Iran unveiled an underground missile storage facility and announced Friday that it is manufacturing “new special missiles,” according to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) affiliated Tasnim news.

Video released on Iranian state TV IRIB on Friday showed IRGC Commander Major General Hossein Salami and Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh touring the facility.

Hajizadeh called the site a “dormant volcano,” Tasnim reports.

Part of Iran’s operations against Israel in October and April were carried out using this underground missile base, semi-official Iranian media outlet Mehr News reports.

At an event in Iran’s southwestern city of Abadan on Friday, Salami also announced the IRGC Aerospace Force is developing “new special missiles.”

On Monday, General Ali Mohammad Naeini warned Iran will be holding new drills and war games this month that would reveal “missile and drone cities” including an underground city storing missiles and another facility accommodating vessels in the south of Iran, Tasnim reported.

On Friday, Iranian Basij (volunteer) forces held a large-scale exercise involving 110,000 members in the capital, Tehran, Tasnim reports, adding that the Iranian Armed Forces have held several war games in recent days.

Iran aims to project that it has not lost power in the region, despite Iranian backed forces in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen coming under attack by Israel and the fall of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad’s regime, an ally of Iran.

“Our deterrence has not been designed on the basis of action from any other country,” Salami said Friday.

In October, Israel said it struck Iranian missile manufacturing sites and aerial defense systems inside Iran in response to earlier strikes launched by Iran on Israel.

At the time, Iran’s foreign ministry called Israel’s strikes a “clear violation” of international law, adding that it is “entitled and obligated to defend itself.”

The US is just days away from swearing in US President-elect Donald Trump, who previously launched a “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran in his first term. US officials have expressed optimism in negotiations on the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal with hopes of reaching one before Trump takes office on January 20.

Brazil’s government will give Meta until Monday to explain the changes to its fact-checking program, Solicitor General Jorge Messias said on Friday.

The move comes after the social media company scrapped its US fact-checking program and reduced curbs on discussions around topics such as immigration and gender identity.

It is not immediately clear exactly what will happen after the deadline expires.

“I’d like to express the Brazilian government’s enormous concern about the policy adopted by the Meta company, which is like an airport windsock, changing its position all the time according to the winds,” Messias, the government’s top lawyer, told reporters in Brasilia.

“Brazilian society will not be at the mercy of this kind of policy,” Messias added.

On Thursday, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the changes were “extremely serious” and announced he had called a meeting to discuss the topic.

Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In announcing the move on Tuesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg cited “too many mistakes and too much censorship.” A spokesperson said on Tuesday that, for now, Meta was planning the changes only for the US market.

Reuters, which was a Meta partner on its US fact-checking program, has declined to comment.

In the wee hours of an October morning, dozens of dogs chased the hulking figure of an animal scrambling through a forest in northwestern China as a thermal drone whizzed overhead.

“The dogs caught it! Just stab it! Stab it!” a drone operator shouted into his walkie-talkie to the hunter, in a video report by a state-linked news outlet.

The hunter rushed to the spot where the dogs had cornered the 125-kilogram beast, and thrust his spear into it, killing the animal and securing a reward of 2,400 yuan ($330).

He works with one of six “bounty hunting” teams hired by Xiji county in China’s northwestern Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region this fall.

Their prey? Wild boars.

In recent years, China has authorized teams of bounty hunters to kill wild boars as part of a pilot program to control a pest that’s wreaking havoc on crops and causing accidents, injuries, and even fatalities. In February, the program was expanded to a nationwide cull.

The hunters are not allowed to use firearms or poison, but the cull has surprised the public in a country where wildlife protection is tightly regulated.

Animal protection groups have criticized the measure as experts debate whether the rise in wild boar attacks justifies killing large numbers of animals, and if hunting is the right solution to mitigate human-wildlife conflict in the world’s second most populous country.

Wild boar attacks

China’s problem with wild boars dates back over two decades, when people hunted so many of the animals to eat that they became extinct in some areas, according to the state broadcaster CGTN.

In response, the government added them to a national protection list in 2000, allowing licensed hunting only in areas where there were too many boars.

Over time, almost free from natural predators, the animal’s population surged from some 10,000 to about 2 million, and so did reports of wild boar attacks.

Boars caused damage to property or people in all but eight of China’s 34 provincial-level regions, the National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA) said last January.

In Xiji county, where six official bounty hunting teams killed 300 wild boars this fall, the animals inflicted economic losses of over 2 million yuan ($276,200) in 2023 alone, mainly through tearing up farmland, a local official told The Paper, a state-run newspaper.

People have also lost their lives.

In December 2023, a 51-year-old villager from central Hubei province died from blood loss after being bitten by a wild boar, The Paper reported. Three years earlier, a village official suffered a similar fatal boar attack in southwestern Sichuan province, according to the newspaper.

