World News

MEXICO CITY — Scientists have documented the first-known instance of a “virgin birth” by a crocodile, which had been living in isolation for 16 years at Costa Rican zoo, according to a study published on Wednesday. The female American crocodile laid 14 eggs in 2018 within her enclosure, a not uncommon phenomenon among captive reptiles. The more puzzling fact, however, came after three months of incubation when one egg was found to contain a fully...

JAKARTA — Separatists in the Indonesian region of Papua where a New Zealand pilot was taken hostage in February have been siphoning off government aid money to buy black market guns for a deadly guerrilla war, officials say. The “Dana Desa” village fund introduced by President Joko Widodo in 2015 and valued at $4.7 billion this year has long been criticized as prone to corruption. Nowhere is the oversight of the scheme more challenging than...

NEW YORK — Schools across the US East Coast canceled outdoor activities, airline traffic slowed, and millions of Americans were urged to stay indoors on Wednesday as smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south, blanketing cities in thick, yellow haze. The US National Weather Service issued air quality alerts for virtually the entire Atlantic seaboard. Health officials from Vermont to South Carolina and as far west as Ohio and Kansas warned residents that spending time outdoors...

ByteDance-owned TikTok hopes to more than quadruple the size of its worldwide e-commerce operations to as much as $20 billion in merchandise sales this year, relying on growth in Southeast Asia, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The increase compares to last year’s $4.4 billion in gross merchandise value, representing the worth of total goods sold through its online marketplace TikTok Shop, the report said, adding that the company is betting on markets such as Indonesia. TikTok did not immediately respond to...

TAIPEI – Taiwan activated its defense systems on Thursday after reporting 37 Chinese military aircraft flying into the island’s air defense zone, some of which then flew into the western Pacific, in Beijing’s latest mass air incursion. China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, has over the past three years regularly flown its air force into the skies near the island, though not into Taiwan’s territorial air space. Taiwan’s defense ministry said that from 5 a.m. (2100 GMT on Wednesday) it had detected 37 Chinese air force planes, including J-11 and J-16 fighters as well...

TOKYO – Japan’s Fukuoka District Court ruled on Thursday that not allowing same-sex marriage was “in a state of unconstitutionality” in a complicated ruling that fell short of marriage-equality activists’ expectations. The ruling came a week after another district court said it was unconstitutional to not allow same-sex marriage, bolstering hopes of the LGBTQ community in Japan, the only Group of Seven nation without legal protection for same-sex unions. Five rulings on same-sex marriage have now been handed down around Japan – two saying bans on...

SHANGHAI/BEIJING — A veritable parade of overseas CEOs including Tesla’s Elon Musk and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon have made their way to a reopened China in the last few months. One notable common strand: they’ve not talked much in public about their trips, which have mostly consisted of meetings with government officials, local staff and business partners. Media events and other public engagements, once frequent before the pandemic, are now rare. Even Mr. Musk, known...

NEW YORK — The top US securities regulator sued cryptocurrency platform Coinbase on Tuesday, the second lawsuit in two days against a major crypto exchange, in a dramatic escalation of a crackdown on the industry and one that could dramatically transform a market that has largely operated outside regulation. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday took aim at Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. The SEC accuses Binance and its chief executive...

A MAN armed with four handguns killed two people and wounded five others when he fired into a crowd outside a high school graduation ceremony in Richmond, Virginia, on Tuesday, police said. Police said they arrested one suspect, a 19-year-old man who knew one of the victims and shot at him amid the crowd that had just emerged from the Huguenot High School’s commencement ceremony inside a theater on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University....

KHERSON, Ukraine — About 42,000 people were at risk from flooding in Russian- and Ukrainian-controlled areas along the Dnipro River after a dam collapsed, as the United Nations aid chief warned of “grave and far-reaching consequences.” Ukraine and Russia blame each other for the collapse of the massive dam on Tuesday, which sent floodwaters across a swathe of the war zone and forced thousands to flee. Ukraine said Russia committed a deliberate war crime in...