INDIA
Bus fire kills 25
At least 25 people were killed and eight injured after a bus caught fire overnight on an expressway yesterday, police said. The bus was traveling to Pune when it hit a pole and overturned after midnight, causing its diesel tank to catch fire, senior police officer Baburao Mahamuni said. “There were about 30-35 people in the bus. Twenty-five people have died and eight others are injured,” he said. Three children were among the dead, a police officer told reporters.
MOLDOVA
Man kills two at airport
A Tajikistan national who was denied entry at Chisinau International Airport grabbed a guard’s weapon and fatally shot two security officers on Friday, officials said. One traveler was also wounded. The man was being escorted by officials when he “took the gun of a border guard” and opened fire, authorities said. Special forces then intervened, subdued the suspect and handcuffed him, leaving him seriously injured. Tajik authorities said he was wanted in relation to the kidnapping of a local bank official.
NAMIBIA
Fur seal hunting begins
An annual sea hunt that started yesterday is expected to cull 86,000 brown fur seals despite a decrease in demand for pups and mounting opposition from conservationists. The seals are hunted for their prized fur for a once thriving global trade. Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources Derek Klazen on Friday said that fewer pups had been harvested in the past few years due to a drop in demand. Previously sold to the fur trade in Europe, market demand has drastically decreased following a 2009 EU ban on seal imports. China is now the main market for the cull.
SINGAPORE
Suicides up 26%: report
Suicides rose nearly 26 percent last year to their highest level in more than two decades, reflecting the “unseen mental distress” in the city-state, Samaritans of Singapore said in an annual report. The suicide rates among young people aged 10 to 29 and elderly people aged 70 to 79 were particularly concerning, it said in a news release. A total of 476 people killed themselves last year, “the highest recorded suicide deaths since 2000,” up from 378 the year before, it said.
UNITED NATIONS
Peacekeepers to leave Mali
The UN Security Council on Friday voted unanimously to immediately end its peacekeeping mission in Mali as demanded by the country’s military junta, which has brought in mercenaries from Wagner Group to help fight an Islamic insurgency. Mali, which has grappled with the insurgency for more than a decade, has seen its relations with the international community become strained in part because the ruling junta brought in the Russian mercenaries. The French-drafted resolution required the mission yesterday to start the withdrawal of more than 15,000 personnel.
UNITED NATIONS
NASA reconnects with craft
Long time, no speak: NASA has re-established contact with the intrepid Ingenuity Mars helicopter after more than two months of radio silence, the space agency said on Friday. The mini rotorcraft, which hitched a ride to the Red Planet with the Perseverance rover in early 2021, has already survived well beyond its initial 30-day mission to prove the feasibility of its technology in five test flights. Data so far indicate that it is in good shape, NASA said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
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