“The scene took place at around 6:36 a.m.[…]. A traffic police officer stopped the perpetrator who was driving against the flow of traffic,” South Tangerang Police traffic unit head, Adj. Comr. Lalu Hedwin Hanggara said on Thursday.

A video of the incident has gone viral on social media after being uploaded by Instagram account @jktinfo. The video shows a man ripping off parts of his motorbike and hitting it with a stone.

When the police stopped the man, identified as Adi Saputra, 21, the latter tried to avoid the police officer, who was conducting traffic management at a U-turn near Pasar Modern Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD) market.

The police officer then ticketed Adi.

“The traffic violator got angry and shouted at the police officer. He also destroyed his own vehicle,” Lalu said.

In addition to wrong-way driving, Adi was also not wearing a helmet and failed to show his driving license and vehicle registration document.

The police have confiscated the damaged motorbike. Lalu said his side had promised to return the motorbike once Adi was able to show the required documents.

He added that the South Tangerang Police had deployed 73 police officers to tackle wrong-way driving. Within a week, the officers have ticketed around 700 violators.

The light aircraft was carrying the 28-year-old footballer from France to his new Premier League team Cardiff City, when it disappeared near the British island of Guernsey, along with 59-year-old pilot David Ibbotson.

Argentinian footballing idols Diego Maradona and Gabriel Batistuta were among the first to pay tribute to the talented young player, who hailed from the South American country.

The striker’s body was spotted by British rescuers using a remotely operated underwater vehicle on Sunday close to where the plane vanished from radar on January 21.

    His body was recovered on Wednesday and brought to the Isle of Portland in southern England for formal identification on Thursday by coroners, who investigate deaths in Britain.

“The body brought to Portland Port today has been formally identified… as that of professional footballer Emiliano Sala,” police in Dorset, the county where the body was taken, said on Twitter.

“The families of Mr Sala and pilot David Ibbotson have been updated. Our thoughts remain with them all,” police said.

– ‘Rest in peace warrior’ –

Sala’s disappearance sparked an outpouring of grief and a flood of cash to support a private hunt for the plane when the official search was initially called off.

“I am very sorry about this sad news. Many of us kept a glimmer of hope for you, Emiliano,” footballing superstar Maradona said on Instagram, after the identification of the body.

“What sadness, this is the worst news. Rest in peace warrior,” tweeted retired Argentinian football star Gabriel Batistuta.

The country’s President Mauricio Macri also offered his condolences to Sala’s family following the “painful news”. “We are with you,” he added.

The small Argentinian town of Progreso, where the footballer lived for most of his childhood, was left “very affected”.

“Since we found out, it’s all anyone can talk about,” said local restaurant owner Oscar Heymo, a friend of Sala’s father Horacio. “He was very much loved and admired by all.”

– ‘Dignified’ recovery –

The initial search operations to trace the plane were suspended in the days after it went missing, but a shipwreck hunter hired by Sala’s family with funds donated by football stars such as Lionel Messi found the wreckage.

Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), then co-ordinated the recovery and the rescued body was taken to Portland Harbour earlier on Thursday and was seen being stretchered into a silver van.

“In challenging conditions, the AAIB and its specialist contractors successfully recovered the body previously seen amidst the wreckage,” the AAIB said Wednesday.

“The operation was carried out in as dignified a way as possible.”

The crash investigators added that it was unable to recover the plane due to bad weather and as a result has closed down the operation.

The AAIB said that extensive video footage captured of the sunken wreckage is expected to “provide valuable evidence for our safety investigation”, adding that it intends to publish an interim report on the accident later this month.

– Private appeal –

The plane, a Piper PA-46 Malibu, vanished from radar around 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Guernsey, with Ibbotson the only other person aboard.

After the official rescue team gave up their search, saying there was little chance of finding anyone alive, Sala’s family raised more than 370,000 euros ($422,000) in an online campaign to pay for a private hunt.

“Had that not happened, I don’t think anybody would have searched for the plane,” shipwreck hunter David Mearns, whose private company found the plane, told AFP.

