It’s been 30 years, but Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka still remembers the first time she ever saw a mountain gorilla.

It was the summer of 1994. Deep in the jungle of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, the then-23-year-old student was hundreds of miles from her home in the country’s capital, Kampala.

Bwindi is one of only two places in the world where mountain gorillas live, and after graduating from the Royal Veterinary College in London, Kalema-Zikusoka had her heart set on seeing the great apes. For the first week of her month-long placement, she’d been stuck at base camp with a terrible cold, unable to join the jungle treks, with her frustration and anticipation rising every day.

Finally, after what felt like endless waiting, Kalema-Zikusoka was cleared to hike.

Pushing through tangled vines and roots in the thick forest, she could hear bubbling waterfalls, birds squawking, and chimpanzees hooting. But gorillas, she says, are silent.

“You don’t hear them, but you see their trails as you’re walking,” says Kalema-Zikusoka. “You can be looking for them, thinking will I ever see them? Then suddenly — they’re there. It’s such a magical feeling.”

Sitting in a forest clearing was a silverback gorilla, called Kacupira.

“When I got to see Kacupira, having wanted to see gorillas for so long — suddenly this gorilla was sitting there chewing on a piece of bark, and I was like, ‘wow,’” recalls Kalema-Zikusoka, now 55.

“I looked into his very intelligent brown eyes, and I felt a really deep connection. He was just willing to let us into his presence, and not at all threatening.”

After this encounter, Kalema-Zikusoka decided to stay at Bwindi. Her one-month summer placement turned into three decades of conservation work at the park, where she became the nation’s first wildlife veterinarian in 1996. With her help, Bwindi’s gorilla population grew from less than 300 to 459, and the subspecies is no longer critically endangered, according to the IUCN Red List.

“The mountain gorillas have really shaped my life,” says Kalema-Zikusoka. And in turn, “the gorillas have really transformed Uganda, and brought Ugandan conservation and tourism back on the map.”

A violent history

For millennia, mountain gorillas roamed across the forests of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But in the last 100 years, rampant deforestation, poaching, and conflicts have left them on the brink of extinction, clinging to just two surviving habitats: Bwindi and the Virungas.

In the 1970s, Uganda’s gorillas faced another existential threat. The eight-year dictatorship of Idi Amin — who was known as the “Butcher of Uganda” for his brutality — devastated the country, killing up to 300,000 people, destroying land and resources, and slaughtering much of the nation’s wildlife.

Kalema-Zikusoka was just two years old at the time of the military coup, and her father was a minister in the government that was overthrown by Amin.

“When Amin came into power, my dad was one of the first victims,” she recalls. “He was abducted when he was taking a relative back home; he was followed by a vehicle, and never seen again.”

Growing up in political turmoil, Kalema-Zikusoka found solace with her many household pets: her older siblings often rescued stray cats and dogs, who became her companions, and she decided at “a very young age” that she wanted to be a veterinarian. It was her neighbor’s pet monkey, Poncho, that sparked her interest in primates: the mischievous creature would sneak in through the window and pull the dog’s tail, steal food, and even plunk keys on the piano.

As a teenager, Kalema-Zikusoka joined her school’s wildlife club, and on a field trip to Queen Elizabeth National Park she saw firsthand how little wildlife remained, even in conservation areas. “I started thinking to myself, why can’t I become a vet who brings back the wildlife to Uganda?”

While Kalema-Zikusoka’s veterinarian studies took her to the UK, she always planned to return to Uganda and build on the work of her father.

“When I was old enough to understand what had happened to him, I felt like I wanted to continue his dream, his legacy, of a prosperous Uganda, through my passion for wildlife.”

Health for all

Less than a year after Kalema-Zikusoka began working at Bwindi, there was an outbreak of an unknown skin disease among the gorillas: they were losing hair and developing white, scaly skin. Kalema-Zikusoka consulted with a doctor friend, who told her about the human disease scabies, common at the time among low-income communities in rural Uganda.

After chimpanzees and bonobos, gorillas are our closest genetic relatives, sharing around 98.4% of their DNA with humans. This genetic similarity also makes gorillas vulnerable to many of the same diseases as humans.

Kalema-Zikusoka and the team tracked down the afflicted gorilla family: it was Kacupira’s group, the gentle giant she had met on her first trek. Many of the apes were extremely unwell, including a baby gorilla that, despite medical interventions, died.

“This made me realize that you couldn’t protect the gorillas without improving the health of their human neighbors,” she says.

