INDONESIA
Tourist reopening mulled
The government is reviewing a plan to reopen its tourist areas to foreign visitors amid concerns that such a move could compromise the country’s effort to contain the spread of COVID-19, State-Owned Enterprises Minister Erick Thohir said yesterday. Thohir, who is overseeing the daily operations of the country’s coronavirus task force, was responding to a question if the government would go ahead with a plan to reopen Bali, the country’s most popular tourist spot, on Sept. 11 as scheduled. “We don’t want that the program to make Indonesia healthy becomes compromised by the plan to allow foreign tourists to come, and it creates possible new clusters,” Thohir said in an online discussion. “Therefore, the committee has decided to review this plan to allow foreign tourists to come.”
LITHUANIA
Baltic nations press Belarus
The prime ministers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania yesterday called on Belarus to conduct new “free and fair” elections as protests swelled against Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s disputed poll victory. A new vote should be held “in a transparent way with the participation of international observers,” the leaders said in a joint statement after meeting in Estonia. They urged Belarus to refrain from violence and release political prisoners and detained protesters. They also called for EU sanctions on those responsible for violence.
AFGHANISTAN
Negotiator escapes assault
A member of the country’s peace negotiating team and a former lawmaker survived an assassination attempt, officials said yesterday. Fawzia Koofi was attacked late on Friday afternoon near the capital, Kabul, as she was returning from a visit to the northern province of Parwan, Ministry of the Interior spokesman Tariq Arian said. Koofi is part of a 21-member team charged with representing the government in upcoming peace talks with the Taliban, following a US deal with the militants that was struck in February. The head of the peace delegation, Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, tweeted that Koofi had survived the attack and was “in good health.”
MEXICO
Baby elephant named Zoom
A baby African elephant whose birth was live-streamed by a safari park in the country has been named Zoom after the video chat app made popular by the COVID-19 pandemic. The calf is the sixth born at the park in Puebla, southeast of the capital, to a herd of elephants rescued eight years ago in Namibia, where they were threatened by poachers. “The birth of an elephant is difficult to see,” said Frank Carlos Camacho, director of Africam Safari, where the baby elephant was seen on Friday playing between its mother’s legs. The park said its goal is for the elephants to eventually return to Africa. “They’re not ours. They belong to the world,” Camacho said.
UNITED STATES
Sea lions to be culled
Authorities on Friday gave wildlife managers in Washington, Oregon and Idaho permission to start killing hundreds of sea lions in the Columbia River basin in hopes of helping struggling salmon and steelhead trout. The permit allows the states and several Native American tribes to kill 540 California sea lions and 176 Steller sea lions over the next five years along a 290km stretch of the Columbia, from Portland, Oregon, to the McNary Dam upriver, as well as in several tributaries.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
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