INDIA
Police kill ‘man-eater’ tiger
Police on Saturday shot dead a tiger dubbed the “man-eater of Champaran” that killed at least nine people, in a major operation involving 200 people including trackers on elephants, officials said yesterday. The big cat had terrorized locals on the fringes of the Valmiki Tiger Reserve in Champaran, killing at least six people in the past month, including a woman and her eight-year-old son on Saturday. Earlier attempts to tranquilize the animal had failed. “Two teams went into the forest on two elephants on Saturday afternoon and the third one waited where we thought the tiger would exit. We fired five rounds to kill it there,” local police chief Kiran Kumar said. It took about six hours for the team — with eight shooters and about 200 forest department officials — to complete the operation, Kumar said.
GAMBIA
Probes on medicine deaths
Police on Saturday announced they were launching an investigation into the deaths of 66 children, amid growing concern over imported medicines. India is also investigating cough syrups made by a local pharmaceutical company after the WHO said they could be responsible for the deaths. President Adama Barrow authorized the health authorities “to suspend the license of the suspected ... importer” involved in the case, his office said on Saturday. The foreign ministry was to communicate “his government’s most profound concern” to the Indian embassy, it added. The WHO on Wednesday issued an alert over four cough and cold syrups made by Maiden Pharmaceuticals in India over possible links to the deaths. Laboratory testing had found unacceptable levels of potentially life-threatening contaminants, the WHO said, adding that the products could have been distributed beyond the West African country.
CHILE
Fire damages moai statues
A fire that ripped through part of Easter Island last week has caused permanent damage to some of its iconic carved stone figures known as moai, authorities said. The high temperature of the forest fire accelerated the process through which the stone carvings would eventually turn into sand, Rapa Nui Mayor Pedro Edmunds Paoa said. The damage is “irreparable and immeasurable,” he said. The fire blazed through 42 hectares and particularly affected an area inside the Rano Raraku volcano where there are about 100 moais, and 20 percent of which have been damaged, Edmunds Paoa said. The high temperatures calcinate the stone of the moais, which leads it to “crack,” and with time “it starts to collapse,” he told a local radio station.
MEXICO
School students poisoned
At least 57 students were poisoned by an unidentified substance in a rural secondary school in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, local authorities said. The mass poisoning on Friday was the third in a Chiapas school to be reported in the past two weeks, spooking students and prompting outrage from parents. The Mexican Social Security Institute said on Friday that 57 teenage students in the rural community of Bochil had arrived at a local hospital with symptoms of poisoning. Authorities did not speculate on a cause, but local news outlets said some parents believe the students were exposed to contaminated water or food. The state prosecutor’s office said on social media on Saturday that it had conducted 15 toxicology exams which had all come back negative for illicit drugs, after reports circulated in local media and on social media that students had tested positive for cocaine.
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
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