HWANGE: When GPS-triggered alerts show an elephant herd heading toward villages near Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park, Capon Sibanda springs into action. He posts warnings in WhatsApp groups before speeding off on his bicycle to inform nearby residents without phones or network access.
The new system of tracking elephants wearing GPS collars was launched last year by the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and the International Fund for Animal Welfare. It aims to prevent dangerous encounters between people and elephants, which are more frequent as climate change worsens competition for food and water.
“When we started it was more of a challenge, but it’s becoming phenomenal,” said Sibanda, 29, one of the local volunteers trained to be community guardians.
For generations, villagers banged pots, shouted or burned dung to drive away elephants. But worsening droughts and shrinking resources have pushed the animals to raid villages more often, destroying crops and infrastructure and sometimes injuring or killing people.
Zimbabwe's elephant population is estimated at around 100,000, nearly double the land’s capacity. The country hasn’t culled elephants in close to four decades. That's because of pressure from wildlife conservation activists, and because the process is expensive, according to parks spokesman Tinashe Farawo.
Conflicts between humans and wildlife such as elephants, lions and hyenas killed 18 people across the southern African country between January and April this year, forcing park authorities to kill 158 “trouble” animals during that period.
“Droughts are getting worse. The elephants devour the little that we harvest,” said Senzeni Sibanda, a local councilor and farmer, tending her tomato crop with cow dung manure in a community garden that also supports a school feeding program.
Technology now supports the traditional tactics. Through the EarthRanger platform introduced by IFAW, authorities track collared elephants in real time. Maps show their proximity to the buffer zone — delineated on digital maps, not by fences — that separate the park and hunting concessions from community land.
At a park restaurant one morning IFAW field operations manager Arnold Tshipa monitored moving icons on his laptop as he waited for breakfast. When an icon crossed a red line, signaling a breach, an alert pinged.
“We’re going to be able to see the interactions between wildlife and people,” Tshipa said. “This allows us to give more resources to particular areas."
The system also logs incidents like crop damage or attacks on people and livestock by predators such as lions or hyenas and retaliatory attacks on wildlife by humans. It also tracks the location of community guardians like Capon Sibanda.
“Every time I wake up, I take my bike, I take my gadget and hit the road,” Sibanda said. He collects and stores data on his phone, usually with photos. “Within a blink,” alerts go to rangers and villagers, he said.
His commitment has earned admiration from locals, who sometimes gift him crops or meat. He also receives a monthly food allotment worth about $80 along with internet data.
Parks agency director Edson Gandiwa said the platform ensures that “conservation decisions are informed by robust scientific data.”
Villagers like Senzeni Sibanda say the system is making a difference: “We still bang pans, but now we get warnings in time and rangers react more quickly.”
Still, frustration lingers. Sibanda has lost crops and water infrastructure to elephant raids and wants stronger action. “Why aren’t you culling them so that we benefit?” she asked. “We have too many elephants anyway.”
Her community, home to several hundred people, receives only a small share of annual trophy hunting revenues, roughly the value of one elephant or between $10,000 and $80,000, which goes toward water repairs or fencing. She wants a rise in Zimbabwe's hunting quota, which stands at 500 elephants per year, and her community's share increased.
The elephant debate has made headlines. In September last year, activists protested after Zimbabwe and Namibia proposed slaughtering elephants to feed drought-stricken communities. Botswana’s then-president offered to gift 20,000 elephants to Germany, and the country’s wildlife minister mock-suggested sending 10,000 to Hyde Park in the heart of London so Britons could “have a taste of living alongside elephants.”
Zimbabwe's collaring project may offer a way forward. Sixteen elephants, mostly matriarchs, have been fitted with GPS collars, allowing rangers to track entire herds by following their leaders. But Hwange holds about 45,000 elephants, and parks officials say it has capacity for 15,000. Project officials acknowledge a huge gap remains.
In a recent collaring mission, a team of ecologists, vets, trackers and rangers identified a herd. A marksman darted the matriarch from a distance. After some tracking using a drone and a truck, team members fitted the collar, whose battery lasts between two and four years. Some collected blood samples. Rangers with rifles kept watch.