The discovery of two seat cushions on the French coast last week revealed that the plane had broken apart, he added.

Sala had been flying in to join up with his new club Cardiff City in what was the most expensive signing in the Welsh club’s history.

His former club Nantes have consulted lawyers to explore legal options to ensure Cardiff pay the transfer fee for Sala, a source close to the French club revealed on Wednesday.

According to the source, the first instalment of the 17-million-euro ($19.3 million) deal for the Argentine striker has yet to be paid, despite the transfer being finalised before the accident.

Earlier this week the footballer’s father, Horacio, acknowledged that there was no prospect of finding his son alive.

“There’s no longer any hope,” he told Fox Sports.

The light aircraft was carrying the 28-year-old footballer from France to his new Premier League team Cardiff City, when it disappeared near the British island of Guernsey, along with 59-year-old pilot David Ibbotson.

Argentinian footballing idols Diego Maradona and Gabriel Batistuta were among the first to pay tribute to the talented young player, who hailed from the South American country.

The striker’s body was spotted by British rescuers using a remotely operated underwater vehicle on Sunday close to where the plane vanished from radar on January 21.

    His body was recovered on Wednesday and brought to the Isle of Portland in southern England for formal identification on Thursday by coroners, who investigate deaths in Britain.

“The body brought to Portland Port today has been formally identified… as that of professional footballer Emiliano Sala,” police in Dorset, the county where the body was taken, said on Twitter.

“The families of Mr Sala and pilot David Ibbotson have been updated. Our thoughts remain with them all,” police said.

– ‘Rest in peace warrior’ –

Sala’s disappearance sparked an outpouring of grief and a flood of cash to support a private hunt for the plane when the official search was initially called off.

“I am very sorry about this sad news. Many of us kept a glimmer of hope for you, Emiliano,” footballing superstar Maradona said on Instagram, after the identification of the body.

“What sadness, this is the worst news. Rest in peace warrior,” tweeted retired Argentinian football star Gabriel Batistuta.

The country’s President Mauricio Macri also offered his condolences to Sala’s family following the “painful news”. “We are with you,” he added.

The small Argentinian town of Progreso, where the footballer lived for most of his childhood, was left “very affected”.

“Since we found out, it’s all anyone can talk about,” said local restaurant owner Oscar Heymo, a friend of Sala’s father Horacio. “He was very much loved and admired by all.”

– ‘Dignified’ recovery –

The initial search operations to trace the plane were suspended in the days after it went missing, but a shipwreck hunter hired by Sala’s family with funds donated by football stars such as Lionel Messi found the wreckage.

Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), then co-ordinated the recovery and the rescued body was taken to Portland Harbour earlier on Thursday and was seen being stretchered into a silver van.

“In challenging conditions, the AAIB and its specialist contractors successfully recovered the body previously seen amidst the wreckage,” the AAIB said Wednesday.

“The operation was carried out in as dignified a way as possible.”

The crash investigators added that it was unable to recover the plane due to bad weather and as a result has closed down the operation.

The AAIB said that extensive video footage captured of the sunken wreckage is expected to “provide valuable evidence for our safety investigation”, adding that it intends to publish an interim report on the accident later this month.

– Private appeal –

The plane, a Piper PA-46 Malibu, vanished from radar around 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Guernsey, with Ibbotson the only other person aboard.

After the official rescue team gave up their search, saying there was little chance of finding anyone alive, Sala’s family raised more than 370,000 euros ($422,000) in an online campaign to pay for a private hunt.

“Had that not happened, I don’t think anybody would have searched for the plane,” shipwreck hunter David Mearns, whose private company found the plane, told AFP.

The discovery of two seat cushions on the French coast last week revealed that the plane had broken apart, he added.

Sala had been flying in to join up with his new club Cardiff City in what was the most expensive signing in the Welsh club’s history.

His former club Nantes have consulted lawyers to explore legal options to ensure Cardiff pay the transfer fee for Sala, a source close to the French club revealed on Wednesday.

According to the source, the first instalment of the 17-million-euro ($19.3 million) deal for the Argentine striker has yet to be paid, despite the transfer being finalised before the accident.

