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.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
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,
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