CANADA
Dinosaur species named
Scientists on Monday said they had discovered a new species of dinosaur closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex that strode the plain of North America about 80 million years ago. Thanatotheristes degrootorum — Greek for “Reaper of Death” — is thought to be the oldest member of the T-rex family discovered so far in northern North America, and would have grown to about 8m in length. “We chose a name that embodies what this tyrannosaur was as the only known large apex predator of its time in Canada, the reaper of death,” Darla Zelenitsky, assistant professor of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Calgary and coauthor of a study that appeared in the journal Cretaceous Research. “The nickname has come to be Thanatos.” Thanatos dates back at least 79 million years, the team said. The specimen was discovered by Jared Voris, a doctoral student at Calgary, and is the first new tyrannosaur species found for 50 years in the nation.
IRELAND
Final election count in
Sinn Fein yesterday became the nation’s second-largest parliamentary party after winning the popular vote in Saturday’s election. Sinn Fein won 37 of the 160 seats in the next Dail — the lower house of parliament — after a 62.9 percent turnout for the poll. Center-right party Fianna Fail were one seat ahead with 38, while Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s Fine Gael party took 35, a result likely to topple him from office. Negotiations on a new coalition government have begun, with Sinn Fein arguing for a central role in power after winning 24.5 percent of first preferences, the largest of any party.
GERMANY
Bird cull after outbreak
An outbreak of the H5N8 bird flu virus has been reported in a backyard in Bretzfeld, in the Baden-Wurttemberg region, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said on Monday. The virus killed 44 birds out of a flock of 69. “All poultry and captive birds have been culled and safely disposed of on Feb. 7, 2020. No poultry, poultry products or captive birds have been dispatched,” the OIE said.
UNITED STATES
Trump dismissive of TBIs
President Donald Trump has again downplayed the severity of traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) suffered by troops during an Iranian missile attack on an air base in Iraq, as the injury total rose to 109, 45 more than previously reported by the Department of Defense. “They landed in a way that didn’t hit anybody,” Trump said of the missile strike. “And so when they came in and told me that nobody was killed, I was impressed by that and, you know, I stopped something that would have been very devastating for them.” He did not specify what he stopped. “Head trauma — that exists, but it’s, you know, I viewed it a little bit differently than most and I won’t be changing my mind on that,” he said.
UNITED STATES
Two cops shot at Walmart
Two police officers were wounded and a gunman was killed on Monday in an exchange of gunfire at a Walmart store in Forest City, Arkansas. The officers responded to the Forrest City Walmart after someone reported a man who was making threats and was “kind of talking out of his head,” police officials said.
MALDIVES
Speaker apologizes to tourist
Speaker of the Parliament Mohamed Nasheed on Monday apologized to a British tourist after footage of her arrest by several policemen triggered a social media storm. Police said the bikini-clad woman, who was walking on a main road, was “inappropriately” dressed and allegedly unruly and drunk when she was detained after refusing to comply with requests to cover up on Thursday last week. Videos shared on social media showed the woman shouting: “You’re sexually assaulting me” during the incident.
BANGLADESH
Hair-cutting head suspended
Authorities have suspended Sekandar Ali, headmaster of Joari High School in Baraigram town, who cut the hair of scores of students, sparking protests by parents, students and locals in the rural town, officials said on Monday. “He randomly ran his scissors on their scalps. He cut hair of around 50 students. Several students said they were injured during the heated moment,” local police chief Dilip Kumar Das said. The 60-year-old teacher had wanted to punish the students for having undisciplined “long hair,” he added.
ETHIOPIA
AU promises to help Libya
African Union (AU) leaders on Monday vowed to push peace efforts in Libya, a sign of the bloc’s desire to play a bigger role in resolving the continent’s conflicts. As the 55-member group wrapped up a summit, AU Commissioner for Peace and Security Smail Chergui offered assistance to revive Libya’s faltering peace process. “It’s [the] UN itself which needs us now,” Chergui said. “It’s time to bring this situation to an end... the two organizations should work hand-in-hand for that goal,” he added. The two-day summit ended in the early hours of yesterday morning.
KENYA
Thousands mourn Moi
Thousands yesterday gathered to mourn the country’s longest serving president, the hardline Daniel arap Moi, as a week of mourning climaxed with a state funeral. Mourners began gathering at Nyayo National Stadium before dawn to pay their respects. In the morning, the body was taken on a gun carriage draped in Kenya’s flag through the streets of Nairobi to the crowded stadium flanked by soldiers. President Uhuru Kenyatta opened the memorial with the national anthem. Shortly afterward, the cortege entered the stadium flanked by long lines of red-coated soldiers and a brass band playing marching tunes and hymns. The body is to be buried today in Moi’s home area of Kabarak, 220km northwest of Nairobi.
NIGERIA
Militants kill 30 in attack
Militants killed at least 30 people in a raid in Borno state, a regional government spokesman said on Monday. The attack on Sunday evening targeted the village of Auno on a key highway linking to regional capital Maiduguri. The militants stormed in on trucks mounted with heavy weapons, killing, burning and looting before kidnapping women and children, state government spokesman Ahmad Abdurrahman Bundi said. They targeted travelers who had stopped for the night and torched vehicles. The militants “killed not less than 30 people who are mostly motorists and destroyed 18 vehicles,” Bundi said in a statement after visiting the scene. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.
‘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
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
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