Earlier this week the footballer’s father, Horacio, acknowledged that there was no prospect of finding his son alive.

“There’s no longer any hope,” he told Fox Sports.

Marzuki Yahya’s educational background came under scrutiny after doubts were raised on social media that he had a distance-learning degree in business administration from the British institution, which was previously listed on his Wikipedia profile.

After initially insisting he would prove he had the degree, Marzuki said late Wednesday that he had in fact not studied at the prestigious British university but at Cambridge International University in the United States.

“I think they (my critics) misunderstood (my credentials). I (studied) at the Cambridge International University in the US,” Marzuki — a member of Bersatu, a party in the ruling coalition — told news portal Malaysiakini.

“I was doing logistics (before joining politics). So I just took that certificate for my knowledge to expand my business.”

One of the programmes listed on the US institution’s website is “logistics”.

The claim sparked mockery in Malaysia, with many questioning the institution’s credibility.

Cambridge International University says on its website it is not accredited with US education authorities, offers 150 programmes — including “casino management” — yet lists only 25 faculty members.

One profile picture of a female faculty member has a watermark that appears to come from an American dating website.

The university did not respond to requests for comment.

Main opposition party the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) called on Marzuki to quit.

“How do you (Marzuki) deceive the people with a fake degree and then claim you are fighting against corruption and propagating good governance and ethics?” Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki, the head of UMNO’s youth division, told The Star newspaper.

The controversy will be a blow to the administration of Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, which has pledged to fight corruption and improve the government’s integrity.

The previous government of Najib Razak became embroiled in a multi-billion-dollar scandal surrounding state fund 1MDB, which played a large part in its shock election defeat in May.

Ghosn’s tenure as CEO has come under the microscope since his arrest last November in Japan on charges he under-reported millions of dollars in pay as head of Nissan, Renault’s alliance partner.

His subsequent indictment on three charges of financial misconduct has led to renewed scrutiny of his management and lifestyle at both companies while he sits in a Tokyo jail awaiting trial.

The latest charges involve Ghosn’s lavish second marriage at the Chateau de Versailles outside Paris in October 2016.

Ghosn and his new wife Carole threw a Marie Antoinette-themed dinner and party at the former royal residence complete with entertainers in period costumes.

“We wanted it to feel as if we were inviting guests into our home — nothing too studied,” Carole Ghosn told Town & Country magazine a few months later when it published photos of the wedding.

According to a report in the Figaro newspaper, the operators of the palace waived the usual fee of 50,000 euros ($57,000) fee for the reception at the 17th-century Grand Trianon complex.

It said the arrangement was made as part of a sponsorship deal between Versailles and Renault.

The company confirmed Thursday that internal audits “identified that a contribution of 50,000 euros, under a sponsorship agreement signed with the Chateau de Versailles, was allocated to Mr. Ghosn’s personal benefit.”

“Renault has decided to bring these facts to the attention of the judicial authorities,” it added.

– Betrayal? –

Ghosn’s arrest and continued detention marks a stunning fall from grace for an executive widely credited with forging the Renault and Nissan alliance into the world’s top-selling automotive group.

The 64-year-old Franco-Brazilian-Lebanese executive has angrily denied the misconduct charges against him, which saw Nissan and the group’s other alliance partner Mitsubishi jettison him as chairman shortly after his arrest.

“I am accused of under-reporting income I never received! There is not one yen that I have received that was not reported,” Ghosn told AFP in an interview at the Tokyo detention centre where he is being held last week.

“Is it a trap? Is it a plot? It’s obvious: it’s a story of betrayal. There is no question about this,” he said.

So far Renault has said its internal investigations have found that his pay was in compliance with French law.

But facing the prospect of several more months behind bars before his trial opens, Ghosn last month relinquished his grip as CEO of Renault.

The affair has also exposed rifts between Renault and Nissan, which some analysts say was bristling at Ghosn’s efforts to bring the two automakers’ operations even closer together.

Ghosn was the linchpin of the three-way alliance, earning industry plaudits for driving together a sometimes fractious threesome with headquarters 10,000 kilometres apart.

