SOUTH AFRICA
Lion escapes national park
Last year, a lion earned the nickname “Spook” after it escaped from a national park and eluded searchers for more than three weeks. Now Spook has broken out again. A helicopter on Tuesday searched for the male lion, which was fitted with a satellite tracking collar after last year’s escape from Karoo National Park and should be easier to trace this time, park spokeswoman Fayroush Ludick said. The lion, which escaped overnight Sunday, has become a “problem animal” and will be killed because he knows how to get out of the park and could endanger people, Ludick said. “It’s a decision that wasn’t taken lightly,’’ she said. Spook killed a cow on Monday and is believed to be about 20km outside the park’s boundary, Ludick said. The lion ranged widely in the arid, sparsely populated area in his last escape, covering about 300km.
CHINA
Web regulations proposed
The government is proposing new regulations governing where businesses register their Web addresses, a move that could strengthen its ability to censor the Internet. Under new draft regulations released this week by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, any firm that provides services to Chinese Internet users must register its domain, or Web address, with the authorities. Although analysts believe the government’s primary motivation is to reel Chinese Internet firms closer under Beijing’s watch rather than add restrictions on foreign businesses, the new rule could pose hurdles for anyone in the world seeking to access the Chinese network. Beijing has recently pushed for what it calls “Internet sovereignty” to run its Internet as it wishes.
PAKISTAN
Protesters told to disperse
The interior minister has warned hundreds of radical Islamists rallying for the past four days in central Islamabad to disperse peacefully and end their protest. Minister of the Interior Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said late on Tuesday that if the Islamists fail to do so, the government would disperse them by force. The rally turned violent on Sunday, when more than 10,000 Islamists from Pakistan’s Sunni Tehreek group descended on the capital to denounce last month’s hanging of police guard Mumtaz Qadri for the 2011 murder of late-Punjab governor Salman Taseer who had campaigned against Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws. Since the start of the rally, the crowds have dwindled down to about 1,200 people. The protesters also demand the hanging of a jailed Christian woman whom Taseer had defended against blasphemy allegations.
AFGHANISTAN
US plane crashes taking off
A US F-16 warplane crashed on Tuesday while taking off from Bagram airfield, an official said. The pilot ejected safely. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said the fighter from the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing crashed at about 8:30pm. “Coalition forces are securing the crash site. The cause of this accident will be investigated,” Cook said. The Taliban said their fighters shot down the jet, claiming that all on board had been killed. The insurgent group is well known for exaggerating battlefield claims. Cook said there was no immediate indication the plane came down due to enemy action. The pilot safely ejected and was recovered by coalition forces, and was being evaluated by medical personnel. Bagram is the largest US military base in Afghanistan and is located north of Kabul.
UNITED STATES
Rhino 29,000 years young
A long-extinct animal known as the Siberian unicorn — which was actually a long-horned rhinoceros — might have walked the Earth 29,000 years ago, at the same time as prehistoric humans, researchers say. Until now, the Elasmotherium sibiricum was thought to have vanished 350,000 years ago. However, research published in the American Journal of Applied Science describes a far more recent discovery of a well-preserved skull in Kazakhstan. “Most likely, it was a very large male,” Tomsk State University paleontologist Andrey Shpanski said. “The dimensions of this rhino today are the biggest of those described in the literature.” Researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the creature’s age, leading to theories of migration and refuge-seeking in southern corners of Western Siberia for these lumbering legends. The skull was in relatively good shape, and showed no signs of having been gnawed upon. Siberian rhinos, which were likely vegetarians, have been described as weighing up to 4 tonnes and standing 2m tall and nearly 5m long.
VENEZUELA
Protesters kill police officers
People demonstrating against a bus fare hike killed two police officers on Tuesday in the restive western Venezuelan town of San Cristobal, as informal protests swept the troubled country. The officers, aged 21 and 25, were killed by a bus hijacked and later abandoned by protesters in Tachira State, according to the Tachira police. Four other officers were seriously injured when masked protesters drove the hijacked bus through a police line, according to posts from the Tachira police Twitter account. Earlier this month, the government doubled bus fares. At least 31 people were arrested during the protest, Tachira Public Security Secretary Ramon Cabeza said.
UNITED STATES
Patty Duke dies aged 69
Patty Duke, who won an Oscar as a teen for The Miracle Worker and maintained a long and successful career throughout her life, has died at the age of 69. Duke’s agent Mitchell Stubbs said the actress died early on Tuesday morning of sepsis from a ruptured intestine. Duke, born Anna Marie Pearce, followed on her early success playing the young Helen Keller with a popular sitcom, The Patty Duke Show, which aired in the mid-1960s. She played dual roles under a then-unconventional premise: Identical twins living in Brooklyn Heights, Duke was also an outspoken advocate for mental health. She was diagnosed as bipolar in 1982 after years of battling mental illness.
UNITED STATES
ash the dog sparks scare
A dog whose name — Dash — sounded too much like Daesh an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group, prompted a security scare at a California bank. The alarm was raised after Dash’s owner Bruce Francis, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and lives in San Francisco, tried to make an online payment to the person who walks his pitbull mix. Francis wrote “Dash” in the memo line for the check, panicking officials at Chase Bank who mistook it for “Daesh” and canceled the payment, local news reports said. The bank also flagged the payment to the US Department of the Treasury which sent a note to Francis asking him to “explain what Dash means.” “I thought to myself, ‘great, they’re stopping the world’s stupidest terrorist,’” Francis told the local KTVU station after the incident earlier this month. In spite of the mix-up, Francis said he is taking the incident in his stride and did not mind the inconvenience.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in