centre of a growing firestorm over whether the president's allies colluded with Moscow in its alleged efforts to tilt last year's election in the Republican's favour.

USA: Billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg and the governor of California announced on Wednesday a plan to quantify efforts by US states, cities and businesses to drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Bloomberg, the world's tenth richest person, leads more than 1,000companies, organisations, state and local authorities who pledged to honour the Paris climate accord, after Donald Trump announced a US exit from the190-plus nation pact.

BERLIN: Germany's longest serving post-war leader Helmut Kohl, the father of national reunification and an architect of European integration, died Friday at the age of 87. Kohl helped a Germany that was split during the Cold War between a capitalist west and a communist east make the traumatic transition to a unified democracy.

THE HAGUE: The International Criminal Court chief's prosecutor Wednesday called for the "immediate arrest and surrender" of Muammar Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, who was reportedly set free by a militia in Libya. An arrest warrant issued by the Hague-based ICC against Seif in 2011"remains valid and Libya is obliged to immediately arrest and surrender Mr Gaddafi... regardless of any purported Amnesty law in Libya".

СООБЩЕНИЯ ОБЩЕТЕХНИЧЕСКОГО ХАРАКТЕРА

Студенты переводят предложения на русский язык. В качестве предварительного домашнего задания им может быть предложено составление тематических глоссариев (астрономия, агрохимия, ядерная физика и т. д.).

BEIJING: China successfully launched on Thursday its first X-ray space telescope to study black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, state media reported. A Long March-4B rocket carried the 2.5-ton telescope into orbit from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gobi Desert at 11:00 am (3:00 GMT), according to the official Xinhua news agency. The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT), named Insight, will allow Chinese scientists to observe magnetic fields and the interiors of pulsars and better understand the evolution of black holes. It will also help scientists search for gamma-ray bursts corresponding to gravitational waves and study how to pulsars can be used for spacecraft navigation,Xinhua said.

STRASBOURG: More than one million people have signed a petition demanding the EU ban the Monsanto weedkiller glyphosate over fears it causes cancer,

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campaigners said Thursday. The petition comes as the European Union is deciding whether to renew the licence of the controversial herbicide produced by the US agro-chemicals giant. Glyphosate is used in the best-selling herbicide Roundup. "In less than five months, more than one million EU citizens have joined our call for a glyphosate ban," said David Schwartz, coordinator at the European Citizens Initiative, which is behind the petition. "European citizens aren't fooled by the pesticide industry's lobbying efforts or the faulty science it's peddling," he added.

WASHINGTON: Chinese scientists have pulled off a major feat with one of the sub-atomic world's weirdest phenomena: photons that behave like twins and experience the same things simultaneously, even over great distances. The spacebased technique developed by the researchers and reported in the journal Science holds potential for revolutionizing telecommunications and perhaps someday developing a hack-proof internet. The principle is called quantum entanglement, in which photons or neutrons are created in such a way that they are linked and behave as if they were one entity, even if they are physically separated.

PARIS: An odd-looking electric boat taxi whose inventor believes it could be an eco-friendly transport solution for cities worldwide was put to the test in Paris for the first time Friday. The brainchild of French yachtsman Alain Thebault, the aerodynamic Sea Bubble made no noise and no waves as it took a star turn on the River Seine with Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo aboard.

BRUSSELS: The EU unveiled a blueprint to safely regulate drone traffic in Europe by 2019 in order to tap the growing commercial potential for unmanned aircraft technology. The blueprint from the European Commission, the EU executive, covers allowing drones to operate in high density under the supervision of fleet operators. "Drones mean innovation, new services for citizens, new business models and a huge potential for economic growth," EU Transport Minister Violeta Bulc said. "We need the EU to be in the driving seat and have a safe drone services market up and running by2019," she said in a statement.

WASHINGTON: Drones could help save the lives of heart attack victims by delivering defibrillators faster than an ambulance can arrive at the scene, according to a report Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. By reducing the crucial intervention time after a heart attack, drone delivery of the easy-to- use kit could raise the chances of survival of cardiac arrest victims, said the report compiled by Swedish researchers. For the study, the Swedish Transportation Agency equipped a drone with a defibrillator weighing 1.7lbs and deployed it at a

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