Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing will travel to Thailand for a regional summit as his country reels from an earthquake that killed thousands and left cities in ruins.

The earthquake in central Myanmar last Friday killed 3,085 people and injured 4,715, the junta has said. Hundreds more are missing and the toll is expected to rise.

A spokesman for the Myanmar army said Min Aung Hlaing is scheduled to fly to Bangkok on Thursday, on the eve of a summit that will gather leaders of the seven countries that border the Bay of Bengal.

His attendance will be unusual as sanctioned leaders are typically barred from these events.

Host Thailand, where the earthquake was felt and killed 21 people, has proposed that the leaders issue a joint statement on the disaster. Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka are also part of the summit.

Countries around the world have sent aid and rescue teams to Myanmar since the quake, but poor infrastructure and an ongoing civil war has complicated relief efforts.

The junta announced a temporary ceasefire late on Wednesday to expedite these efforts, after earlier rejecting proposals from armed ethnic rebel groups.

Before this, the military had continued its airstrikes in rebel-held areas, including those badly hit by the earthquake.

On Tuesday night, troops opened fire at a Chinese Red Cross convoy carrying relief supplies. The junta said the troops fired after the convoy refused to stop despite being signalled to do so.

Myanmar has been gripped by a bloody civil war since the military seized power in 2021, which led to the rise of an armed resistance that has been fighting alongside armed ethnic groups, some of which have been fighting the military for decades.

Years of violence have crippled the economy, supercharged inflation, and plunged the country into a humanitarian crisis.

Now, the earthquake has worsened the crisis. Humanitarian groups have urged the junta to lift any remaining obstructions to aid.

The UN has also urged the global community to ramp up aid before the monsoon season hits in about a month.

(BBC News)

The Slovak cabinet has approved a plan to shoot around a quarter of the country’s brown bears, after a man was mauled to death while walking in a forest in Central Slovakia.

Prime Minister Robert Fico’s populist-nationalist government announced after a cabinet meeting that 350 out of an estimated population of 1,300 brown bears would be culled, citing the danger to humans after a spate of attacks.

“We can’t live in a country where people are afraid to go into the woods,” the prime minister told reporters afterwards.

A special state of emergency allowing bears to be shot has now been widened to 55 of Slovakia’s 79 districts, an area that now covers most of the country.

The government in Bratislava has already loosened legal protections allowing bears to be killed if they stray too close to human habitation. Some 93 had been shot by the end of 2024.

The plans to shoot even more were condemned by conservationists, who said the decision was in violation of international obligations and could be illegal.

“It’s absurd,” said Michal Wiezek, an ecologist and MEP for opposition party Progressive Slovakia.

“The Environment Ministry failed desperately to limit the number of bear attacks by the unprecedented culling of this protected species,” he told the BBC.

“To cover up their failure, the government has decided to cull even more bears,” he continued.

Wiezek argued that thousands of encounters a year passed without incident, and he hoped the European Commission would intervene.

Slovak police confirmed on Wednesday that a man found dead in forest near the town of Detva in Central Slovakia on Sunday night was killed by a bear. His wounds were consistent with an attack.

The 59-year-old man had been reported missing on Saturday after failing to return from a walk in the woods.

He was found with what authorities described as “devastating injuries to the head”. Evidence of a bear’s den was found nearby, a local NGO told Slovak newspaper Novy Cas.

Bears have become a political issue in Slovakia after a rising number of encounters, including fatal attacks.

In March 2024, a 31-year-old Belarusian woman fell into a ravine and died while being chased by a bear in northern Slovakia.

Several weeks later a large brown bear was captured on video running through the centre of the nearby town of Liptovsky Mikolas in broad daylight, bounding past cars and lunging at people on the pavement.

The authorities later claimed to have hunted down and killed the animal, although conservationists said later there was clear evidence they had shot a different bear.

Environment Minister Tomas Taraba said on Wednesday there were more than 1,300 bears in Slovakia, and that 800 was a “sufficient number”, as the population was growing.

However, experts say the population remains more or less stable at around 1,270 animals.

Bears are common across the Carpathian mountain range, which stretches in an arc from Romania through western Ukraine and on to Slovakia and Poland.

(BBC News)

US Senator Cory Booker has broken the record for the longest speech ever delivered in the Senate.

The New Jersey Democrat’s marathon address, a symbolic protest against President Donald Trump, in which he warned of a “grave and urgent” moment in American history, ended after for 25 hours and four minutes.

Although it was not a filibuster – a speech designed to obstruct passage of a bill – it held up legislative business in the Republican-controlled Senate. The rules for such speeches require a speaker to remain standing and forgo bathroom breaks.

The previous record was held by Republican Senator Strom Thurmond, who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act in 1957.

Booker said he would speak for as long as he was physically able as he began his address at around 19:00 local time on Monday evening. He concluded at 20:06 on Tuesday.

The 55-year-old, who is the fourth-ranking Democrat in the chamber, filled some of the time reading letters from constituents, who said they had been harmed by President Trump’s policies.

The former presidential candidate also ran out the clock by discussing sports, reciting poetry and taking questions from colleagues.

Booker, who is African-American, spoke of his roots as the descendant of both slaves and slave-owners.

“I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people are more powerful,” he said, referring to segregationist Thurmond’s record-setting address 68 years ago.

As he reached the milestone, Booker said he was going to “deal with some of the biological urgencies I’m feeling”.

He was able to give his jaw much-needed respite during the speech by taking questions from colleagues, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer of New York, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

The Democratic Party, currently out of power in the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, rallied behind Booker’s symbolic act of protest.

Booker’s speech is also the longest in the Senate since a 21-hour filibuster in 2013 by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican, against Obamacare.

Cruz told CBS, the BBC’s US partner, that a filibuster is a challenging physical feat.

For his own protest, he wore comfortable shoes and tried to drink as little water as possible – an approach he described as “nothing in, nothing out”.

(BBC News)