Fri, Jul 05, 2024 page5

• World News Quick Take

  • Agencies
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  AUSTRALIA

  Egg shortage hits chain

  McDonald’s fast-food outlets have cut breakfast service hours as bird flu outbreaks in the country hit egg supplies. “We are carefully managing supply of eggs due to the current industry challenges,” McDonald’s Australia said in a message to customers this week. As a result, breakfast orders would stop at 10:30am instead of midday, it said. “We are working hard with our suppliers to return this back to normal as soon as possible,” it said. Authorities said H7 avian influenza has emerged at about a dozen poultry farms across Victoria, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. The government said chickens at the infected farms have been “depopulated” — a euphemism for extermination.

  RUSSIA

  Full-face veil banned

  Islamic authorities in the mostly-Muslim North Caucasus region of Dagestan on Wednesday temporarily banned women from wearing the niqab full-face veil, after simultaneous attacks targeting churches and synagogues killed 22 last month. In a statement posted on the Telegram messenger app, the Dagestan Muftiate said it was introducing a “temporary” ban on the niqab after an appeal from the Ministry of Nationality Policy and Religious Affairs. Reports following the attacks on June 23 said one of the gunmen had planned to escape wearing a niqab. The muftiate, a religious organization representing Dagestani Muslims, said that the ban would remain in place “until the identified threats are eliminated and a new theological conclusion is reached.”

  AUSTRALIA

  Child’s remains found

  Police yesterday found the remains of a 12-year-old girl, two days after she was snatched by a crocodile while swimming in a remote creek in the north. The remains were found in the river system near where the girl vanished at the indigenous community of Palumpa in the Northern Territory, police Senior Sergeant Erica Gibson said. Injuries confirmed a crocodile attack, Gibson said. “The recovery has been made. It was particularly gruesome and a sad, devastating outcome,” Gibson told reporters. Efforts were continuing to trap the killer crocodile, she said. Saltwater crocodiles are territorial and the killer is likely to remain in nearby waterways. The crocodile population has exploded across the country’s tropical north since they became a protected species under Australian law in 1970s. Because saltwater crocodiles can live up to 70 years and grow throughout their lives — reaching up to 7m in length — the proportion of large crocodiles is also rising.

  JAPAN

  Floppy-disk war ends

  The government has finally eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems, two decades since their heyday, reaching a long-awaited milestone in a campaign to modernize the bureaucracy. By the middle of last month, the Digital Agency had scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling. “We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” Minister for Digital Transformation Taro Kono, who has been vocal about wiping out fax machines and other analogue technology in government, told Reuters in a statement on Wednesday. The Digital Agency was set up during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when a scramble to roll out nationwide testing and vaccination revealed that the government still relied on paper filing and outdated technology.
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