SRI LANKA
Fuel hoarder jailed
The courts have jailed a man for three weeks after he admitted to hoarding 4 litres of gasoline during a nationwide fuel shortage triggered by the Middle East war, local media reported yesterday. The 48-year-old man initially said the fuel was for his lawnmower. A magistrate in Nikaweratiya, 125km northeast of the capital, Colombo, also fined the man 1,500 rupees (US$5), the Lankadeepa daily reported. The man had been charged with hoarding gasoline and trying to sell it on the black market at a time when authorities had imposed fuel rationing, it said. Motorists in the nation are currently receiving fuel every other day. Authorities say that diesel stocks are sufficient until the middle of next month, while gasoline supplies could last about a week longer. Fuel prices across Sri Lanka have risen by a third since the United States and Israel began bombing Iran, triggering retaliatory attacks that disrupted global supplies. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s office said in a statement that he had held talks with visiting Russian Deputy Minister of Energy Roman Marshavin on securing oil supplies. The statement quoted the Russian minister as saying: “Russia is prepared to support Sri Lanka in facing any challenges arising from the Middle East conflict.”
Photo: AFP
ITALY
Police find reptiles
Anacondas, boa constrictors and a caiman were found behind a false wall in Bari, police said on Thursday, amid warnings that dangerous reptiles are being used by local crooks to intimidate people. Police carrying out a raid in an apartment block found “exotic and dangerous animals” in a secret basement room that had been transformed into a clandestine reptile house. The find included two green anacondas, each about 5m long and weighing about 60kg, and a spectacled caiman measuring more than 1.5m long. “The spectacled caiman ... is a wild predator with extremely powerful jaws and potentially aggressive behavior” and posed “a real threat to public safety,” the police said in a statement. There was also an Asian water monitor, a lizard “of considerable size equipped with claws and a potentially dangerous bite,” it said. Police also seized a yellow anaconda, a Bolivian anaconda, four Burmese pythons approximately 3m long each and four boa constrictors. The reptiles were kept by “a man with multiple criminal convictions, who is currently untraceable,” the statement said. The “possession of exotic and particularly dangerous animals in criminal contexts is a phenomenon of significant social concern,” it said. “In several cases, these animals are used as tools of intimidation or as a display of criminal power in the area.”
MEXICO
Navy searches for boats
The navy on Thursday said that it was searching for two boats transporting humanitarian aid for Cuba with nine crew of different nationalities on board. The vessels set sail on Friday last week from Isla Mujeres in Quintana Roo state and were due to arrive in Havana on Tuesday or Wednesday, the navy said in a statement. There had been neither “communication nor confirmation of their arrival” in Cuba, it said, adding that it has alerted naval commanders in the region, and its search and rescue stations. The navy did not specify the identities or nationalities of the crew members on the missing boats, but said it was maintaining communication with rescue agencies in Poland, France, Cuba and the US.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
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