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.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Yemen’s separatist leader has vowed to keep working for an independent state in the country’s south, in his first social media post since he disappeared earlier this month after his group briefly seized swathes of territory. Aidarous al-Zubaidi’s United Arab Emirates (UAE)-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces last month captured two Yemeni provinces in an offensive that was rolled back by Saudi strikes and Riyadh’s allied forces on the ground. Al-Zubaidi then disappeared after he failed to board a flight to Riyadh for talks earlier this month, with Saudi Arabia accusing him of fleeing to Abu Dhabi, while supporters insisted he was
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
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