Much of the tension between the partners stems from a complex ownership structure that gives Renault 43 percent of Nissan, whereas Nissan owns just 15 percent stake in the French company — and no voting rights.

Adding to the complexity, the French state owns just over 15 percent of Renault, and government officials have said they are keeping a close eye on the alliance’s future.

“We are being vigilant to ensure the balances of the alliance are preserved,” French President Emmanuel Macron said last month.

Rescuers work at the site of a building that collapsed in Istanbul’s Kartal district, Turkey, on February 6, 2019. – An eight-story apartment building in Istanbul collapsed on Wednesday leaving at least one person dead, Turkish media reported. // AFP PHOTO

Images from the incident in the Kartal district on the Asian side of Istanbul showed people escaping as the building crumbled around them.

    There were reports of people left wounded or trapped under the rubble.

It was not immediately clear what caused the collapse but prosecutors launched an investigation, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.

Rescuers work at the site of a collapsed building in Kartal district of Istanbul, Turkey, February 6, 2019. – An eight-storey apartment building in Istanbul collapsed on Wednesday leaving at least one person dead, Turkish media reported. // AFP PHOTO

Istanbul governor Ali Yerlikaya said 43 residents were registered as living in the block, according to Anadolu.

He said local authorities had told him that three of the eight storeys had been illegally added.

Authorities immediately placed a media blackout on the incident, a practice usually reserved for terror attacks.

These melting giants, especially the one atop Greenland, are poised to further weaken the ocean currents that move cold water south along the Atlantic Ocean floor while pushing tropical waters northward closer to the surface, they reported in the journal Nature.

Known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), this liquid conveyor belt plays a crucial role in Earth’s climate system and helps ensures the relative warmth of the Northern Hemisphere.

“According to our models, this meltwater will cause significant disruptions to ocean currents and change levels of warming around the world,” said lead author Nicholas Golledge, an associate professor at the Antarctic Research Centre of New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington.

    The Antarctic ice sheet’s loss of mass, meanwhile, traps warmer water below the surface, eroding glaciers from underneath in a vicious circle of accelerated melting that contributes to sea level rise.

Most studies on ice sheets have focused on how quickly they might shrink due to global warming, and how much global temperatures can rise before their disintegration — whether over centuries or millenia — becomes inevitable, a threshold known as a “tipping point.”

But far less research has been done on how the meltwater might affect the climate system itself.

– Cooler temperatures –

“The large-scale changes we see in our simulations are conducive to a more chaotic climate with more extreme weather events and more intense and frequent heatwaves,” co-author Natalya Gomez, a researcher in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University in Canada, told AFP.

“By mid-century,” the researchers concluded, “meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet noticeably disrupts the AMOC,” which has already shown signs of slowing down.

This is a “much shorter timescale than expected,” commented Helene Seroussi, a researcher in the Sea Level and Ice Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who was not involved in the study.

The findings were based on highly detailed simulations combined with satellite observations of changes to the ice sheets since 2010.

One likely result of weakened current in the Atlantic will be warmer air temperatures in the high Arctic, eastern Canada and central America, and cooler temperatures over northwestern Europe.

The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, up to three kilometres (1.8 miles) thick, contain more than two-thirds of the planet’s fresh water, enough to raise global oceans 58 and seven metres (190 and 22 feet), respectively, were they to melt completely.

Besides Greenland, the regions most vulnerable to global warming are West Antarctica and several huge glaciers in East Antarctica, which is far larger and more stable.

In a second study published Wednesday in Nature, some of the same scientists offered new projections of how much Antarctica will contribute to sea level rise by 2100 — a hotly debated topic.

– Ice cliffs –

A controversial 2016 study suggested the continent’s ice cliffs — exposed by the disintegration of ice shelves that jut out from glaciers over ocean water — were highly vulnerable to collapse, and could lead to sea level rise of a metre by century’s end.

That would be enough to displace up to 187 million people around the world, especially in populous low-lying river deltas in Asia and Africa, research has shown.

But the new study challenges those findings.

