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.
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
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
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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