AUSTRALIA
Cocaine haul seized
A massive haul of cocaine bound for Australia in the hull of a yacht has been intercepted by the French Navy in the Pacific Ocean, officials said yesterday. The 1.46 tonnes of the drug with an estimated street value of A$322 million (US$256 million) was seized in the South Pacific and four crewmembers, believed to be Lithuanian and Latvian nationals, were arrested, officials said. The vessel Afalina, which set sail from South America, was towed to Noumea in New Caledonia, a French territory. The Criminal Intelligence Commission said it was working with its international partners to probe “the Lithuanian syndicate” and pinpoint exactly where the drugs came from after the seizure last week. “We are thankful for the actions taken by French authorities, which has stopped a significant amount of drugs reaching the streets of Australia,” commission executive director of intelligence Col Blanch said.
JAPAN
Tortoise escapes again
The escapee is female, weighs 55kg and has a “gentle” disposition, but a history of running away. A zoo on Thursday said it was searching for its giant tortoise, which has escaped for the second time in less than two weeks. The reptile, measuring about 1m in length, was captured on security cameras as she wandered out of the main entrance of Shibukawa Animal Park in Okayama Prefecture on Tuesday morning, zoo staffer Yoshimi Yamane said. The tortoise “won’t immediately die, because it will eat grass available around the zoo, but we’re all very worried,” Yamane told reporters. “She’s quiet and gentle,” Yamane said, adding that the zoo has received no reports of sightings of the approximately 35-year-old tortoise. Tuesday’s escape was the second time in less than a fortnight that the fleet-footed reptile, which is allowed to walk freely inside the park during opening hours, fled the zoo. Yamane said it was found walking down the road 150m away from the zoo on July 21. “I spotted her on the way to the zoo. I stopped my car and asked my colleagues to help,” she said. “She can walk faster than we can ever imagine.”
AFGHANISTAN
Bomber reported in burqa
An official said that a suicide bomber who hit a NATO patrol, killing one service member and two Afghan civilians, had hid behind the all-enveloping women’s garment known as a burqa. Qarabagh District Governor Abdul Sami Sharifi yesterday said that the attacker was riding a motorcycle. The bomber rammed his motorcycle into a NATO patrol late the previous night, Sharifi said. The US military in Afghanistan reported the death of the coalition member, but not identify the soldier’s nationality.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened