ETHIOPIA
Eritrea withdrawal agreed
Eritrea has agreed to withdraw its forces from the Ethiopian Tigray region, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said yesterday in a statement after intense pressure from the US to address the deadly crisis in Tigray, where witnesses have described Eritrean soldiers looting, killing and raping. Abiy’s statement said that Ethiopian forces would take over guarding the border areas “effective immediately.” Abiy earlier this week acknowledged the presence of soldiers from Eritrea, long an enemy of the Tigray leaders who once dominated the Ethiopian government.
SAUDI ARABIA
Jizan oil facility attacked
A fuel tank at an oil facility in Jizan caught fire after being struck by a projectile, the government said yesterday. The alleged attack came on the sixth anniversary of its entry into Yemen’s yearslong civil war. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack near the border with Yemen, although it came during what Saudi Arabian defense officials described as a barrage of eight bomb-carrying drones launched by Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Saudi Arabia has faced an increasing number of such assaults and the tempo has not slowed since it offered a ceasefire to the Houthis on Monday. The attack in Jizan, about 970km southwest of Riyadh, struck a distribution facility, the Ministry of Energy said. “The attack resulted in a fire in one of the terminal’s tanks,” it said, without elaborating. “The attack left no casualties.”
SCIENCE
Octopuses dream: study
A study by researchers in Brazil published on Thursday shows that octopuses, already considered perhaps the smartest invertebrates, experiences two major alternating sleep states eerily similar to those in humans — and they even might dream. The findings provide fresh evidence that the octopus possesses a complex and sophisticated neurobiology that underlies an equally sophisticated behavioral repertoire, the researchers said. They had observed that color changes of sleeping octopuses are associated with two distinct sleep states: “quiet sleep” and “active sleep.”
UNITED STATES
House for sale ‘not haunted’
A Massachusetts woman noticed something strange about the “for sale” sign outside a home in her neighborhood. On top of the sign with the name of the broker and their contact information was a sign with the words “Not Haunted” in big red letters. “This just went up around the corner and I have so many questions,” Margot Bloomstein wrote on Twitter, the Boston Globe reported. Bloomstein said she reached out to the real-estate agency to learn more about the sign. They knew nothing about it either. The consensus is that the sign is a prank.
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
CHEER ON: Students were greeted by citizens who honked their car horns or offered them food and drinks, while taxi drivers said they would give marchers a lift home Hundreds of students protesting graft they blame for 15 deaths in a building collapse on Friday marched through Serbia to the northern city of Novi Sad, where they plan to block three Danube River bridges this weekend. They received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Said after arriving on foot in their two-day, 80km journey from Belgrade. A small red carpet was placed on one of the bridges across the Danube that the students crossed as they entered the city. The bridge blockade planned for yesterday is to mark three months since a huge concrete construction
DIVERSIFY: While Japan already has plentiful access to LNG, a pipeline from Alaska would help it move away from riskier sources such as Russia and the Middle East Japan is considering offering support for a US$44 billion gas pipeline in Alaska as it seeks to court US President Donald Trump and forestall potential trade friction, three officials familiar with the matter said. Officials in Tokyo said Trump might raise the project, which he has said is key for US prosperity and security, when he meets Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba for the first time in Washington as soon as next week, the sources said. Japan has doubts about the viability of the proposed 1,287km pipeline — intended to link fields in Alaska’s north to a port in the south, where