1Missing soldier: The Israeli army says it has recovered the body of a soldier who went missing in a bloody 1982 battle with Syrian forces in southern Lebanon. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said Wednesday that the remains of Zachary Baumel had been returned to Israel and identified after nearly four decades of intelligence operations. Conricus declined to elaborate on how the return was arranged or where the remains were found, saying only that “an opportunity arose to locate the body.” Baumel, a U.S. citizen from New York, went missing in action near the Lebanese village of Sultan Yacoub.
2American kidnapped: Ugandan security forces are searching for a U.S. citizen and a local driver who were abducted in a wildlife park and their kidnappers demanded a ransom, authorities said Wednesday. The missing people were taken in an ambush by four gunmen on Tuesday in Queen Elizabeth National Park, a protected area near the porous border with Congo. The kidnappers held up a group of foreign tourists at gunpoint, grabbed two of them and disappeared into the bush. Later the kidnappers, using the phone of one of their victims, demanded a ransom of $500,000, police said. The kidnapped American is a 35-year-old woman. Queen Elizabeth National Park, in southwest Uganda, is a popular safari destination in this East African country.
3Creepy cargo: Philippine customs officials were astonished when they opened nicely gift-wrapped boxes of cookies and oatmeal flown in all the way from Poland and found a hair-raising contraband: hundreds of live tarantulas. Bureau of Customs personnel seized the 757 tarantulas at a mail exchange center near Manila’s international airport this week and later arrested a Filipino man who tried to claim the long-legged and venomous spiders, which were declared as “collection items.”
4Senator censured: An Australian senator was censured by his colleagues on Wednesday for seeking to blame the victims of last month’s mosque shootings and vilify Muslims. Sen. Fraser Anning was the target of widespread condemnation for blaming the attack in New Zealand on immigration policies. He faced more criticism later for physically striking a teenager who cracked a raw egg on his head in a viral incident in Melbourne. On Parliament’s second sitting day since the March 15 attack in which 50 people died, government and opposition lawmakers moved the censure motion against Anning for divisive comments “seeking to attribute blame to victims of a horrific crime and to vilify people on the basis of religion, which do not reflect the opinions of the Australian Senate or the Australian people.”
5No comment: India on Wednesday declined to comment on a statement by a U.S. space official that India’s recent test of an anti-satellite weapon created debris that could threaten the International Space Station. India’s Defense Ministry spokesman Col. Aman Anand said there was no official response to NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine’s statement on Monday. Bridenstine said in shooting down one of its own satellites with a rocket last week, India had left debris high enough in orbit to pose a risk to the International Space Station. India’s External Affairs Ministry in a statement after the March 27 test said that whatever debris generated would decay and fall back to Earth within weeks as the test was in the lower atmosphere.
Chronicle News Services
