GERMANY
Part of Berlin Wall removed
For nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the hated symbol of the division of Europe. On Wednesday, it took hundreds of police to guarantee the safe removal of 15 feet of what’s left. Construction crews, protected by about 250 police, hauled down part of the three-quarter of a mile strip of the wall before dawn to provide access to a planned luxury apartment complex overlooking the Spree River. The move angered many Berliners, who believe that developers are sacrificing history for profit. The site, known as the East Side Gallery, has become a major tourist attraction, painted by 120 artists with colorful scenes along the gray concrete tiles.
EGYPT
Divers caught cutting Internet cable
Egypt’s naval forces captured three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, a military spokesman said. Telecommunications executives meanwhile blamed a weeklong Internet slowdown on damage caused to another cable by a ship. Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement that divers were arrested while “cutting the undersea cable” of the country’s main communications company, Telecom Egypt. The statement said they were caught on a speeding fishing boat just off the port city of Alexandria. The statement did not have details on who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable.
BRAZIL
Doctor suspected of killing patients
Brazil’s health ministry says a doctor is suspected of killing seven terminally ill patients in a southern Brazilian hospital. A ministry press officer says Virginia Helena Soares de Souza and seven assistants are suspected of injecting the patients with “drug cocktails” and of tampering with their respirators. The press officer declined to be identified because she was not authorized to comment on the case. The press officer says the Health Ministry is reviewing the medical records of 300 other patients that were under de Souza’s care. She did not provide details and did not say if they had died.
UNITED NATIONS
Arms trade treaty deadline at hand
Supporters of a strong treaty to regulate the multibillion-dollar global arms trade were optimistic that a final draft circulated a day before today’s deadline will reach consensus. U.N. diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity because negotiations have been private, said Wednesday the United States was virtually certain to go along with the latest text. Hopes of reaching agreement on what would be a landmark treaty were dashed last July when the U.S. said it needed more time to consider the proposed accord — a move quickly backed by Russia and China.
ITALY
Talks on forming government break down
Italy’s political gridlock deepened Wednesday as talks to form a government broke down between the center-left leader, Pier Luigi Bersani, and the upstart Five Star Movement a month after national elections failed to yield a majority. Bersani said Wednesday that he would hold more consultations today and then report to President Giorgio Napolitano on whether he had enough support to cobble together a government. On Wednesday, the leaders of the Five Star Movement of the former comedian Beppe Grillo, which soared to third place on an agenda of doing away with politics as usual, rejected Bersani’s request that they support him in a confidence vote in Parliament.
UNITED KINGDOM
Cyberattack hits anti-spam group
A record-breaking cyberattack targeting an anti-spam watchdog group has sent ripples of disruption coursing across the Web, experts said Wednesday. Spamhaus, a site responsible for keeping ads for counterfeit Viagra and bogus weight-loss pills out of the world’s inboxes, said it had been buffeted by the monster denial-of-service attack since mid-March, apparently from groups angry at being blacklisted by the Swiss-British group. Security experts measure those attacks in bits of data per second. Recent cyberattacks — like the ones that caused persistent outages at U.S. banking sites late last year — have tended to peak at 100 billion bits per second. But the furious assault on Spamhaus clocked in at 300 billion bits per second.
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