INDIA
Wolf killed after attacks
Residents in the Bahraich district of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh have beaten to death a wolf believed to be the last of a six-member pack that killed nine people, eight of them children, wildlife officials said yesterday. The gray wolves were said to have attacked more than 40 people. Five of the animals were trapped, with drones and surveillance cameras suggesting that only one remained free. Government forest officer Ajit Singh said villagers had contacted his team yesterday after they killed a prowling wolf. “It seems it is part of the same pack of wolves,” Singh said. Wildlife officials say heavy flooding had swamped the wolves’ usual territory, driving them into areas of more populated farmland.
UNITED STATES
Florida braces for storm
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Saturday declared a state of emergency as forecasters warned that the state — still reeling from Hurricane Helene — could be slammed by another major storm this week. Tropical Storm Milton, currently churning in the western Gulf of Mexico, was “forecast to strengthen into a major hurricane as it moves toward Florida into midweek next week,” the National Weather Service wrote on social media. Milton could potentially bring fresh havoc to areas of Florida’s west coast still recovering from Helene, which killed at least 220 people.
DR CONGO
Mpox vaccinations start
Health officials on Saturday launched their first mpox vaccination campaign, a key step in efforts to contain an outbreak that has spread from its epicenter in the country to numerous other African nations this year. Officials held a ceremony to mark the start of vaccinations at a hospital in Goma, where health workers were first in line to receive the shots. The Ministry of Public Health on Friday said the campaign’s scope would be small due to limited resources. At the moment, 265,000 vaccine doses are available, although more are in the pipeline.
HUNGARY//
Thousands protest state news
Thousands of people on Saturday gathered outside the headquarters of the state broadcaster MTVA, protesting against what they described as the government’s “propaganda machine” and calling for an independent public service media. The protesters, from the opposition TISZA Party, said the state broadcaster is running biased propaganda, featuring only politicians from Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s party and government, and analysts repeating their narrative. “We have had enough of the malice, the lies, the propaganda, our patience has run out,” Tisza leader Peter Magyar told the crowd. “What we have as public service media in Hungary today is a global scandal, we have had enough.”
PERU
Child sacrifice site found
In a vacant lot outside Trujillo, archeologists have unearthed the remains of nearly four dozen children — all thought to have been ritually sacrificed more than 600 years ago. “Many of these remains have cuts on the sternum, some on their ribs,” archeologist Julio Asencio said from the excavation site. Each child was buried separately, he said. The remains of two adults and nine llamas — thought to be an offering representing their source of food, clothing and transportation — were also found nearby. They likely belonged to the local Chimu group, which dominated northern Peru from the 700s to the late 1400s, Asencio said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might