AUSTRALIA
Killer crocodile shot dead
Rangers have shot dead a 4.2m crocodile after it killed a 12-year-old girl while she was swimming with her family last week, police said yesterday. The girl’s death was the first fatal crocodile attack in the Northern Territory since 2018. Wildlife rangers had been attempting to trap or shoot the crocodile since the girl was attacked in Mango Creek near Palumpa, an Outback indigenous community in the Northern Territory. They shot the animal on Sunday after getting permission from the region’s traditional landowners. Police said that an analysis had confirmed the animal was the one that killed the girl. “The events of last week have had a huge impact on the family and local police are continuing to provide support to everyone impacted,” Senior Sergeant Erica Gibson said. Northern Territory-based crocodile scientist Grahame Webb said a reptile the size of the one shot had to be male and at least 30 years old.
CHINA
Man caught with snakes
A man has been caught trying to smuggle more than 100 live snakes into the nation by cramming them into his trousers, customs officials said in a statement on Tuesday. The unnamed traveler was stopped by customs officers as he sought to exit Hong Kong and into the border city of Shenzhen, the statement said. “Upon inspection, customs officers discovered that the pockets of the trousers the passenger was wearing were packed with six canvas drawstring bags and sealed with tape,” it said. “Once opened, each bag was found to contain living snakes in all kinds of shapes, sizes and colors.” Officers seized 104 of the reptiles, including milk snakes and corn snakes, many of which were non-native species. An accompanying video showed two border agents peering into transparent plastic bags filled with squirming red, pink and white snakes. “Those who break the rules will be ... held liable in accordance with the law,” the statement said, without specifying the man’s punishment.
INDIA
Nine rhinoceroses drown
More than 150 animals, nine of them one-horned rhinoceroses, have drowned in floods at the Kaziranga National Park in Assam state, authorities said. The Kaziranga National Park, with almost one-third of its camps flooded, is home to nearly half of the global population of one-horned rhinos, which stands at about 4,000. The weather department yesterday said that heavy rainfall is expected to lash northern and northeastern states for the next two or three days.
UNITED STATES
Hawaii airport evacuated
A Hawaii airport on Tuesday was briefly evacuated after a Japanese man was found with two inert grenades in his hand luggage, police said following his arrest. Officers cleared the terminal while a bomb squad moved in to investigate the suspicious items, which were picked up on an X-ray machine. “The Hilo International Airport experienced a brief halt in operations” for little over an hour, Hawaii police said in a statement. The bomb squad “determined the items to be inert grenades,” police reported, meaning they were not dangerous. A 41-year-old Japanese man was arrested on a “terroristic threatening” charge and remains in custody, police said. “Police remind the public that replicas of explosives, such as hand grenades, are prohibited in checked and carry-on baggage.”
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
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
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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