Likely North Korean weapon smugglers spotted near China
SEOUL, South Korea — A North Korean ship suspected of carrying illicit weapons was plying the waters off Shanghai on Tuesday en route to Myanmar, a news report said, as regional military officials and a U.S. destroyer kept a close eye on the vessel’s movements.
Washington’s top military commander in South Korea, meanwhile, warned that the communist regime is bolstering its guerrilla warfare capacity.
Gen. Walter Sharp, who commands the 28,500 U.S. troops positioned in South Korea, said the North could employ roadside bombs and other guerrilla tactics if war breaks out again on the Korean peninsula. The two Koreas technically remain at war because their three-year conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953.
North Korea’s 1.2 million-member army makes it one of the world’s largest. Some 180,000 are special operation forces. North Korea is believed to have been boosting its urban, nighttime and special operation capabilities in the wake of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said.
Scientists reconstructing rare preserved elephant skeleton
BANDUNG, Indonesia — Indonesian scientists are reconstructing the largest, most complete skeleton of a prehistoric giant elephant ever found in the tropics, a finding that may offer new clues into the largely mysterious origins of its modern Asian cousin.
The prehistoric elephant is believed to have been submerged in quicksand shortly after dying on a riverbed in Java around 200,000 years ago. Its bones — almost perfectly preserved — were discovered by chance in March when an old sand quarry collapsed during monsoon rains.
The animal stood 13 feet tall, 16 feet long and weighed more than 10 tons — closer in size to the woolly mammoth than to the great Asian mammals now on Earth.
Animal fossils are rare in the humid, hot climate of the equator because decomposition occurs extremely quickly.
Following a monthlong excavation, a team of seven paleontologists from the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java, set the bones in plaster for the trip back to their office where they will be pieced back together.
Taliban commander killed by own guard in Pakistan
ISLAMABAD — A Taliban faction leader who criticized the militant group’s Pakistani head over attacks that killed civilians was fatally shot Tuesday, reportedly by one of his own guards.
The attack on Qari Zainuddin appeared to be a sign that divisions within the Taliban have broken into the open as they come under military assault. The army is clearing out militants from the Swat Valley and has been pounding strongholds of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in the South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan in apparent preparation for a major offensive.
US, Kyrgyzstan reach air base deal after months of limbo
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — The United States has agreed to more than triple the rent it pays for use of a key air base in Kyrgyzstan to ship non-lethal military supplies to Afghanistan under a deal approved Tuesday by a Kyrgyz parliamentary committee.
The accord to use the Manas base as a “center of transit shipments” comes four months after the Central Asian nation ordered the eviction of U.S. troops. It falls short of U.S. hopes of maintaining the base as a full-fledged military facility.
But it would provide a much-needed logistical support base as the U.S.-led coalition ramps up operations against increasingly bold Taliban and al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan.
Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Kadyrbek Sarbayev told lawmakers that under the new one-year deal, rent will increase to $60 million per year from the current $17.4 million.
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