Bwindi is located in one of Uganda’s most densely populated rural regions, leaving limited space for a buffer zone. Instead, farmland and villages are pressed up against its borders. The park is also relatively small — at just 321 square kilometers (123 square miles), it is just 2% of the size of the 14,700-square-kilometer (5,600-square-mile) Serengeti in Tanzania — which puts further pressure on its borders and resources and increases the likelihood of human-gorilla interactions.

To help remedy the situation Kalema-Zikusoka founded Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) in 2003, a non-profit that has worked with around 10,000 households around the national park to improve the community’s health and well-being.

Local farmers are trained to safely herd gorillas back to the forest when they venture onto community land, and a network of village health teams educates families on ways to improve hygiene and reduce the spread of disease.

And now that the gorilla population is growing, so is tourism in the area: 27 gorilla families are now habituated to people, and the number of “gorilla tourists” in Uganda has risen from around 1,300 in 1993 to almost 39,000 in 2023.

It’s improved the well-being of villagers living near the park, says Joshua Masereka, the community conservation warden at Uganda Wildlife Authority. “When tourists come to this place, there’s more money and therefore more benefits, more jobs, more opportunities, more developments,” he says, adding that the park allocates 20% of its revenue to community projects, such as building schools and roads.

CTPH is one of the wildlife authority’s “prime partners” and has been pivotal to the conservation work at the park, says Masereka. “Gladys, I think she’s born with conservation in her blood. If you go through the life of her family, how she was brought up, she was brought up in that life of being a conservationist and I think she’ll die a conservationist.”

Kalema-Zikusoka’s dedication has inspired others in the community into action. Born and raised around Bwindi, Alex Ngabirano worked for CTPH for 15 years, before starting his own non-profit organization, Mubare Biodiversity, which focuses on reforming poachers around the park. Gorillas are rarely poached intentionally, but subsistence hunters looking to put food on the table sometimes go after pigs or antelope in the forest, and accidentally snare or spear gorillas in the process.

By educating the local community on the benefits of gorilla tourism, Ngabirano and his team have convinced more than 300 former poachers to give up their tools, and are now retraining them as rangers, guides, and farmers.

“Dr. Gladys has done amazing work in Bwindi community. She’s the first person to introduce the one health approach in this area,” says Ngabirano. “The (community) started understanding that in the future, their children will become rangers and guides, all those jobs associated with conservation and tourism activities.”

Kalema-Zikusoka’s conservation efforts have been recognized internationally, too: she is a National Geographic explorer, and her many accolades include the Whitley Gold Award in 2009, the Leopold Award in 2020, and the Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize in 2022.

And her hard work continues to show in the expanding gorilla population: in the last two months alone, three baby gorillas were born in the forest.

“I always get very excited when I hear that a baby mountain gorilla has been born,” says Kalema-Zokusoka. “It gives me hope that the numbers are continuing to grow. It means that we’re bringing the gorillas back from the brink of extinction.”

India has emerged as a growing player in the illicit fentanyl trade, a new US intelligence report says, a designation likely to raise alarm in New Delhi as President Donald Trump wields tariffs on countries he accuses of not doing enough to stop the deadly drug from flowing into the United States.

Fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that can be 100 times more potent than morphine, is the most common drug involved in overdose deaths in the US – fueling an opioid crisis that has become a high-priority issue for the Trump administration.

For many years, China has been the largest source of both legal supplies of the drug – which is prescribed for severe pain relief – and illicit supplies of precursor chemicals that are typically processed in labs in Mexico before the final product is smuggled across the US border.

But India’s role in the illegal trade is becoming more prominent, according to the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) report published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence this month.

“Nonstate groups are often enabled, both directly and indirectly, by state actors, such as China and India as sources of precursors and equipment for drug traffickers,” the report said.

“China remains the primary source country for illicit fentanyl precursor chemicals and pill pressing equipment, followed by India.”

Last year’s ATA report named India as among countries other than China where Mexican cartels were sourcing precursor chemicals to a “lesser extent.” The 2023 report made no mention of India in relation to fentanyl.

India is a global leader in generic drug manufacturing, supplying a significant portion of the world’s vaccines and medicines. It has a pharmaceutical industry so large, it is often referred to as the “Pharmacy of the World.” But the industry has been marred by controversy, raising concerns about regulation and quality control.

Days later, the US Department of Justice indicted three top executives from a Hyderabad-based pharmaceutical company for allegedly importing ingredients used to make illicit fentanyl.

The report comes at a delicate time for India as it mounts a case to avoid US tariffs.

The US was India’s largest trading partner in 2024, accounting for almost $120 billion in trade, yet India only ranked tenth in the list of US trading partners for the same year.

Indian economist and researcher Soumya Bhowmik said the ATA report “may introduce complexities in India-US relations,” and could “open the door for tougher rhetoric and potentially even targeted tariffs.”

