CANADA
Lithium battery ban rejected
A UN aviation panel has tentatively rejected a proposed ban on passenger airlines carrying lithium batteries as cargo, despite calls to do so by US regulators. A dangerous goods committee at the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal took the vote on Wednesday, a preliminary step in setting guidance for aviation regulators around the world, according to two people familiar with the action. Lithium-based batteries have been linked to at least three airplane accidents and recent testing has found that they can emit fumes that will explode in cargo holds if they overheat.
UNITED STATES
MSU plans Cuba exchange
Michigan State University (MSU) has become the first US school offering medical students routine learning time in Cuban hospitals, MSU announced on Wednesday. The development is a landmark for the country’s institutions of higher education since bilateral ties were re-established in July after five decades of Cold War bad blood. The goal of the two-week program for osteopathic and human medicine students, which starts in April, is to study how Cuba’s universal healthcare has achieved stellar low infant mortality rates while operating on a shoestring budget.
UNITED STATES
Police officer’s funeral held
Thousands of mourners on Wednesday braved wind and heavy rain to attend the funeral of New York’s fourth police officer killed in the line of duty in less than a year. Randolph Holder died on Oct. 20 after being shot in the head in the Harlem area of Manhattan. He was a Guyanese immigrant and his body will be flown to his home country for burial. A suspect has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Thousands of law enforcement officers from across the country gathered outside the Greater Allen A.M.E Cathedral of New York in Queens to pay their respects, joining political, community and church leaders in grieving with his family and friends. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio delivered a lengthy eulogy to Holder and ended with an appeal for keeping guns off the streets. Holder was shot by a robbery suspect in an exchange of fire after he and his partners responded to gun shots.
UNITED STATES
Warming threatens rare birds
By the end of this century, a warming climate may wipe out available habitat for some of Hawaii’s rarest birds, researchers said on Wednesday. The future is particularly dire for certain species living in high elevations, said the study, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE. The yellow honeycreeper known as ‘Akeke’e, the gray Akikiki bird and a rare songbird known as Puaiohi could lose all of their current range, the study said. Three others could lose about 90 percent of their range.
UNITED STATES
Witch, warlock in court
A Massachusetts judge on Wednesday granted a protective order against a warlock, spelling relief for the Salem witch who accused him of harassment. The two faced off in court before a Salem District Court judge, who granted the protective order to witch priestess Lori Sforza. She had accused self-proclaimed warlock Christian Day of harassing her over the telephone and on social media over the past three years. The pair made headlines in 2011, when they cast spells together to try to heal actor Charlie Sheen.
NEPAL
Female president elected
Lawmakers on Wednesday elected a longtime women’s rights campaigner to become the nation’s first female president, as the Himalayan nation pushes for more gender equality in politics and work life. Bidhya Devi Bhandari, the 54-year-old deputy leader of the Communist Party of Nepal Unified Marxist-Leninist, had lobbied actively for the new constitution to require that either the president or vice president be a woman. The nation has been trying to shift from a traditionally male-dominated society, where women are mostly limited to working at homes or on farms, to one in which women have equal access to opportunities and legal rights.
CHINA
One-child policy dropped
The government is to ease family planning restrictions to allow all couples to have two children after decades of the strict one-child policy, the Chinese Communist Party said yesterday. The policy is a major liberalization of the nation’s family planning restrictions, already eased in late 2013 when Beijing said it would allow more families to have two children when the parents met certain conditions. The announcement was made at the close of a key CCP meeting focused on financial reforms and maintaining growth from next year to 2020. However, no details of the new policy or a timeframe for implementation were given.
IRAQ
Torrential rain wreaks havoc
Torrential rain caused chaos across several parts of the country yesterday, with the water causing thigh-high flooding on some Baghdad streets and damaging camps for the displaced. The storm that hit on Wednesday evening was unusually violent and the first after a long, dry summer. The poor condition of infrastructure in the capital resulted in spectacular flooding. Social media was awash with pictures and footage of the devastation, which left many people unable to reach their workplace and led the government to declare yesterday a holiday.
PHILIPPINES
Family feud kills seven
Violence between rival clans in the south has claimed seven lives in one week, with both sides clashing violently yesterday, authorities said. Two people were shot dead and two houses burned in the latest outbreak of violence in Mindanao, regional military spokeswoman Captain Jo-Ann Petinglay said. The fighting on the outskirts of Cotabato was in apparent retaliation for the ambush of a van on Monday, which left five people dead on the side of local clan leader Bimbo Ayunan, she said. About 50 armed men led by Ayunan arrived in the area by boat before dawn yesterday and immediately fired at the houses inhabited by the rival Karim family, Petinglay said. The Karim family retaliated, resulting in a firefight that raged for half an hour before authorities arrived to stop the violence, she added.
SOUTH KOREA
Ferry boss’ sentence upheld
The Supreme Court yesterday confirmed a seven-year prison sentence for the head of the company that operated the ill-fated Sewol ferry, which sank in April last year, killing 304 people. The ruling upheld the sentence passed by an appeals court in May, which found Chonghaejin Marine Co president Kim Han-sik guilty of manslaughter and embezzlement. Four other Chonghaejin officials were sentenced to jail terms ranging from two-and-a-half to four years.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
Australians were downloading virtual private networks (VPNs) in droves, while one of the world’s largest porn distributors said it was blocking users from its platforms as the country yesterday rolled out sweeping online age restriction. Australia in December became the first country to impose a nationwide ban on teenagers using social media. A separate law now requires artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot services to keep certain content — including pornography, extreme violence and self-harm and eating disorder material — from minors or face fines of up to A$49.5 million (US$34.6 million). The country also joined Britain, France and dozens of US states requiring
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
STILL IN POWER: US intelligence reports showed that the Iranian regime is not in danger of collapse and retains control of the public, casting doubt on Trump’s exit Nearly every US Senate Democrat on Wednesday signed a letter sent to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth requesting a “swift investigation” of airstrikes on a girls’ school in Iran that killed scores of children and any other potential US military actions causing civilian harm. Reuters reported on Thursday last week that US military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the Feb. 28 strike on the school, as US and Israeli forces launched attacks on Iran. “The results of this school attack are horrific. The majority of those killed in the strikes were girls between the ages
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