“Unstable ice-cliffs were proposed as a cause of unstoppable collapse of large parts of the ice sheet,” said lead author Tamsin Edwards, a lecturer in geography at King’s College London.

“But we’ve re-analysed the data and found this isn’t the case.”

Both of the news studies, Edwards told AFP, “predict a most likely Antarctic contribution of 15 centimetres” by 2100, with an upward limit of about 40 cm.

A special report on oceans by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due out in September, will offer a much anticipated estimate of sea level rise.

The IPCC’s last major assessment in 2013 did not take ice sheets — today seen as the major contributor, ahead of thermal expansion and glaciers — into account for lack of data.

Most of the dead are children and the toll is expected to rise as more cases are confirmed of the highly contagious disease, which has made a worldwide resurgence in recent years.

Figures from the Philippines’ national health authorities show cases jumped from 791 in 2017 to 5,120 last year. There were 1,813 confirmed cases in January alone.

Filipino children, who are suffering from measles, share beds inside an over crowded room at a government hospital in Manila, Philippines, 07 February 2019. // EPA-EFE PHOTO

    The most recent numbers available show measles killed 30 in the first eight months of last year, and five in all of 2017.

Authorities said vaccination rates in the Philippines have been declining for years, but also pointed to the recent controversy over the safety of the Dengvaxia dengue vaccine.

“The measles vaccination coverage has been in decline in the last five years,” health undersecretary Eric Domingo told a press conference Thursday.

“In the recent years, it was the issue of Dengvaxia vaccine that contributed,” he added, as the government pushed parents to get children vaccinated.

The scare started in late 2017, shortly after the Philippines gave Dengvaxia to some 837,000 students as part of a public immunisation campaign.

The vaccine’s maker, Sanofi, set off a panic when it said a new analysis showed Dengvaxia could lead to more severe symptoms for people who had not previously been infected with dengue.

Sanofi has unequivocally said its product is safe, but Manila still halted the campaign and left hundreds of thousands of terrified parents wondering if their children were at risk.

The World Health Organization in November 2018 warned that measles cases globally had jumped more than 30 percent in 2017 compared to the previous year, in part because of children not being vaccinated.

San Lazaro hospital in the Philippine capital reported more than 50 deaths from measles and over 1,500 patients in January alone, which is subject to health department confirmation.

The sources said Indang was injured in the Feb 2 military offensive in the Patikul village area of the southern Philippines island and was taken away from the fighting zone by Moro National Liberation Front commander Annual Abdulah to another village in Talipao.

The sources said Wednesday (Feb 6) that Indang had apparently suffered complications from his injury and died in the Indanan area at around 8am on Feb 4 (Monday).

However, efforts are still under way to validate the ground intelligence claims.

Indang, who was believed to have been killed during President Rodrigo Duterte’s all-out war against Abu Sayyaf two years ago but resurfaced late last year to arrange fresh kidnappings in waters off Sabah’s east coast.

The Philippines military operations against the Abu Sayyaf in Jolo came after Manila blamed the militant group for the Jan 27 suicide bombing of a church in Jolo that left at least 22 dead and more than a hundred injured.

The  suicide attack was believed to have been carried out by an Indonesian couple with assistance from an Islamic State-linked group linked to the militants.

Indang’s group was responsible for the abduction of the Tung cousins from Negri Sembilan, who were kidnapped in 2012; Taiwanese Chang An Wei kidnapped in Pom Pom island in 2013; and Sarawakian Bernard Then, who was the first and only Malaysian to be beheaded by the Abu Sayyaf.

Late last year, Indang, working with Abu Sayyaf sub-commander Hatib Hajan Sawadjan, began to put together a new group of cross-border kidnappers amid talks that they were financed by a southern Philippines political warlords edgy over the newly-introduced Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL), also known as Bangsamoro Basic Law.

The BOL creates a Muslim-majority sub-state in the Philippines that has replaced  the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.

Intelligence sources said despite the military offensive, three hostages – a Malaysian and two Indonesians – taken from waters off Sabah’s Kinabatangan on Dec 5 remained safe and under guard of the Abu Sayyaf gunmen.