Tropical Cyclone Kills at Least 4 in Fiji

At least four people were killed and one is still missing in Fiji, due to floods caused by torrential rains over the weekend, authorities said Monday.

The director of the Fiji National Disaster Management Office said that the bodies of those killed were retrieved and authorities do not expect that the missing person survived.

Tropical Cyclone Josie, a category-one storm, caused severe flooding, with the northwestern town of Ba on Fiji's largest island, Viti Levu, hit the hardest.

Forecasters at the Meteorological Service warned that heavy rains would continue through Monday afternoon in Fiji and surrounding islands, as Josie moves south and southeast.

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Militants Call for Shutdown in Kashmir

Separatists in Indian-administered Kashmir called for a shutdown Monday in the strife-torn state to protest deadly clashes with security forces the day before that killed 13 rebels, four civilians and three soldiers.

Security has been increased in the region, ahead of more expected skirmishes.

Schools and businesses are closed.

Kashmir has been the center of a deadly tug-of-war between India and neighboring Pakistan since the end of British colonial rule in 1947. The Muslim-majority Himalayan territory is divided between the nuclear-armed rivals, but both claim Kashmir in full.

Kashmir rebels have battled Indian forces for decades, demanding either independence or a merger with Pakistan.

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Downscaled US-South Korea Military Drills Could Be Part of Nuclear Deal

This week the United States and South Korea began annual joint military training exercises which had been delayed to keep the peace during the Olympics in the South, and reduced in scope as a conciliatory gesture to facilitate talks to end North Korea’s nuclear program.  However as VOA’s Brian Padden reports from Seoul, permanently ending these exercises and the U.S. military presence in Korea could become a key factor in the negotiations to come.

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Malala Ends Tearful Homecoming Trip to Pakistan

Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai has concluded her first trip back to her native Pakistan, which also took the education activist to her home district of Swat, where she was shot in the head six years ago by the outlawed Pakistani Taliban for advocating girls’ rights and education. She was airlifted in a coma to Britain for an emergency surgery and has since been living there and studying at Oxford University. Ayaz Gul reports from Islamabad.

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Downscaled US-South Korea Military Drills Could Be Part of Nuclear Deal

New Hope for Frog Once Feared Extinct in Australia

SYDNEY, AUSTRALA — 

Sydney's Taronga Zoo has released a specially-bred group of critically endangered yellow-spotted bell frogs into the wild. Yellow-spotted bell frogs were thought to have become extinct until a chance discovery a decade ago. It allowed scientists to breed a so-called insurance population' in captivity to help the species recover.

Historically, yellow spotted-bell frogs were found in two separate highland ranges in the north and south of New South Wales state in eastern Australia.

But disaster struck in the 1970s following an outbreak of an infectious disease that affects amphibians around the world.

For 30 years there were no recorded sightings of yellow-spotted bell frogs and scientists thought they were extinct.

However, a small group of these rare frogs was found near the New South Wales town of Yass in 2009 on the Southern Tablelands. Researchers moved quickly to harvest eggs and they became part of a so-called insurance population. It has been a success.This week experts from Taronga Zoo in Sydney released 200 juvenile frogs back into the area near Yass in an attempt to re-establish a wild population.

Michael McFadden is a supervisor at the zoo.

"In the Northern and Southern Tablelands this species used to be extremely common up until the late 1970s and at that time the species almost went extinct over a couple of years. So it disappeared, it was thought to have gone extinct. The reason for that decline was due to the introduction of an introduced pathogen called chytrid fungus. Unfortunately for this species they showed very little immunity and as a result they were wiped out over a period of one or two years," he said.

Insurance populations' of endangered Tasmanian Devils have also been bred in captivity in Australia. In the wild, the world's largest surviving carnivorous marsupial has been devastated by a contagious facial cancer that was first recognized in the 1990s. A small number of animals bred in captivity have been released into the wild, fueling hopes this iconic species can recover.

There are hopes, too, the yellow-spotted bell frogs can do the same.

Chytrid fungus causes chytridiomycosis, which has been described by scientists as one of the most devastating wildlife diseases ever known. It has devastated frog populations in Australia, Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe.

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Indonesia says 1 Soldier Killed in Papua Clash

JAKARTA, INDONESIA — 

Indonesia's military said Monday that one solider has been killed in an ongoing clash between security forces and Papuan independence fighters near the U.S.-owned Grasberg copper mine in the country's east.

Military spokesman Col. Muhammad Aidi said the soldier was shot in the head and died Sunday afternoon.

He said that a joint military and police force was hunting an "armed separatist criminal group.''

Aidi denied a purported statement from the National Liberation Army of West Papua that numerous Indonesian soldiers were killed in the clashes and a 10-year-old boy had died in a fire caused by the Indonesian attack.

The liberation army said one of its fighters was killed.

Aidi said the dead Indonesian soldier's body has yet to be evacuated due to bad weather and difficult terrain in the mountainous area.

An insurgency has simmered in Papua since the early 1960s when Indonesia annexed the region that had remained under Dutch control following Indonesian independence nearly two decades earlier.

Attacks by rebels near the Grasberg mine have spiked in the past year after liberation army figures declared the area a war zone.

The Grasberg mine's vast gold and copper reserves have been exploited for decades by the U.S. mining company Freeport, damaging the surrounding environment while providing significant tax income for the Indonesian government.

But indigenous Papuans have benefited little and are poorer, sicker and more likely to die young than people elsewhere in Indonesia.

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