Once the collar was secured, an antidote was administered, and the matriarch staggered off into the wild, flapping its ears.
“Every second counts,” said Kudzai Mapurisa, a parks agency veterinarian.
Zimbabwe is full of elephants and conflict with villagers is growing. A new approach hopes to help
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Zimbabwe is full of elephants and conflict with villagers is growing. A new approach hopes to help
Photos show a Filipino couple walking down a flooded aisle on their wedding day
“We just mustered enough courage,” said Verdillo
MALOLOS, Philippines: Jade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar were determined to walk down the aisle on their wedding day. Even if it meant walking down a flooded one.
On Tuesday, the Barasoain church in Malolos, Bulacan province, Philippines flooded due to heavy rain. Typhoon Whipa had intensified seasonal monsoon rains in the Philippines, bringing widespread flooding.
The couple anticipated the risk of flooding, but instead of letting the weather dampen the mood, they decided to push through, as all marriages have their challenges.
“We just mustered enough courage,” said Verdillo. “We decided today because it is a sacrifice in itself. But there will more sacrifices if we don’t push through today.”
Aguilar waded down the aisle with her white dress and wedding train floating behind her through waters almost up to her knees. At the altar, Verdillo was waiting to receive her while wearing an embroidered shirt called a Barong Tagalog, worn during special occasions.
The newlyweds have been together for 10 years. The groom said, “I feel that challenges won’t be over. It’s just a test. This is just one of the struggles that we’ve overcome.”
Despite the turbulent weather, some family and friends made it to the wedding.
“You will see love prevailed because even against weather, storm, rains, floods, the wedding continued,” said Jiggo Santos, a wedding guest. “It’s an extraordinary wedding.”
Humans beat AI gold-level score at top maths contest
- Humans beat generative AI models made by Google and OpenAI at a top international mathematics competition, despite the programs reaching gold-level scores for the first time
SYDNEY: Humans beat generative AI models made by Google and OpenAI at a top international mathematics competition, despite the programs reaching gold-level scores for the first time.
Neither model scored full marks — unlike five young people at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), a prestigious annual competition where participants must be under 20 years old.
Google said Monday that an advanced version of its Gemini chatbot had solved five out of the six maths problems set at the IMO, held in Australia’s Queensland this month.
“We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much-desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points — a gold medal score,” the US tech giant cited IMO president Gregor Dolinar as saying.
“Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise and most of them easy to follow.”
Around 10 percent of human contestants won gold-level medals, and five received perfect scores of 42 points.
US ChatGPT maker OpenAI said that its experimental reasoning model had scored a gold-level 35 points on the test.
The result “achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI” at “the world’s most prestigious math competition,” OpenAI researcher Alexander Wei wrote on social media.
“We evaluated our models on the 2025 IMO problems under the same rules as human contestants,” he said.
“For each problem, three former IMO medalists independently graded the model’s submitted proof.”
Google achieved a silver-medal score at last year’s IMO in the British city of Bath, solving four of the six problems.
That took two to three days of computation — far longer than this year, when its Gemini model solved the problems within the 4.5-hour time limit, it said.
The IMO said tech companies had “privately tested closed-source AI models on this year’s problems,” the same ones faced by 641 competing students from 112 countries.
“It is very exciting to see progress in the mathematical capabilities of AI models,” said IMO president Dolinar.
Contest organizers could not verify how much computing power had been used by the AI models or whether there had been human involvement, he cautioned.
Malcolm-Jamal Warner, ‘Cosby Show’ actor, dies at 54 in Costa Rica drowning
SAN JOSE, Costa Rica: Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who as teenage son Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” was central to a cultural phenomenon that helped define the 1980s, died at age 54 in an accidental drowning in Costa Rica, authorities there said Monday.
Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Department said Warner drowned Sunday afternoon on a beach on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. He was swimming at Playa Cocles in Limon province when a current pulled him deeper into the ocean.
