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Bird doused with beer and stuffed in ticket vending machine

Animal abusers doused a cockatiel with beer and stuffed it in a train station’s ticket machine in Saxony, before a firefighter rescued the frightened bird.

Published: 24 October 2011 17:15 CEST

Bird doused with beer and stuffed in ticket vending machine

Photo: "Zefry"/Wikipedia

The 15-centimetre-tall bird was discovered at the Flöha train station by a customer who wanted to buy a ticket Saturday afternoon.

Police couldn’t free the parrot-like bird and decided to call the mayor for help. He remembered a local firefighter is a member of a bird breeders’ association. The firefighter managed to wriggle the bird out of the machine, but not before it attacked him.

“The bird bit him several times on his fingers,” said Mayor Friedrich Schlosser.

Although the cockatiel apparently drank some beer and was a bit tipsy, he is now jumping about happily again, according to his rescuer.

It isn’t clear who might have stuffed the bird into the machine or why. But officials said they were investigating the case as animal abuse.

DPA/The Local/mdm

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German army faces new questions over online security

Federal prosecutors are already investigating a secret army conversation on the Ukraine war that was wiretapped and ended up on Russian social media in March.

The latest security flaw that Zeit Online reported on again concerned the online video-conference tool Webex, a popular public platform for audio and video meetings, with additional security buffers built in.

Zeit Online said it had been able to access Germany army meetings by using simple search terms on the platform.

“More than 6,000 meetings could be found online,” some of which were meant to be classified, it wrote.

Sensitive issue covered included the long-range Taurus missiles that Ukraine has been calling for, and the issue of online warfare.

Online meeting rooms attributed to 248,000 German soldiers were easy to detect thanks to weak online design that lacked even password protection, Zeit Online added. That allowed its reporters to find the online meeting room of air force chief Ingo Gerhartz.

Multiple security flaws

His name came up during reports of the earlier leak in March, when a recording of the talks between four high-ranking air force officers was posted on Telegram by the head of Russia’s state-backed RT channel. He was one of the four officers recorded.

Zeit Online said that the army only became aware of the security flaws after they approached them for comment. The security issue was first identified by Netzbegruenung, a group of cyber-activists, it reported.

An army spokesman confirmed to AFP that there was a flaw in the army’s Webex sites but that once it had been drawn to their attention they had corrected it within 24 hours.

“It was not possible to participate in the videoconferences without the knowledge of the participants or without authorisation,” he added. “No confidential content could therefore leave the conferences.”

Zeit Online said the Webex sites of Chancellor Olaf Scholz as well as key government ministers had the same flaws and that they had been able to connect to Scholz’s site on Saturday.

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