INDIA
Wolf killed after attacks
Residents in the Bahraich district of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh have beaten to death a wolf believed to be the last of a six-member pack that killed nine people, eight of them children, wildlife officials said yesterday. The gray wolves were said to have attacked more than 40 people. Five of the animals were trapped, with drones and surveillance cameras suggesting that only one remained free. Government forest officer Ajit Singh said villagers had contacted his team yesterday after they killed a prowling wolf. “It seems it is part of the same pack of wolves,” Singh said. Wildlife officials say heavy flooding had swamped the wolves’ usual territory, driving them into areas of more populated farmland.
UNITED STATES
Florida braces for storm
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Saturday declared a state of emergency as forecasters warned that the state — still reeling from Hurricane Helene — could be slammed by another major storm this week. Tropical Storm Milton, currently churning in the western Gulf of Mexico, was “forecast to strengthen into a major hurricane as it moves toward Florida into midweek next week,” the National Weather Service wrote on social media. Milton could potentially bring fresh havoc to areas of Florida’s west coast still recovering from Helene, which killed at least 220 people.
DR CONGO
Mpox vaccinations start
Health officials on Saturday launched their first mpox vaccination campaign, a key step in efforts to contain an outbreak that has spread from its epicenter in the country to numerous other African nations this year. Officials held a ceremony to mark the start of vaccinations at a hospital in Goma, where health workers were first in line to receive the shots. The Ministry of Public Health on Friday said the campaign’s scope would be small due to limited resources. At the moment, 265,000 vaccine doses are available, although more are in the pipeline.
HUNGARY//
Thousands protest state news
Thousands of people on Saturday gathered outside the headquarters of the state broadcaster MTVA, protesting against what they described as the government’s “propaganda machine” and calling for an independent public service media. The protesters, from the opposition TISZA Party, said the state broadcaster is running biased propaganda, featuring only politicians from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party and government, and analysts repeating their narrative. “We have had enough of the malice, the lies, the propaganda, our patience has run out,” Tisza leader Peter Magyar told the crowd. “What we have as public service media in Hungary today is a global scandal, we have had enough.”
PERU
Child sacrifice site found
In a vacant lot outside Trujillo, archeologists have unearthed the remains of nearly four dozen children — all thought to have been ritually sacrificed more than 600 years ago. “Many of these remains have cuts on the sternum, some on their ribs,” archeologist Julio Asencio said from the excavation site. Each child was buried separately, he said. The remains of two adults and nine llamas — thought to be an offering representing their source of food, clothing and transportation — were also found nearby. They likely belonged to the local Chimu group, which dominated northern Peru from the 700s to the late 1400s, Asencio said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees