AUSTRALIA
Dolphins euthanized
Dozens of false killer whales stranded on a remote beach in Tasmania state were euthanized after bad weather and the isolated location hampered efforts to push them back into the waters, authorities said yesterday. More than 150 endangered dolphins, known commonly as false killer whales, were found stranded this week in the island state’s northwest coast near Arthur River, about 400km from Tasmania’s state capital, Hobart. “The conditions that the team faced yesterday in attempts to refloat the whales proved very challenging and in fact, dangerous to our staff,” Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service Brendon Clark said in a media briefing. Twenty-seven of the animals were euthanized yesterday morning, with 38 still alive, Clark said. The euthanasia process was expected to be finished later yesterday.
Photo: AFP / Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania
INDONESIA
Crocodile attacks boy
A boy is missing on Borneo island after he was attacked by a crocodile, police said yesterday, the second such attack in the area in two weeks. The 10-year-old boy jumped into a river in West Kalimantan province on Borneo, one of the world’s most biodiverse islands, on Tuesday, when a 4m-long crocodile attacked him, a friend said. “His friend witnessed the crocodile resurface, maul the victim’s body and drag it into the current,” local police chief Rachmatul Isani Fachri said in a statement. The friend alerted the boy’s father, who searched for his son’s body in the river using a speedboat, but could not find him. “Currently the search-and-rescue team and local people are still searching for the victim. Please pray so he will be found soon,” Rachmatul said. Another boy went missing in the same village after a crocodile attacked him while bathing, according to his uncle who witnessed the attack, police said on Feb. 7. The search for six-year-old Cristian Ricardo ended after seven days and he is now presumed dead.
Photo: Reuters
JAPAN
North buried in snow
Residents in the nation’s north were yesterday sheltering from deep snow up to the rooftops in some areas after a two-week whiteout. Several cities have had record snowfall this month, causing traffic disruption and several fatalities. More snow is expected, said the national weather agency, which issued a series of warnings for heavy snow and strong winds, particularly along the coast facing Russia and the Korean Peninsula. “I have been here for 10 years and I have never seen anything like this,” a resident of Aomori Prefecture’s Sukayu area told TV network TBS in comments broadcast yesterday. “If you look at the volume of snowfall per day, there wasn’t any single stand-out episode, but it accumulated little by little,” he said. Sukayu was buried under 5m of snow, reaching the roofs of two-story buildings, the meteorological agency said.
UNITED STATES
DOGE dividends mooted
President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that he likes the idea of giving some of the savings from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) back to citizens as a kind of dividend. The administration is considering a concept in which 20 percent of the savings produced by DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts goes to citizens and another 20 percent goes to paying down the national debt, Trump said at an investment conference in Miami. He also said the potential for dividend payments would incentivize people to report wasteful spending. “They’ll be reporting it themselves,” he said. “They participate in the process of saving us money.”
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
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