RUSSIA
Rescuers die in mine
Six people have died — most of them rescuers — in a new explosion in a mine in the Komi region where 26 miners went missing following an accident on Thursday, officials said yesterday. Minister of Emergency Situations Vladimir Puchkov also said that the 26 miners were most likely also dead. Four miners had already been declared dead on Thursday after the collapse at the Severnaya mine in Vorkuta, which is within the Arctic Circle. A massive search operation involving hundreds of rescue workers has been underway since then.
ARGENTINA
urassic find announced
Paleontologists have announced the discovery of a major Jurassic-era fossil site four years after it was first discovered. The site, which spans 60,000km2 in Patagonia, came to light this week with the publication of a report in the journal Ameghiniana. “No other place in the world contains the same amount and diversity of Jurassic fossils,” said geologist Juan Garcia Massini of the Regional Center for Scientific Research and Technology Transfer. The fossils — between 140 and 160 million years old — lie on the surface because they were recently exposed by erosion, said Garcia Massini, who leads the research team investigating the site. “You can see the landscape as it appeared in the Jurassic — how thermal waters, lakes and streams as well as plants and other parts of the ecosystem were distributed.” The fossils are so well preserved, that researchers say each rock extracted from the site could possibly open the door to a new discovery.
GERMANY
Bachelor party ejected
Police in Berlin on Saturday said the pilot of a Ryanair plane on a flight from London to Bratislava made an unscheduled landing to eject members of a bachelor party — including the groom. They said the six men had disturbed security on board the plane and ignored the crew’s instructions, prompting the pilot to land in Berlin late on Friday. Police said the drunken Englishmen aged 25 to 28 from Southampton were met by officers upon landing at Berlin-Schoenefeld Airport. They face fines of up to 25,000 euros (US$27,330) each and civil claims from the airline. The rest of the passengers, including six members of the bachelor party who had not been rowdy, continued their flight to Slovakia.
PUERTO RICO
Cocaine shipment seized
The US Customs and Border Protection on Saturday said it is investigating the origin of almost a half-tonne of cocaine seized last week from a shipping container at San Juan port. Officers said 413kg of cocaine worth an estimated US$11.5 million was found during an inspection after an X-ray of the container revealed irregularities. Several brick-shaped objects wrapped in plastic bags contained a substance that tested positive for cocaine. The container was headed for the US.
UNITED STATES
Burmese pythons nabbed
Florida wildlife officials said 106 Burmese pythons were caught during a state-sanctioned hunt for the invasive snakes. The longest was 4.5m. More than 1,000 people from 29 states registered to remove pythons from south Florida’s wetlands between Jan. 16 and Feb. 14. University of Florida professor Frank Mazzotti said the stomach contents of the pythons are still being analyzed, but so far the prey has included a fawn and a wood stork and other large wading birds.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the