Gaberova, 30, and Tihomir Ivanov Ivanchev, 39, were convicted at London’s Central Criminal Court after a trial that began in November. Jurors deliberated for more than 32 hours before finding the Bulgarians guilty of plotting to spy for an enemy state.
COLUMBIA, S.C. – When the clock strikes 6 Friday evening, a South Carolina man will walk into the death chamber, be strapped into a chair and have a target placed over his heart. He may utter last words before a hood is placed over his head, a curtain shielding him from spectators is swept aside and three volunteers armed with rifles simultaneously fire bullets designed to shatter on impact with his chest.
Unless the governor or the U.S. Supreme Court grants him a last-minute reprieve, Brad Sigmon, 67, will be the first person to die by firing squad in the U.S. since 2010 – and just the fourth since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. 49 years ago.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A private lunar lander is no longer working after landing sideways in a crater near the moon’s south pole and its mission is over, officials said Friday.
The news came less than 24 hours after the botched landing attempt by Texas-based Intuitive Machines.
Launched last week, the lander named Athena missed its mark by more than 800 feet and ended up in a frigid crater, the company said in declaring it dead.
CAIRO – Four boats carrying migrants from Africa capsized overnight in waters off Yemen and Djibouti, the U.N. migration agency said Friday. At least two people died, and 186 others were missing.
Two of the boats capsized off Yemen late Thursday, said Tamim Eleian, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration. Two crew members were rescued, but 181 migrants and five Yemeni crew members remain missing, he told The Associated Press.
Two other boats capsized off the tiny African nation of Djibouti around the same time, he said. Two bodies of migrants were recovered, and all others on board were rescued.
Nearly two months after an explosion sent flaming debris raining down on the Turks and Caicos, SpaceX launched another mammoth Starship rocket on Thursday, but lost contact minutes into the test flight as the spacecraft came tumbling down and broke apart.
This time, wreckage from the latest explosion was seen streaming from the skies over Florida. It was not immediately known whether the spacecraft's self-destruct system had kicked in to blow it up.
The 403-foot rocket blasted off from Texas. SpaceX caught the first-stage booster back at the pad with giant mechanical arms, but engines on the spacecraft on top started shutting down as it streaked eastward for what was supposed to be a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, half a world away. Contact was lost less than 10 minutes into the flight as the spacecraft went into an out-of-control spin.
BEIRUT – Fighters siding with Syria's new government stormed several villages near the country's coast, killing dozens of men in response to recent attacks on government security forces by loyalists of ousted President Bashar Assad, a war monitor said.
The village assaults erupted Thursday and continued Friday. Ongoing clashes between the two sides have marked the worst violence since Assad’s government was toppled in early December by insurgent groups led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The new government has pledged to unite Syria after 14 years of civil war.
More than 200 people have been killed since the fighting broke out, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. In addition to around 140 killed in apparent revenge attacks in the villages, the dead include at least 50 members of Syria’s government forces and 45 fighters loyal to Assad. The civil war that has been raging in Syria since March 2011 has left more than half a million people dead and millions displaced.
– Associated Press
