SOUTH AFRICA
Lion escapes national park
Last year, a lion earned the nickname “Spook” after it escaped from a national park and eluded searchers for more than three weeks. Now Spook has broken out again. A helicopter on Tuesday searched for the male lion, which was fitted with a satellite tracking collar after last year’s escape from Karoo National Park and should be easier to trace this time, park spokeswoman Fayroush Ludick said. The lion, which escaped overnight Sunday, has become a “problem animal” and will be killed because he knows how to get out of the park and could endanger people, Ludick said. “It’s a decision that wasn’t taken lightly,’’ she said. Spook killed a cow on Monday and is believed to be about 20km outside the park’s boundary, Ludick said. The lion ranged widely in the arid, sparsely populated area in his last escape, covering about 300km.
CHINA
Web regulations proposed
The government is proposing new regulations governing where businesses register their Web addresses, a move that could strengthen its ability to censor the Internet. Under new draft regulations released this week by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, any firm that provides services to Chinese Internet users must register its domain, or Web address, with the authorities. Although analysts believe the government’s primary motivation is to reel Chinese Internet firms closer under Beijing’s watch rather than add restrictions on foreign businesses, the new rule could pose hurdles for anyone in the world seeking to access the Chinese network. Beijing has recently pushed for what it calls “Internet sovereignty” to run its Internet as it wishes.
PAKISTAN
Protesters told to disperse
The interior minister has warned hundreds of radical Islamists rallying for the past four days in central Islamabad to disperse peacefully and end their protest. Minister of the Interior Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said late on Tuesday that if the Islamists fail to do so, the government would disperse them by force. The rally turned violent on Sunday, when more than 10,000 Islamists from Pakistan’s Sunni Tehreek group descended on the capital to denounce last month’s hanging of police guard Mumtaz Qadri for the 2011 murder of late-Punjab governor Salman Taseer who had campaigned against Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws. Since the start of the rally, the crowds have dwindled down to about 1,200 people. The protesters also demand the hanging of a jailed Christian woman whom Taseer had defended against blasphemy allegations.
AFGHANISTAN
US plane crashes taking off
A US F-16 warplane crashed on Tuesday while taking off from Bagram airfield, an official said. The pilot ejected safely. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said the fighter from the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing crashed at about 8:30pm. “Coalition forces are securing the crash site. The cause of this accident will be investigated,” Cook said. The Taliban said their fighters shot down the jet, claiming that all on board had been killed. The insurgent group is well known for exaggerating battlefield claims. Cook said there was no immediate indication the plane came down due to enemy action. The pilot safely ejected and was recovered by coalition forces, and was being evaluated by medical personnel. Bagram is the largest US military base in Afghanistan and is located north of Kabul.
UNITED STATES
Rhino 29,000 years young
A long-extinct animal known as the Siberian unicorn — which was actually a long-horned rhinoceros — might have walked the Earth 29,000 years ago, at the same time as prehistoric humans, researchers say. Until now, the Elasmotherium sibiricum was thought to have vanished 350,000 years ago. However, research published in the American Journal of Applied Science describes a far more recent discovery of a well-preserved skull in Kazakhstan. “Most likely, it was a very large male,” Tomsk State University paleontologist Andrey Shpanski said. “The dimensions of this rhino today are the biggest of those described in the literature.” Researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the creature’s age, leading to theories of migration and refuge-seeking in southern corners of Western Siberia for these lumbering legends. The skull was in relatively good shape, and showed no signs of having been gnawed upon. Siberian rhinos, which were likely vegetarians, have been described as weighing up to 4 tonnes and standing 2m tall and nearly 5m long.
VENEZUELA
Protesters kill police officers
People demonstrating against a bus fare hike killed two police officers on Tuesday in the restive western Venezuelan town of San Cristobal, as informal protests swept the troubled country. The officers, aged 21 and 25, were killed by a bus hijacked and later abandoned by protesters in Tachira State, according to the Tachira police. Four other officers were seriously injured when masked protesters drove the hijacked bus through a police line, according to posts from the Tachira police Twitter account. Earlier this month, the government doubled bus fares. At least 31 people were arrested during the protest, Tachira Public Security Secretary Ramon Cabeza said.
UNITED STATES
Patty Duke dies aged 69
Patty Duke, who won an Oscar as a teen for The Miracle Worker and maintained a long and successful career throughout her life, has died at the age of 69. Duke’s agent Mitchell Stubbs said the actress died early on Tuesday morning of sepsis from a ruptured intestine. Duke, born Anna Marie Pearce, followed on her early success playing the young Helen Keller with a popular sitcom, The Patty Duke Show, which aired in the mid-1960s. She played dual roles under a then-unconventional premise: Identical twins living in Brooklyn Heights, Duke was also an outspoken advocate for mental health. She was diagnosed as bipolar in 1982 after years of battling mental illness.
UNITED STATES
ash the dog sparks scare
A dog whose name — Dash — sounded too much like Daesh an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group, prompted a security scare at a California bank. The alarm was raised after Dash’s owner Bruce Francis, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and lives in San Francisco, tried to make an online payment to the person who walks his pitbull mix. Francis wrote “Dash” in the memo line for the check, panicking officials at Chase Bank who mistook it for “Daesh” and canceled the payment, local news reports said. The bank also flagged the payment to the US Department of the Treasury which sent a note to Francis asking him to “explain what Dash means.” “I thought to myself, ‘great, they’re stopping the world’s stupidest terrorist,’” Francis told the local KTVU station after the incident earlier this month. In spite of the mix-up, Francis said he is taking the incident in his stride and did not mind the inconvenience.
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles. It might sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than 1 percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years. Such an impact has the potential for city-level devastation, depending on where it strikes. Scientists are not panicking yet, but they are watching closely. “At this point, it’s: ‘Let’s pay a lot of attention, let’s
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to