Boars have also been seen in urban areas more frequently as their numbers rise and habitat shrinks from China’s rapid urbanization.

A wild boar burst into the lobby of a four-star hotel in Nanjing in late October, struggling to escape on the slick floor before security captured it, according to state media reports.

Two days earlier, another boar, weighing 80 kilograms, ran amok through a downtown street in eastern Hangzhou, overturning vehicles and rampaging in a local shop.

Is “hunting” the right solution?

Wild boar hunting’s popularity plummeted after the species came under national protection, though some poachers still risked jail time to kill them for sale in wildlife markets.

But demand for boar meat slumped when Beijing imposed what it called an “unprecedentedly strict” ban on wildlife consumption in early 2020.

At the time, the coronavirus pandemic was spreading worldwide and many scientists linked it back to a food market in central China that sold wild meat.

One year after the consumption ban, reports of wild boar attacks exceeded 100 for the first time, according to a tally of human-boar conflicts from 2000 to 2021 published in Acta Geographica Sinica, a leading Chinese geographic journal.

As social and state media reports of wild boar attacks continued to mount, the central government removed the species from its national protection list in 2023, waiving the need for a license to hunt them.

While many welcomed the policy shift to control the pest, recent high-profile bounty hunting initiatives by local authorities have faced some pushback, igniting debate among experts about how the country should tackle this growing public menace.

“Aren’t we supposed to protect animals? Why are we back to hunting again?” said a user on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China.

An animal protection group active in fighting wildlife poaching for over a decade called the nationwide culling a “brutal farce,” on China’s X-like platform Weibo.

Officials have defended the policy. Sun Quanhui, a member of the Wild Boar Population Management Expert Group at China’s top forestry administration, told the state-run China Daily that hunting was the “only way” to manage the wild boar population, given the absence of natural predators.

And based on open data, he said, it was way too early to say the boars were “running rampant” in China.

He added that wild boar attacks are “precisely a fallout of humans disrupting the natural balance.”

“On one hand, we’ve driven their natural predators, like tigers, to the brink of extinction. On the other, while we’re becoming more aware of the need for conservation, many of our efforts are one-sided.”

Among those who agree on the need to curb the wild boar population, opinions vary on how to cull them and what to do with the carcasses.

Members of the state-backed expert group suggested hunters should be allowed to use guns to improve hunting efficiency, as reported by The Paper.

They also proposed changing China’s laws to allow people to consume “captured wild boars,” but only after a quarantine process to ensure the meat is safe to eat. However, the group didn’t provide further details on how this would work.

Both proposals have raised safety concerns among experts outside the group.

China’s top forestry authority said it was working to “optimize firearms and ammunition management” to “facilitate professional hunting,” according to the state-owned People’s Daily.

“Wild boar damage has become a disaster… which actually reflects a certain imbalance in the ecological environment,” the deputy head of the expert group told CCTV.

“Therefore, no matter what methods we use, we ultimately need to restore the flow and balance of the ecological chain to achieve true harmony between humans and nature.”

Flight recorders from the passenger jet that crashed in South Korea last month, killing more than 170 people, stopped working minutes before the plane belly-landed and exploded on the runway, investigators said Saturday.

Officials probing the country’s deadliest aviation accident in almost three decades had hoped information from the so-called black boxes would shed light on why Jeju Air flight 7C 2216 from Bangkok belly-landed at Muan International Airport on December 29, erupting into a fireball.

The disaster killed 179 passengers and crew members. Two people survived.

But South Korea’s transport ministry said Saturday that both the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) from the Boeing 737-800 had stopped working about four minutes before the crash.

In a statement, the ministry said it was unclear why the devices stopped recording, adding that it will work to determine the cause.

“CVR and FDR data are important data for accident investigations, but accident investigations are conducted through investigation and analysis of various data, so we plan to do our best to accurately identify the cause of the accident,” the ministry said.

The cockpit voice recorder was first analyzed locally and later sent to the United States for cross-checking, the ministry said.

The flight data recorder, which was damaged and missing a connector, was sent to the National Transportation Safety Board in the US last week for analysis, after South Korean authorities concluded they could not extract data from the device, due to the damage.

The crash was the country’s deadliest since 1997, when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed in the Guam jungle, with the loss of 228 lives.

It is not yet clear what caused it, with the investigation expected to take months.

Footage of the crash showed that neither the back nor front landing gear was visible at the time of the crash-landing.

Prior to the emergency landing, the pilot made a mayday call and used the terms “bird strike” and “go-around,” according to officials, who also said the control tower had warned the pilot of birds in the area.

Another point of contention has been the concrete embankment that the plane hit upon landing. Many airports don’t have similar structures so close to runways, according to aviation experts.

South Korean police last week also raided Jeju Air’s office in Seoul and the operator of Muan International Airport as part of their investigation, Reuters reported.