October 5, 2021

*) US resumes Afghan refugee flights after measles shots Afghan refugees will soon be arriving again in the US after a massive campaign to vaccinate them against measles. The measles outbreak, detected in 24 people, caused a three-week pause in evacuations. Authorities have administered the vaccination to about 49,000 evacuees staying temporarily on American military bases and also others at transit points. *) French clergy molested '216,000 victims' in 70 years A report on sex abuse by Roman Catholic clergymen in France is set to say there have been an estimated 216,000 victims since 1950, a survivor who contributed to the dossier has said ahead of its publication. An independent commission spent more than 2-1/2 years investigating sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the country over the past seven decades. In the run-up to the release of its findings, Commission head Jean-Marc Sauve said about 3,000 paedophile priests and clerics abused minors over the period. *) Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp back online after massive outage Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp services have returned online after a massive and lengthy outage that added to the social network's woes. Facebook cited faulty configuration changes on its routers as the root cause of the nearly six-hour outage. Security experts said the disruption could be the result of an internal mistake, though sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible. *) 'Pandora Papers' bring renewed calls for tax haven scrutiny Calls grow for an end to the financial secrecy that has allowed many of the world’s richest and most powerful people to hide their wealth from tax collectors. The outcry came after a report revealed the way that world leaders, billionaires and others have used shell companies and offshore accounts to keep trillions of dollars out of government treasuries over the past quarter-century. The investigation, dubbed the Pandora Papers, was published on Sunday and involved 600 journalists from 150 media outlets in 117 countri