Verified News Online

A raw, handcrafted Chinese animation has become an unlikely box-office sensation despite being widely panned by critics and social media users.
Niu Lai, or The Arrival of the Ox, has been criticised for its “rough” and “broken” style and a plot that many viewers found hard to follow.
But the film has generated some of the loudest online discussion in recent days, despite the competition from two Hollywood blockbusters: Christopher Nolan’s epic version of The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New…

Welcome to the Island Where Egrets Rule A century after wildlife wardens began protecting a small island in Texas, the 35-acre site has become the world’s largest nesting colony for Reddish Egrets. Green Island sits in the Laguna Madre, a coastal lagoon in southern Texas. In 1923, Audubon Texas signed its first sanctuary lease with the Texas General Land Office to protect the island. At the time, coastal birds were under severe pressure from hunting. Their feathers were highly valued by the fashion industry, while people also collected their eggs and hunted the birds for meat. This caused Reddish Egret numbers to fall sharply across the Gulf Coast, leaving the species close to disappearing from Texas. Today, Green Island is the centre of a much larger conservation network. Audubon Texas manages 175 coastal islands, and the Texas Gulf Coast now has the world’s largest concentration of Reddish Egrets. The islands are also home to thousands of Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, Roseate Spoo..

Chantal Doecke at Onkaparinga River in Adelaide A commercial DNA test has helped an Australian woman discover that she has a twin brother living only a short flight away. Chantal Doecke was evacuated from Saigon as a newborn in 1975 and brought to Australia during Operation Babylift, an international effort to move children out of Vietnam as the war came to an end. Doecke was taken to Adelaide in April 1975. She was carried onto the evacuation flight in a shoebox, with her umbilical cord still attached. For most of her life, she knew very little about her biological family or where she came from. Forty-nine years later, a DNA match revealed that she had a twin brother named Glenn, who was living in Brisbane. Doecke described the extraordinary discovery in a first-person account published by The Guardian as part of its “Experience” series.Evacuated in a shoeboxIn early 1975, Doecke’s adoptive parents answered an advertisement in an Australian newspaper asking families to adopt orphaned ..

Taiwan’s push to build a modern counter-drone shield has come under renewed scrutiny after an official audit uncovered technical shortcomings and a key procurement programme collapsed following repeated testing failures.
The developments have fuelled concerns that Taipei’s efforts to match Beijing’s rapidly evolving drone technology are being undermined by capability gaps, procurement failures and delays in building an integrated counter-drone network.
According to a recent report by Taiwan’s…

Hong Kong authorities have conducted a counterterrorism drill at the revamped Huanggang border crossing and used a new “crowd flow” test to simulate an unexpected surge in passenger numbers, with about 5,000 civil servants taking part.
The counterterrorism exercise on Saturday was the first such drill to be held at the redeveloped checkpoint building.
A Security Bureau spokesman said civil servants from around 30 bureaus took part in the drill, which aimed to test authorities’ management of…