■ CHINA
Yalu River breaches dike
The Yalu River that marks the country’s border with North Korea breached a dike yesterday after torrential rains, inundating parts of Dandong and forcing the evacuation of more than 50,000 people. Flood waters punctured the dike that stood between the river and an economic development zone in a low-lying part of Dandong, a port city, state media reported. The heavy rains and flooding cut rail service out of Dandong, destroyed more than 200 houses and left at least three people missing, in addition to the 51,000 evacuated to higher ground, local officials said. Officials with the flood control offices in Dandong and for Liaoning Province said they did not know whether the city of Sinuiju on the North Korean side of the river sustained any damage. Much of North Korea’s trade with the world passes through Sinuiju, forming a vital lifeline for the isolated, economically struggling country. Flooding in previous years has destroyed crops and pushed North Korea deeper into poverty, increasing its dependence on international food aid.
■NEW ZEALAND
Beached whales refloated
Rescuers refloated 11 beached pilot whales yesterday after a mass stranding on an isolated northern beach in which 47 of the mammals died. Some of the survivors still appeared to be in trouble. All 11 survivors initially headed out to sea and were being monitored to ensure they did not return to the beach, said Carolyn Smith, a spokeswoman for the Department of Conservation. But within an hour, Smith said four of the survivors were in trouble. “Of the eleven whales that were released, seven appear to be in good health, while four are experiencing difficulties,” she said. “The department is concerned because they haven’t left the immediate area and we are closely monitoring the situation.” The 58 pilot whales that beached on Thursday night on remote, storm-tossed Karikari Beach were stranded for up to 12 hours before they were discovered — the reason so many died, Smith said.
■ THAILAND
Site shows WikiLeaks data
A group of anonymous Internet activists has set up a Web site to display information about the country that comes from the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, which is blocked to some viewers in the Southeast Asian country. The group calling itself “Wikicong” said on Friday it set up the thaileaks.info site as “a tool to break the censorship” — an apparent reference to alleged efforts by the government to block access to the material, which includes a private video of Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn. Some access to the main Wikileaks site has been blocked in the country since at least late June. It has been accessible, however, using some variants of the domain name, and through some local Internet service providers.
■ PORTUGAL
Teen girl sets sail
A 14-year-old Dutch girl set off yesterday on a controversial attempt to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world, her representatives said. Laura Dekker’s ambition of completing the yearlong trip has fueled a global debate over the wisdom of allowing young sailors to take on the tremendous risks of sailing the high seas alone. The girl who grew up on a sailboat faces a host of challenges — including favorable winds to send her across the Atlantic Ocean from her jumping off point in a marina in the resort city of Portimao at the southwestern tip of the country.
■ BELGIUM
Dali sculpture stolen
A man stole a bronze sculpture by Salvador Dali in broad daylight from an exhibit at the Belfry tower in Bruges on Wednesday afternoon, local media said on Friday. The incident was captured by surveillance cameras, which police were examining, Belga news agency reported. The statuette, entitled Woman With Drawers and created in 1964, is worth between 100,000 and 120,000 euros (US$127,000 to US$152,000), police said. The theft took place nearly one year after a painting by Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte was snatched from a Brussels museum, also in broad daylight. In September last year, two masked men with a pistol entered the museum dedicated to Magritte’s life and work, and took a 1948 nude entitled Olympia worth between 750,000 and three million euros.
■ TANZANIA
Extinct toads flown home
At the time of its discovery in 1996, the rare Kihansi Spray Toad was living in a five acre area under the waterfall spray of the nearby Kihansi Gorge. It was declared extinct last year after its habitat was disturbed by the construction of the Kihansi hydroelectric dam 10 years previously. However, before the toads were last seen in the wild, in 2004, some 500 were flown to Bronx and Toledo zoos in the US where they thrived and now 100 have now been sent back home to replenish stocks. “The toads now reside at a new, state-of the-art propagation center in Dar es Salaam ... with the eventual goal of reintroducing them into their former habitat,” the World Bank said in a statement. A sprinkler system has been installed in Kihansi to replicate the toad’s habitat before its return. The World Bank, which funded the dam’s construction, also funded the conservation exercise.
