INDIA
Electrocution kills 11
A freak electrocution killed at least 11 people, including two children, when their vehicle snagged overhead transmission lines and burst into flames as they rode in a religious procession, authorities said yesterday. More than a dozen people were also injured in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur District after the vehicle, a 2.7m-high structure fashioned in the form of a chariot and pulled by worshipers, hit the high-voltage lines. “I hope those injured recover soon,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on Twitter as he offered condolences to the bereaved. Some of those injured were hurt in falls following the electric shock and others, who scrambled to escape the flames, when they jumped from the chariot, which carried statues of Hindu deities in addition to the devotees. The chariot, which had been wending its way back to a nearby temple, was left a charred ruin.
PHILIPPINES
Manila pulls ‘Uncharted’
Manila has pulled the plug on all domestic screenings of a Hollywood film called Uncharted over a scene showing a disputed map of the South China Sea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The move comes shortly after Vietnam, another claimant in the South China Sea, also banned the Sony Pictures action movie, which stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. It was released in the Philippines on Feb. 23. A two-second frame in the movie contains an image of the so-called “nine-dash line,” which marks China’s claims in the South China Sea. The scene “is contrary to national interest,” the ministry said in a statement. The U-shaped line is a feature used on Chinese maps to illustrate its maritime territory in a region where Taiwan, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines all have competing claims. Sony’s Columbia Pictures Industries Inc was ordered to stop screening the film and has complied, the ministry said.
UNITED STATES
Twitter followings fluctuate
Some Twitter users, former president Barack Obama among them, have shed thousands of followers since Elon Musk’s planned purchase of the social media platform was announced, while numbers have soared for others. Musk on Monday struck a deal to buy Twitter for US$44 billion. The news was greeted with enthusiasm by fans of Musk, who calls himself a free speech absolutist, and horror by proponents of online content moderation. Promises to leave the platform were trending under hashtags such as #LeaveTwitter. Obama, the most popular person on Twitter with more than 131 million followers, lost 300,000 of them nearly overnight, news firm NBC reported. However, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene gained nearly 100,000 to her official congressional Twitter account in just 24 hours. Greene praised the acquisition by Musk. “Prepare for blue check mark full scale meltdown after @elonmusk seals the deal and I should get my personal Twitter account restored,” she wrote, referencing the site’s system for verifying users. “It really is something how conservative accounts are getting massive follower increases today,” Representative Matt Gaetz wrote on Tuesday. Twitter told reporters that while it was monitoring the situation, the fluctuations appeared to be organic and largely due to new accounts being created and existing ones deactivated.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘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
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
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
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