ECUADOR
Fireworks banned in islands
The government on Friday banned most fireworks in the Galapagos Archipelago due to damage caused to the islands’ wildlife from the sounds of explosions, including heart problems and nervous stress. Officials announced the ban just days before New Year celebrations that traditionally see fireworks exploding across Latin America. The new rule bars the entry, sale and distribution of any fireworks that cause noise on the archipelago’s 13 main islands at at least 17 islets about 1,000km out in the Pacific, Governing Council of Galapagos president Lorena Tapia said on Twitter. “This is a gift for Ecuador and the world,” she said. Luminous pyrotechnics that do not produce any sound would still be allowed, officials said.
MEXICO
Blaze kills seven children
Seven children on Friday died in a house fire in a poor Mexico City neighborhood. The fire erupted before dawn in a wooden dwelling in the Iztapalapa neighborhood, the city prosecutors’ office said. Five of the children were younger than 10, including two two-year-olds, the office said, adding that the other two were 13 and 14. The children were apparently left alone while their parents worked, officials said. Local media said that the parents earn money collecting plastic bottles. Someone apparently lighted a fire somewhere on the lot to keep warm, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said. While the cause of the blaze remained under investigation, house fires in the city are often caused by attempts to heat dwellings using wood or charcoal fires or by faulty gas connections.
UNITED STATES
Bear attack victim improves
A Pennsylvania woman who survived a bear mauling by punching the animal as it dragged her has been upgraded to a fair condition after several surgeries. Danville, Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Medical Center on Friday said that Melinda LeBarron has been moved from intensive care to a medical-surgical unit. Her son has said that the attack on Dec. 12 resulted in broken bones, cuts and bruises, and that she suffered multiple bites. LeBarron told relatives that her Chihuahua-mix named Bear distracted the bear. The dog was also bitten during the attack. State wildlife officials have said that they believed the bear was a sow with cubs and the incident occurred after the dog ran toward the bears. The attack took place in a rural area outside Muncy, Pennsylvania, about 265km northwest of Philadelphia.
UNITED STATES
Doctor used own sperm: suit
A Florida couple has accused a retired Vermont doctor of artificially inseminating the woman with his own sperm rather than that of a donor in the 1970s. They filed a lawsuit in US District Court on Dec. 4 against John Coates and then-named Central Vermont Medical Center seeking at least US$75,000 in damages. The complaint says that Coates agreed to inseminate Cheryl Rousseau with donor material from an unnamed medical student, who resembled Rousseau’s husband and had characteristics that she required. Rousseau had wanted a child with her husband, but he had a vasectomy that could not be reversed, the complaint says. Coates performed the artificial insemination, but inserted his own genetic material, the lawsuit says. The couple recently discovered what had happened when their now-grown daughter sought information about her biological father through DNA testing, which in October determined that Coates was her father, the complaint says.
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