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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
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