MALAWI
VP’s plane likely ‘crashed’
An airplane carrying Vice President Saulos Klaus Chilima might have crashed in dense forest, but it has not yet been found, the military said yesterday. Search-and-rescue operations had been hampered by foggy weather around the Chikangawa Forest, which was affecting visibility. Chilima, 51, was aboard a military aircraft with nine others that left Lilongwe, the capital, at 9:17am on Monday. The plane had been scheduled to land at Mzuzu airport at 10:02am, but was unable to land due to poor visibility and was ordered to return to the capital, President Lazarus Chakwera said in a televised address to the nation on Monday. Aviation authorities had failed to make contact with the plane since it went off the radar.
THAILAND
Rare elephant twins born
An elephant has delivered a rare set of twins in a dramatic birth that left a carer injured after he tried to rescue one of the newborns. The 36-year-old Asian elephant named Jamjuree gave birth to an 80kg male at the Ayutthaya Elephant Palace and Royal Kraal north of Bangkok on Friday night. However, when a second, 60kg female calf emerged 18 minutes later, the mother went into a frenzy and attacked her new arrival. “We heard somebody shout: ‘There is another baby being born,’” veterinarian Lardthongtare Meepan said. An elephant keeper, also known as a mahout, moved in to prevent the mother from attacking her newborn, and took a blow to his ankle in return. “The mother attacked the baby, because she had never had twins before — it’s very rare,” said Michelle Reedy, director of the Elephant Stay organization, which allows visiting tourists to ride, feed and bathe elephants at the Royal Kraal center. Jamjuree has now accepted her calves, who are so small that a special platform has been built to help them reach up to suckle.
THAILAND
Caged animals die in fire
Hundreds of caged animals died yesterday after a fire struck Chatuchak Weekend Market, one of the most famous markets in Bangkok. The fire was reported early in the morning and quickly swept across more than 100 shops in the market’s pet section, the Bangkok government said. Officials said it took them about an hour to bring the fire under control. There were no reports of human casualties, but local media reports said the fire killed several hundred animals, including puppies, fish, snakes, birds and rabbits, kept in cages and locked inside the shops. The cause of the fire is being investigated, said Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt, who visited the scene after the fire.
INDONESIA
Comedian gets 7 months
A court in the Muslim-majority nation has handed a comedian a seven-month prison sentence for blasphemy after he made a joke about the name Mohammed, a local legal official said yesterday. Aulia Rakhman, a comedian from Lampung Province on Sumatra Island, was found guilty of spreading hatred through stand-up jokes at an event in December, Lampung prosecutor’s office spokesperson Ricky Ramadhan said. He reportedly made a joke at a cafe in the provincial capital, Bandar Lampung, about how names like Mohammed — inspired by Islam’s founding prophet — had lost their positive connotations due to the sheer number of badly behaved Indonesians who share them. Aulia was found guilty last week, but the verdict only came to light yesterday. “The defendant admitted and regretted his actions, behaved politely at the trial, and the defendant has never been convicted,” Ramadhan said.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
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