NIGERIA
Army recaptures Chibok
The army said on Sunday it had recaptured the northeastern town of Chibok, where Islamic militants abducted more than 200 schoolgirls in April. Control of Chibok is crucial to the reputation of the government of President Goodluck Jonathan and the military, which have both come under fire at home and abroad for their failure to rescue the girls. The army recaptured the town from Boko Haram militants late on Saturday, army spokesman General Olajide Olaleye told reporters in a text message. “Mopping up ops ongoing. [The] town is now secured,” he said. The operation came just days after Jonathan on Tuesday announced his bid for re-election, vowing to defeat Boko Haram whose brutal five-year insurgency has plagued his first term in office. In the latest sign of unrest on Sunday, a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a market in the town of Azare in Bauchi State, killing at least 13 people, police said.
UNITED STATES
State Department breached?
The Department of State had to shut down its unclassified computer network over the weekend after evidence emerged that it could have been hacked, media outlets reported late on Sunday. The department said in an e-mail late on Friday that the shutdown came as scheduled routine maintenance to its main unclassified network, and would impact e-mail traffic and access to public Web sites. However, on Sunday reports emerged that there was evidence a hacker may have breached the security in portions of the system handling non-classified e-mails. A senior official told the Washington Post there had been “activity of concern” but that none of the departments classified systems had been compromised.
UNITED STATES
Man pushed in front of train
A 61-year-old man was killed on Sunday in New York when he was pushed onto subway tracks by an unknown assailant, said police, who released a video of the suspect. The incident took place in the Bronx, where the victim, identified as Wai Kuen Kwok, was waiting for the D train, at the 167th Street stop, with his wife. The couple were headed to Chinatown, in lower Manhattan. The suspect pushed the man from the platform just as a train arrived in the station, as his horrified wife watched helplessly. The victim and his attacker did not appear to know each other and had not argued, witnesses said. Police released a video of the suspected killer, who left the scene by bus. In the video, a man wearing a black jacket over a dark T-shirt gets off the bus, goes into a store, and emerges to smoke a cigarette as he ambles away. A reward of US$2,000 was offered for any information that could help the investigation.
UNITED STATES
Tourist tries to climb bridge
A French tourist was arrested on Sunday for scaling the Brooklyn Bridge, apparently to take photos, police said, in the latest such incident at the iconic New York landmark. The man, identified as Yonathan Souid, 23, from Esnandes in southwestern France, faces charges of reckless endangerment and criminal trespassing. He was arrested after jumping a fence and climbing up a beam on the famous bridge that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn, a police spokesman told reporters. Souid climbed back down at the request of a patrol officer who saw him and was detained. He was due to be formally charged yesterday, said a spokesman from the Brooklyn prosecutor’s office, who added that he would remain in custody on Sunday night.
AUSTRALIA
Bluefin tuna on ‘red list’
The Pacific bluefin tuna, a fish used in sushi and sashimi dishes, is at risk of extinction as the global food market places “unsustainable pressure” on the species and others, a conservation body said yesterday. The bluefin tuna joined the Chinese pufferfish, American eel, Chinese cobra and Australian black grass-dart butterfly on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) “red list” of threatened species. The updated list was released by the IUCN at its once-a-decade World Parks Congress in Sydney as it called for better management of protected areas, where some of the decline in species levels has taken place. “Each update of the IUCN ‘red list’ makes us realize that our planet is constantly losing its incredible diversity of life, largely due to our destructive actions to satisfy our growing appetite for resources,” IUCN director-general Julia Marton-Lefevre said. “But we have scientific evidence that protected areas can play a central role in reversing this trend,” she added.
CHINA
Food plant fire kills 18
A fire in a carrot-packaging plant has killed 18 people in eastern China, police said yesterday. Another 13 people were injured in the fire on Sunday night at the Longyuan Food Co facility in Shandong Province’s Shougang, the city’s police department said on its official microblog. Two of the injured were in serious condition, the police said. The fire was put out after about two-and-a-half hours. The cause is still under investigation, and the owner of the plant has been detained, a police statement said.
THAILAND
US man mailed body parts
A shipping company in Bangkok put a trio of packages bound for the US through a routine X-ray and made a startling discovery — inside were a variety of preserved human parts, including an infant’s head, a baby’s foot sliced into three sections and a tiny heart. The shipping company, DHL, alerted police who tracked down the sender, a 31-year-old US tourist who said he found the items at a Bangkok night market, police Colonel Chumpol Poompuang said. “He said he thought the body parts were bizarre and wanted to send them to his friends in the US,” Chumpol said, adding that the man was questioned for several hours and released without charges. The three packages were being sent to Las Vegas, including one that the man had addressed to himself. Among the baby body parts there was also an infant’s intestines and two pieces of tattooed skin from an adult, Chumpol said. All the pieces were preserved separately in formaldehyde inside sealed acrylic boxes.
FRANCE
S Korean buys Napoleon hat
A two-cornered hat that belonged to French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was sold to a South Korean bidder for 1.9 million euros (US$2.4 million) at an auction near Paris on Sunday. Jean-Pierre Osenat of the Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau said the buyer acquired the black “bicorne” felt hat in a sale of Napoleon-era items from the collections of the Prince of Monaco. The bicorne hat was a trademark of Napoleon, who wore it athwart, the two points aligned with his shoulders. “Everybody at the time wore that kind of hat one way, but Napoleon wore it the other way so that everybody would recognize his silhouette on the battlefield,” the auction official said.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: By showing Ju-ae’s ability to handle a weapon, the photos ‘suggest she is indeed receiving training as a successor,’ an academic said North Korea on Saturday released a rare image of leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter firing a rifle at a shooting range, adding to speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. Kim’s daughter, Ju-ae, has long been seen as the next in line to rule the secretive, nuclear-armed state, and took part in a string of recent high-profile outings, including last week’s military parade marking the closing stages of North Korea’s key party congress. Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo of Ju-ae shooting a rifle at an outdoor shooting range, peering through a rifle scope
India and Canada yesterday reached a string of agreements, including on critical mineral cooperation and a “landmark” uranium supply deal for nuclear power, the countries’ leaders said in New Delhi. The pacts, which also covered technology and promoting the use of renewable energy, were announced after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney hailed a fresh start in the relationship between their nations. “Our ties have seen a new energy, mutual trust and positivity,” Modi said. Carney’s visit is a key step forward in ties that effectively collapsed in 2023 after Ottawa accused New Delhi
Gaza is rapidly running out of its limited fuel supply and stocks of food staples might become tight, officials said, after Israel blocked the entry of fuel and goods into the war-shattered territory, citing fighting with Iran. The Israeli military closed all Gaza border crossings on Saturday after announcing airstrikes on Iran carried out jointly with the US. Israeli authorities late on Monday night said that they would reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza yesterday, for “gradual entry of humanitarian aid” into the strip, without saying how much. Israeli authorities previously said the crossings could not be operated safely during
Counting was under way in Nepal yesterday, after a high-stakes parliamentary election to reshape the country’s leadership following protests last year that toppled the government. Key figures vying for power include former Nepalese prime minister K. P. Sharma Oli, rapper-turned-mayor Balendra Shah, who is bidding for the youth vote, and newly elected Nepali Congress party leader Gagan Thapa. In Kathmandu’s tea shops and city squares, people were glued to their phones, checking results as early trends flashed up — suggesting Shah’s centrist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) was ahead. Nepalese Election Commission spokesman Prakash Nyupane said the counting was ongoing “in a peaceful manner”
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