Feb. 21-27, 2025

Twenty-two people died in the 2019 New Zealand disaster, mostly US and Australian cruise ship passengers on a walking tour

The owners of an island volcano in New Zealand where 22 tourists and local guides died in an eruption had their criminal conviction for failing to keep visitors safe thrown out by a judge on Friday.

The release of the decision followed a three-day hearing last October for the owners’ company at the high court in the city of Auckland where they appealed against the charges laid by New Zealand’s workplace health and safety regulator after the 2019 eruption of Whakaari, also known as White Island.

Gruff in demeanor yet much beloved, Gene Hackman was one of the finest actors of his generation.

Tropical cyclones Rae, Seru and Alfred are churning as the region’s season reaches its peak

Three tropical cyclones are churning in the South Pacific at the same time, satellite images show, in a rare occurrence for the region.

Tropical cyclones Rae, Seru and Alfred formed over five days and are still spinning in a stretch off the eastern coast of Australia and around 8,000 kilometers into the Pacific, where the cyclone season is reaching its peak.

Milorad Dodik says he will not accept any conviction after his repeated calls for Serb-run part of Bosnia to join Serbia

A court in Bosnia has sentenced the pro-Russia Bosnian Serb president, Milorad Dodik, to one year in prison and banned him from politics for six years over his separatist actions as tensions mount in the fragile Balkan state.

Wednesday’s landmark ruling in Sarajevo came after a year-long trial on charges that Dodik disobeyed the top international envoy overseeing peace in the country. The judgment becomes final after the expected appeal process.

Electricity restored to almost all affected regions as investigation under way into how outage occurred

Power has been restored to most of Chile’s 19 million people after the country’s most disruptive blackout in 15 years, the government said, as authorities lifted a strict curfew imposed when the outage left 98% of the population without electricity.

Chilean interior minister Carolina Tohá said on Wednesday that electricity had largely returned to Chile’s 14 afflicted regions, although 220,000 residents remained without power.

Guo Qingshan’s image of a cliff on the edge of the Yangtze River in Hubei province has been viewed millions of times

A cliff on the edge of the Yangtze River has become an overnight sensation in China after a Shanghai-based designer posted a photo of it earlier this month likening it to a dog.

Guo Qingshan took the photo, which he captioned “Puppy Mountain”, while on a hike near his home town of Yichang, in Hubei province, in late January.

Highly contagious disease spreads among Mennonite community as 18 people hospitalized

A measles outbreak in rural west Texas has grown to 124 cases across nine counties, the state health department said on Tuesday, and 18 people have been hospitalized.

The outbreak is largely spreading in the Mennonite community in an area where small towns are separated by vast stretches of oil rig-dotted open land but connected due to people traveling between towns for work, church, grocery shopping and other day-to-day errands.