IN BRIEF (Page 12)

EGYPT

Signals possibly from flight recorder

Egypt said on Wednesday that a French ship picked up signals from deep under the Mediterranean Sea, presumed to be from one of the black boxes of the EgyptAir plane that crashed last month, killing all 66 passengers and crew on board. The development raised hopes the plane's flight data and cockpit voice recorders, known as the black boxes, could be retrieved and shed light on the aircraft's tragic crash. In Cairo, the Civil Aviation Ministry cited a statement from the committee investigating the crash as saying the vessel Laplace received the signals. The French Navy confirmed the ship arrived in the search area and picked up the signals.

ISRAEL

Jewish settler freed from detention

Israel's prison service says an extremist Jewish settler has been freed from jail after a 10-month detention. Meir Ettinger was arrested last year following a deadly arson attack on a Palestinian West Bank home that killed three people, including a toddler. Ettinger was released on Wednesday. He has not been charged with any crime. Another man and a minor were indicted for the arson. The 24-year-old Ettinger is the grandson of US-born Rabbi Meir Kahane, Israel's most notorious Jewish extremist, whose ultranationalist party was banned from Israel's parliament for its racist views in 1988. He was killed by an Arab gunman in New York in 1990.

Republic of Korea

4 dead, 10 hurt in construction blast

Four people died and 10 others were injured after an explosion at a subway construction site on Wednesday near the capital, Seoul. The workers were welding iron bars 15 meters underground when the explosion occurred in the morning, said officials from the Gyeonggi Province Fire and Disaster Headquarters, who didn't want to be named, citing office rules. The cause of the explosion wasn't immediately known.

GERMANY

Women sexually harassed at festival

German prosecutors are investigating claims by 26 women that they were sexually harassed at a music festival in the western city of Darmstadt at the weekend and police have arrested three men with Pakistani backgrounds, a police spokesman said on Wednesday. By late on Tuesday, 26 women had come forward and 14 formal complaints had been made. "The women complained that they were surrounded by small groups of men who then touched them inappropriately," the spokesman said, adding the matter was now with prosecutors.

CANADA

Cigarettes to get plain packaging

Canada, following the lead of Britain and Australia, will make plain packaging of cigarettes compulsory in a bid to cut the rate of smoking, Health Minister Jane Philpott said on Tuesday. Although Canada already obliges firms to slap large graphic warning labels on cigarette packets, Philpott said more must be done, given that some 5 million of Canada's 36 million inhabitants still use tobacco products. The measures would require a uniform, standardized color and font on packages and restrict the use of logos and trademarks.

(China Daily 06/02/2016 page12)