“He was rescued by people on the beach,” the department’s initial report said, but first responders from Costa Rica’s Red Cross found him without vital signs and he was taken to the morgue.
Warner created many TV moments etched in the memories of Generation X children and their parents, including a pilot-episode argument with Bill Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable about money, and another episode where Theo tries to hide his ear piercing from his dad. His Theo was the only son among four daughters in the household of Cliff Huxtable and Phylicia Rashad’s Clair Huxtable on the NBC sitcom, and he would be one of the prime representations of American teenage boyhood on a show that was the most popular in America for much of its run from 1984 to 1992.
He played the role for eight seasons, appearing in each of the show’s 197 episodes and earning an Emmy nomination for supporting actor in a comedy in 1986. For many the lasting image of the character, and of Warner, is of him wearing a badly botched mock designer shirt sewed by his sister Denise, played by Lisa Bonet. The “Gordon Gartrell” shirt later became a memeable image: Anthony Mackie wore one on “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon and the profile picture on Warner’s Instagram shows a toddler sporting one.
NBA hall-of-famer Magic Johnson was among those giving tribute Monday. Johnson said on X that he and his wife are sad to hear of the death of their friend.
“We were both super fans of the hit ‘Cosby Show’ and continued to follow his career on shows like ‘Malcolm and Eddie’ and ‘The Resident,’” Johnson said. “Every time I ran into Malcolm, we would have deep and fun conversations about basketball, life, and business. He will truly be missed.”
Like the rest of the “Cosby Show” cast, Warner had to contend with the sexual assault allegations against its titular star, whose conviction in a Pennsylvania court was later overturned.
Warner told The Associated Press in 2015 that the show’s legacy was “tarnished.”
“My biggest concern is when it comes to images of people of color on television and film,” Warner said. “We’ve always had ‘The Cosby Show’ to hold up against that. And the fact that we no longer have that, that’s the thing that saddens me the most because in a few generations the Huxtables will have been just a fairy tale.”
Representatives for Cosby declined immediate comment.
Warner worked steadily as an actor for more than 40 years. His first major post-“Cosby” role came on the sitcom “Malcolm & Eddie,” co-starring with comedian Eddie Griffin in the popular series on the defunct UPN network from 1996 to 2000.
“My heart is heavy right now,” Griffin said on Instagram Monday. “Rest easy my brother for you have Won in life and now you have won forever eternal bliss..”
In the 2010s, he starred opposite Tracee Ellis Ross as a family-blending couple for two seasons on the BET sitcom “Read Between The Lines.” He also had a role as O.J. Simpson’s friend Al Cowlings on “American Crime Story” and was a series regular on Fox’s “The Resident.”
“First I met you as Theo with the rest of the world then you were my first TV husband,” Ross said on Instagram. “My heart is so so sad. What an actor and friend you were: warm, gentle, present, kind, thoughtful, deep, funny, elegant.”
Warner’s film roles included the 2008 rom-com “Fool’s Gold” with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. A poet and a musician, Warner was a Grammy winner, for best traditional R&B performance, and was nominated for best spoken word poetry album for “Hiding in Plain View.”
Warner also worked as a director, helming episodes of “Malcolm & Eddie,” “Read Between the Lines,” “Kenan & Kel,” and “All That.”
Warner was born in 1970 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His mother, Pamela Warner, reportedly named him after Malcolm X and jazz pianist Jamal. She served as his manager when he began pursuing acting at age 9.
In the early 1980s, he made guest appearances on the TV shows “Matt Houston” — his first credit — and “Fame.”
Warner was 13 when he landed the role of Theo in an audition after a broad search for the right child actor.
Cosby was a major star at the time, and the show was certain to be widely seen, but few could’ve predicted the huge, yearslong phenomenon it would become.
He had been married for about 10 years with a daughter about 5 years old, but chose to not publicly disclose their names. Warner’s representatives declined immediate comment on his death.
His final credits came in TV guest roles, including appearances on “The Wonder Years,” “Grown-ish,” and “9-1-1,” where he had a four-episode arc last year.