■ GERMANY
Taunting robber caught
A bank robber led his pursuers straight to him after taunting police in an e-mail over their efforts to catch him. Authorities in the southern city of Wuerzburg said on Wednesday the 19-year-old sent e-mails to police and two newspapers to point out factual errors in the report of his bank raid in the town of Roettingen a week ago. According to daily Bild, he mocked the police for getting his age, height and accent wrong then pointed out he escaped in a car, not on foot. “His game of cat and mouse went all wrong,” a Wuerzburg police spokesman said. Police traced his e-mail and arrested him in a gambling hall in Hamburg just a few hours later. “He was completely shocked,” the spokesman said.
■ UNITED KINGDOM
Pilots put on vulture alert
Britain’s air traffic controllers put pilots on alert this week after, Gandalf, a seven-year-old Ruppell’s vulture, which can soar as high as 9,100m, escaped from her handlers during a show at the World of Wings center in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, on Tuesday. “She caught a nice thermal and was gone,” World of Wings director Alan Galloway said. “I had a mixture of feelings. She was like a ballerina in the sky, changing from this big lumbering bird on the ground.” Gandalf, originally from Africa, can fly for long periods and could reach the European continent. Sightings by members of the public have been reported from Inverness in northern Scotland, to Cornwall in southwest England. Galloway said he thought it unlikely the bird would pose a threat to aircraft as she would be hungry, flying low in search of food. “She’s clever and quite charming, but temperamental and not everybody’s cup of tea,” he added.
■ RUSSIA
St Petersburg lights go out
An electricity outage in St Petersburg brought about half of the country’s second-largest city to a standstill during the evening rush hour. Trolley buses and trams stopped running, and some subway lines also shut down. Traffic jams formed on central avenues where traffic lights were out. In most buildings there was no hot or cold water as pumping plants also shut down. The blackout lasted for about two hours.
■ FRANCE
Gorilla undergoes surgery
A surgeon may have entered the record books by saving a 70kg female gorilla that sustained a crippling injury after falling from a tree in a safari park. Louis-Etienne Gayet, an orthopedic surgeon at the University Hospital Center in Poitiers, central France, was called in to help eight-year-old Kwanza after the ape snapped her thighbone at Vallee des Singes (Valley of the Apes) in Romagne. The break occurred very close to where the thighbone, or femur, enters the hip, where its ball-like end is enclosed by a ring of bone, the park said in a press release on Friday. The problem was that, because the femur had been completely fractured, the ball end twisted around in the hip casing. As a result, the two bones were left back-to-front. Delicate cases such as these are relatively common in human surgery, but are very rare for veterinarians. Gayet handled the case in a three-hour operation.
■ UNITED STATES
Navy discharges Nowak
The Navy has ended the military career of former astronaut Lisa Nowak, who lost her NASA job over a bizarre airport attack on a romantic rival. A Navy panel of three admirals voted unanimously late on Thursday to discharge Nowak and downgrade her rank from captain to commander. Nowak was sentenced to a year on probation in November after pleading guilty to third-degree felony burglary and misdemeanor battery. Nowak confronted her romantic rival in the parking lot of Orlando International Airport in February 2007 after driving from Houston. Colleen Shipman had begun dating Nowak’s love interest.
■ UNITED STATES
Mother faces charges
Prosecutors have charged a southeastern Indiana woman with starving to death her physically and mentally disabled four-year-old son. Court documents show Payton Ettinger weighed just 5.4kg on May 17 when he died of malnutrition and dehydration. He had weighed more than 7.3kg as a one-year-old. Decatur County prosecutors filed felony child neglect and reckless homicide charges against 25-year-old Courtney Tressler on Wednesday. Court documents say Tressler told officers she found Payton dead in his crib a few hours after feeding him.
■ UNITED STATES
Broken curfew leads to ad
A Texas teenager who broke curfew is headed for a reluctant adventure in babysitting. Robert Rausch placed an advertisement offering his daughter’s free babysitting services in the community newspaper in Southlake. The advertisement names Rausch’s 16-year-old daughter and says, “Want a FREE BABYSITTER for a night out?” It explains that she is in trouble for missing her curfew and offers 30 hours of free babysitting, KXAS-TV reported. Rausch says he wanted to discipline his daughter and help others at the same time. And it appears his daughter has already learned a lesson. She says she won’t violate curfew again or throw any more late-night parties.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion