YEMEN
British hostage freed
United Arab Emirates (UAE) forces based in Aden have freed a British hostage who had been held by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militants, the Emirates News Agency (WAM) said yesterday. The hostage, 64-year-old Douglas Robert Semple, a petroleum engineer abducted in February last year, was rescued on Saturday and taken Aden, where he was put on a military plane and flown to Abu Dhabi, WAM said. It said he was taken to a hospital for health checks and spoke to his wife by telephone, adding that he would leave for Britain following the medical check-up. Britain’s Foreign Office confirmed in a statement that the hostage was “extracted by UAE forces in a military intelligence operation” and was “safe and well.”
GERMANY
Dinosaur footprints found
Scientists have found an unusually long trail of footprints from a 30-tonne dinosaur in an abandoned quarry in Lower Saxony, a discovery they think could be about 145 million years old. “It’s very unusual how long the trail is and what great condition it’s in,” excavation leader Benjamin Englich said at the site, referring to 90 uninterrupted footprints stretching more than 50m. Their diameter measured 1.2m. Englich and his team found the impressions while excavating at the quarry in the town of Rehburg-Loccum near Hanover on Wednesday. Englich said the elephant-like tracks were stomped into the ground sometime between 135 and 145 million years ago by a sauropod — a class of heavy dinosaurs with long necks and tails.
ARGENTINA
Treasures to head home
The government will return thousands of stolen archeological pieces to South American neighbors, President Cristina Fernandez said on Saturday. “We are doing something unusual, really special: restoring cultural wealth to other countries, in this case Ecuador and Peru. We are returning to them more than 4,000 pieces that had been stolen and have been recovered,” she said at the National Museum of Fine Art in Buenos Aires. “The world we live in is one in which great powers fight to control the cultural riches of other people. One can see in the great museums of the world pieces from Greece, Syria, Egypt, Asia and even Latin America, and which have not been returned.” Fernandez’s office did not describe the pieces in question or from whom and when they were seized.
COLOMBIA
Cuban doctors protest
About 100 Cuban doctors who deserted a humanitarian mission in Venezuela and have been stranded for months in Colombia seeking entry into the US are staging a protest in Bogota to draw attention to their plight. They say they fear the delays in processing their visa requests under a 2006 program aimed at luring Cuba’s medical talent could be a sign that US President Barack Obama is seeking to end the incentive as part of his campaign to normalize relations with Havana.
CHINA
Massive manhunt launched
Police in Hunan Province have launched a manhunt for a man accused of fatally stabbing his estranged wife and eight others. Xinhua news agency said the attacks occurred on Saturday in Longshan County. It said four people were injured. A news Web site in Hunan, rednet.cn, yesterday said that about 400 police officers were mobilized to find the suspect, identified as Wang Wensheng.
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
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