United States: A top Idaho wildlife official has resigned amid outrage over a photo of him posing with a baboon family he killed during a hunting trip in Namibia, Africa, ending days of turmoil for a state where big game hunting is popular but critics said the photo was seen as unsportsmanlike by hunting enthusiasts. Idaho Governor C.L. "Butch" Otter said that he asked for and accepted Blake Fischer's resignation, three days after the Idaho Statesman newspaper published the first report about a photo of Fischer smiling with four dead baboons propped in front of him. Fischer killed them using a bow and arrows, visible in the bottom of the picture.
China: China's detention camps are "training" centres that have made lives more "colourful" for Muslim minorities by saving them from extremist behaviour, a senior official said, amid growing international criticism. Shohrat Zakir, the Governor of Xinjiang, a north-western province home to Chinese Muslims, said in a rare interview with Chinese state media that the government offered "hands-on training" to teach Uighurs Mandarin, "the country's common language, legal knowledge, vocational skills, along with de-extremisation education". The "free programmes" provided nutritious meals, air-conditioned rooms, dance contests and facilities including basketball courts, computer labs, and film screening rooms, said Zakir, stressing the detention centres were legal under Chinese law. "Many trainees have said that they were previously affected by extremist thought and had never participated in such kinds of art and sports activities, and now they have realised that life can be so colourful," he said. Beijing has come under fire for its repression of the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking, primarily Muslim minority group. As many as one million Uighurs have been forced into camps where they undergo political indoctrination and abuse.
Italy: New excavations in the ancient buried city of Pompeii have yielded a truly historic find: a charcoal inscription apparently dating the eruption of Mount Vesuvius to October of AD 79, two months later than originally thought. Culture Minister Alberto Bonisoli was on hand for the announcement in Pompeii, where earlier this month archaeologists revealed a richly painted garden scene in a home that was unearthed during excavations of a new sector of the vast site. The carbon inscription, found in a home, carries the equivalent date of October 17, and supports the idea that the eruption occurred a week later, rather than August 23 as had previously been thought.