Earlier this month, the Trump administration enacted tariffs against the US’ top three trading partners: China, Mexico and Canada, saying the levies of up to 25% were necessary to stem the flow of fentanyl into the US.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington in February, where he spoke with Trump about a range of issues from defense and technology to trade and economic growth.

The two leaders “resolved to expand trade and investment to make their citizens more prosperous, nations stronger, economies more innovative and supply chains more resilient,” a joint statement from that meeting said.

A Washington delegation is currently in New Delhi for trade talks.

India has “proactively undertaken measures to respond to potential trade tensions and mitigate the impact of impending US tariffs,” said Bhowmik, including a proposal to remove import duties on goods essential for manufacturing.

The ATA report also “highlights the critical importance of collaborative efforts between (the US and India) to address the global opioid crisis,” Bhowmik said.

A former police officer who fatally Tasered a 95-year-old Australian woman after she refused his orders to drop a knife has been spared jail, with the victim’s family decrying the sentence as a “slap on the wrist.”

Kristian White was found guilty of manslaughter after shocking Clare Nowland with the Taser while on police duty in the early hours of May 17, 2023, in a case that sparked public outcry.

Last November, a jury rejected his claim that Nowland posed a threat and found the former senior constable guilty of breaching his duty of care by deploying his weapon against the elderly woman, who later died of her injuries.

Sentencing White on Friday, New South Wales Supreme Court Justice Ian Harrison said the former officer’s actions were “a terrible mistake,” but that his crime fell at the lower end of objective seriousness.

Police were called to Nowland’s nursing home in Cooma – about 70 miles south of the capital Canberra – after the great-grandmother, who was showing signs of dementia, refused repeated requests by staff to surrender knives she was holding and return to her room.

After responding to the call-out, White spent about three minutes trying to convince Nowland to put down a steak knife, before saying, “Nah, bugger it,” and deploying his Taser.

Nowland, who had a walking aid, fell and hit her head, fracturing her skull. She died in hospital a week later, surrounded by family.

White was sentenced to a community corrections order for a period of two years, and 425 hours of community service. The order allows convicted criminals to serve their sentence in the community under some restrictions, such as curfews and alcohol bans.

Harrison said in his sentencing that a jail term was not necessary given White had already lost his job and become an “unwelcome member” of the Cooma community as a result of his actions.

Furthermore, he said, White does not represent a risk to the community or of reoffending. He said imposing community service work would be an “appropriate and adequate method” of meeting the sentencing conditions of punishment.

White had served as a police officer for 12 years before being removed from his position following his conviction.

The ‘axis’ of the family

Nowland’s eldest son, Michael, told reporters outside the court in Sydney that the verdict was “really disappointing for the family” and was “a slap on the wrist for someone that’s killed our mother.”

“It’s very, very hard to process that,” he told reporters.

Over the course of the trial, some of Nowland’s children and grandchildren read victim statements to the court, describing her as the “axis” of the family.

She had raised eight children alone but also had made time for others in her community, they said. Nowland also had dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Michael Nowland told the court in February of his “shock, disbelief and anger” at hearing what had happened to her.

“I could not process how a normal human being, let alone a police officer, could possibly perform such an inappropriate and inhumane act on a frail, 95-year-old lady who weighed 47 kilos (103 pounds),” Michael Nowland said.

Gemma Murphy, Clare Nowland’s daughter, said she’d be forever haunted by the former officer’s bodycam video, that showed the moment he deployed the Taser on her mother.

“The irreverent footage of my mother’s last moments has left an indelible mark on my psyche. It is a grotesque image that I cannot erase, made even more unbearable by the echoes of Kristian White’s words – ‘Nah, bugger it’ and ‘got her.’”

“The utter disregard (White) displayed for my mum in her time of need and care will forever echo in my ears,” she said.

Several of Nowland’s relatives told of their distress at the media coverage, with one of her daughters, Jennifer Jordan, describing how her mother, a “humble, independent person,” would have been “mortified” by the large attendance at her funeral.

White ‘misread’ the situation, judge rules

White was one of two police officers called to the Yallambee Lodge nursing home by staff who asked for help with a resident who was holding two knives.

While the deployment of a Taser was unlawful and dangerous, Justice Harrison ruled that White made “an error of judgment” and that his actions were motivated by an “honest but mistaken and unreasonable belief about the existence and nature of the threat that was posed.”

“The simple but tragic fact would seem to me to be that Mr. White completely, and on one available view inexplicably, misread and misunderstood the dynamics of the situation,” Harrison said.

In a letter to Nowland’s family provided to the court, White apologized and expressed regret.