“I grew up with a maniacal obsession with not wanting to be one of those ‘where are they now kids,’” Warner told the AP in 2015. “I feel very blessed to be able to have all of these avenues of expression ... to be where I am now and finally at a place where I can let go of that worry about having a life after ‘Cosby.’”
Pope Leo XIV marks 56th anniversary of moon landing with observatory visit, call to Buzz Aldrin
- This is Pope Leo XIV’s first visit to the Vatican astronomical observatory in Castel Gandolfo, founded in 1891 by Leo XII
- In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI rang the space station and asked about the future of the planet and the environmental risks it faced
ROME: Pope Leo XIV marked the 56th anniversary of man’s arrival on the moon Sunday with a visit to the Vatican astronomical observatory in Castel Gandolfo and a call to astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
After praying the Sunday Angelus at his summer retreat in Castel Gandolfo, Leo headed to the astronomical observatory located in the Pontifical Villas, where he took a close look at the telescopes that have supported celestial exploration from a faith-based perspective for decades.
The pontiff was accompanied by astronomers and students participating in the traditional summer school organized by the observatory.
This was Pope Leo’s first visit to the observatory, founded in 1891 by Leo XIII. The first vision of it, however, can be traced back to the establishment by Pope Gregory XIII of a commission aimed at studying the scientific data and implications of the calendar reform that took place in 1582.
The Vatican Observatory has generated top-notch research from its scientist-clerics, drawing academics to its meteorite collection, which includes bits of Mars and is considered among the world’s best.
Later Sunday, the pope called astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who shared with Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins the historic 1969 moonwalk.
“This evening, 56 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, I spoke with the astronaut Buzz Aldrin,” Pope Leo wrote on his X account. “Together we shared the memory of a historic feat, a testimony to human ingenuity, and we reflected on the mystery and greatness of Creation.”
Pope Leo then blessed the astronaut, his family and his collaborators.
There are a few precedents of papal calls to “space.”
In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI rang the space station and asked about the future of the planet and the environmental risks it faced.
Before Benedict, Pope Paul VI sent a radio message to astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins after their moonwalk, calling them “conquerors of the Moon.”
Pakistani camel relearns to walk with prosthetic leg
- Cammie’s leg was allegedly severed by a landlord in June 2024 as punishment for entering his field in search of fodder
KARACHI: Cammie, a young camel whose front leg was chopped off by a landlord in Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh, left her caregivers emotional as she walked for the first time on a prosthetic leg.
“I started weeping when I saw her walking with the prosthetic leg. It was a dream come true,” Sheema Khan, the manager of an animal shelter in Karachi told AFP on Saturday.
Veterinarian Babar Hussain said it was the first time a large animal in Pakistan had received a prosthetic leg.
Cammie’s leg was allegedly severed by a landlord in June 2024 as punishment for entering his field in search of fodder.
A video of the wounded camel that circulated on social media prompted swift government action.
According to the deputy commissioner of Sanghar, she was transported the very next day to Karachi, over 250 kilometers (155 miles) away, and has been living in a shelter there ever since.
“She was terrified when she first arrived from Sanghar. We witnessed her heart-wrenching cries. She was afraid of men,” Khan told AFP.
One of the biggest challenges the caregivers faced was gaining her trust.
“I cannot put her condition into words,” Khan added.
To aid her recovery, the caregivers introduced another young camel named Callie. Her presence brought comfort to the injured Cammie, who tried standing on her three legs for the first time after seeing her new companion.
“Cammie had been confined to her enclosure for almost four to five months before Callie arrived,” Khan added.
After treating the wound and completing initial rehabilitation, the shelter — Comprehensive Disaster Response Services (CDRS) Benji Project — arranged a prosthetic leg from a US-based firm so she could walk on all fours again.
“We don’t force her to walk. After attaching the prosthetic leg, we wait about 15 to 20 minutes. Then she stands up on her own and walks slowly,” veterinarian Hussain told AFP.
He said that it would take another 15 to 20 days for her to fully adjust to the new limb.
The caregivers said Cammie will remain at the shelter permanently.
