INDIA
Cows get visibility strips
Police are sticking glow-in-the-dark strips on the horns of stray cattle to prevent motorists from crashing into the animals as they wander across roads at night, an officer said on Tuesday. Following a spate of road accidents, traffic police in one district of Madhya Pradesh have stuck orange radium reflective bands on the horns of 300 cows and bulls to help drivers spot them. “Many drivers injured themselves or killed the cattle after running over them at night,” Kailash Chauhan, traffic police inspector for Balaghat District told reporters. “There was an urgent need to prevent such accidents.” Because of the success of the scheme, officers say they now plan to buy permanent radium paint to cover cows’ horns, as the plastic bands only last for a few weeks.
FRANCE
False teeth removed
An elderly man has been hospitalized in serious condition after his false teeth reportedly were stuck in his throat for six days. The Dunkirk Hospital on Tuesday said that it is investigating how its personnel handled the treatment of 85-year-old Roland Marissael. La Voix du Nord newspaper reported that staff at the Dunkirk Hospital and Cambrai Hospital Center thought he had lung problems or dementia and refused to check his throat. Marissael’s sons, Jean-Jacques and Jean-Luc, are quoted as saying they repeatedly told medics that he had accidentally swallowed his dentures. The report says that an X-ray eventually revealed the false teeth were trapped in the octogenarian’s vocal cords, and surgeons immediately removed them.
GAZA STRIP
Charity animals from zoo
An international animal welfare charity has removed 15 animals rescued from the territory’s main zoo, dubbed “the worst in the world.” Four Paws International is to resettle the animals from the Khan Younis Zoo abroad. The rescue was announced last week. The removal of the animals, completed yesterday, effectively closed the zoo. Most of the animals are headed to Jordan, while a tiger was to go to South Africa. The rescued animals include monkeys, an emu, a pelican and a porcupine.
SAUDI ARABIA
Attack reported foiled
Security forces have foiled a planned suicide attack on a mosque in the Qatif region, where many Shiite Muslims live, al-Arabiya news channel and other media reported early yesterday. The satellite channel said security forces killed one man who was wearing an explosive belt and arrested another. Neither man was a Saudi citizen, al-Arabiya said. Asharq al-Awsat newspaper said the second man was wounded after a gunfight.
UNITED STATES
Dog re-elected as mayor
The four-legged mayor of a northwestern Minnesota village greets voters like a true politician. Duke, a nine-year-old Great Pyrenees, won a third one-year term as honorary mayor of Cormorant Township on Saturday last week. The big, shaggy white dog was overwhelmingly re-elected at the sixth annual Cormorant Daze Festival. Anyone could pay US$1 and cast a vote. Cormorant resident Karen Nelson says Duke “greets everyone” who comes to the village of about 20 people nestled among lakes northwest of Minneapolis. Nelson says the canine mayor also is popular with children. She says Duke “can have 10 kids on him, and he don’t care.” Duke was first elected in a write-in vote in 2014.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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