“I deeply regret my actions and the severe consequences they have caused, to not only Mrs. Nowland, but also to your family and the greater community,” White wrote. “I understand that my actions were adjudged to be wrong and have caused great harm not only to Mrs. Nowland, but also the emotional pain it caused to others, and for that, I am truly sorry.”

White’s defense lawyer Warwick Anderson told reporters outside court Friday that the former officer’s family were “very relieved” at the outcome, according to public broadcaster ABC.

“They’re now going to take their time and move on with their lives,” Anderson said.

A powerful 7.7 earthquake hit central Myanmar on Friday, close to the country’s second city of Mandalay, home to around 1 million people and historic temple complexes, with tremors shaking buildings as far away as the Thai capital of Bangkok.

Video posted online from both countries showed panicked residents running from swaying residential towers as dust fills the air, and traffic comes to a sudden stop on busy city streets.

Myanmar is already reeling from more than four years of civil war sparked by a bloody and economically destructive military coup, with has seen military forces battle rebel groups across the country. It remains one of Asia’s poorest nations and is ill-equipped to deal with major natural disasters.

“We saw other people running out of the buildings too. It was very sudden and very strong.”

Another resident said phone networks in the city home to around 8 million people were briefly down following the quake but were now running again.

The epicenter was in nearby Sagaing region, which has been ravaged by the civil war, with the junta, pro-military militia and rebel groups battling for control and all running checkpoints, making travel by road or river extremely difficult.

A resident in Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai, who also did not want to be named, said “I felt it for about ten seconds in my room then I figured out I couldn’t stay inside. So I rushed out on to the street.

Tremors were also felt in China’s southwestern Yunnan province, according to Xinhua.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

At 64 and 60 years old, Antoinette and Brucie-Baby are thin and bony. Their skin hangs looser than it did in their youth, but their eyes still gleam with energy.

But these aren’t just any sexagenarians we’re talking about; these are geckos, believed to be the world’s oldest on record, discovered on a small island in New Zealand.

Marieke Lettink, an expert on reptiles and amphibians, was part of the team that found the pair of Waitaha geckos on Motunau Island, off the coast the country’s South Island. It was an “exciting” moment, she said, adding that it was humbling to realize “that these animals are older than us and still out there doing their thing.”

They were found during a five-yearly survey on the island. “That also means it’s worth going back in five years’ time because we don’t actually know how long they can live for. Every time we go, every trip we’ve done … the oldest gecko we catch is always older than us,” Lettink said.

During each survey, the team sets up a grid of traps on the small island, typically catching a few hundred geckos over a few days. The geckos come out at night – so the team also goes trekking in the dark with flashlights to look for geckos perched on leaves and bushes.

The surveys have been going on since the 1960s, when the late conservationist Tony Whitaker began marking geckos on the island with a practice called toe clipping – which involves clipping a certain number of toes on the geckos, each with a unique pattern. The practice is no longer used by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation.

It was Whitaker’s markings on Antoinette and Brucie-Baby – named after Whitaker and fellow conservationist Bruce Thomas – that helped Lettink identify the lizards.

“It made me think of Tony, who started the work. It was quite a poignant moment,” she said.

Both geckos were fully grown when they were marked – so they could be even older than the 60 and 64 years recorded.

That’s far older than the average lifespan of geckos worldwide, at only about a decade. And this discovery places Waitaha geckos in the top ranks of other long-living lizards – most of which are far larger and better known.

“It’s now actually bypassed all the older lizards, with things like the iguanas and the big Komodo dragons – you know, really big lizards that are quite famous,” Lettink said. “And this is a humble, drab brown gecko that’s not famous at all.”

There are a few reasons it may have lived so long – the main one being that Motunau Island is predator-free, without any of the introduced species that have decimated native animals across mainland New Zealand.

The success of reptile survival in predator-free spaces is one reason conservationists across the country are trying to establish more safe sanctuaries – for instance, building a fenced area to keep predators out and eliminating invasive predators within.

But skewing the ecosystem that way can allow mice populations to thrive. They can prey on geckos, posing another problem, Lettink said – so some groups have set up specific sanctuaries just for lizards and geckos.

There are other factors behind their longevity too – like the cool climate and the island lifestyle, said the Department of Conservation’s Biodiversity Ranger Kaitlyn Leeds, who was on the survey team with Lettink, in a news release.

The team had actually seen Antoinette once before, about a decade ago, and they assumed that would be the last time. “And here, 10 years later, they look no different – they’re still going,” Lettink said.

It makes her hopeful that by the next survey, in five years, they might be able to find a few more of the original geckos tagged in the 1960s. Or better yet – there might be many older geckos out there that just haven’t been found yet. “That would be really exciting,” she said.