A zoo in eastern China has denied suggestions that some of its bears were people dressed in costume after videos of a Malayan sun bear standing on its hind legs – and looking uncannily human – went viral, fueling rumors and conspiracy theories on Chinese social media.

In a statement written from the perspective of a sun bear named “Angela,” officials from Hangzhou zoo said people “didn’t understand” the species.

“I’m Angela the sun bear – I got a call after work yesterday from the head of the zoo asking if I was being lazy and skipped work today and found a human to take my place,” the statement read.

“Let me reiterate again to everyone that I am a sun bear – not a black bear, not a dog – a sun bear!”

In videos shared on the popular Chinese microblogging site Weibo, a sun bear was seen standing upright on a rock and looking out of its enclosure.

Many Weibo users noted the animal’s upright posture, as well as folds of loose fur on its behind – making the bear look somewhat odd and fueling speculation that a human imposter might be masquerading in its place.

It might sound like an implausible gambit. But zoos in China have courted public ridicule in the past for trying to pass off pets like dogs as wild animals.

In 2013, a city zoo in the central Henan province angered visitors by trying to pass off a Tibetan Mastiff dog as a lion. Visitors who had approached the enclosure expressed shock when they heard the “lion” bark.

Visitors at another Chinese zoo, in Sichuan province, were shocked to discover a golden retriever sitting in a cage labeled as an African lion enclosure.

‘Forgotten’ bears under threat

Native to the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, sun bears are the world’s smallest bear species. Adult bears stand at heights of up to 70 centimeters tall (28 inches) and weigh between 25 to 65 kilograms (55 to 143 pounds), experts say.

They do not hibernate and are also characterized by amber colored crescent shaped fur patches on their chests and long tongues which help them extract honey from bee hives – earning them the name “beruang madu” (honey bear) in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Sun bears are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and are a protected species in native countries like Malaysia.

Their numbers in the wild are at threat by poachers and deforestation, declining by 35% over the past three decades, according to conservation groups like the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center (BSBCC) in Sabah, Malaysia.

The center cares for 43 rescued bears, each with their own mannerisms and unique personality.

“Most bear species can stand on their hind legs but sun bears stand up high to reach higher ground to investigate their surroundings so there is a purpose to why they do that. Female sun bears even hold their cubs with both hands and walk on their feet, very human like, so I guess that’s why people get mistaken.”

Wong said that the bear’s loose, saggy skin also serves an important function in the wild, by acting as armor from predators, protecting them from deeper bites and injuries.

“Sun bears are usually fat and round. When conditions are bad and food is scarce, their skin becomes loose,” Wong said.

“Forests are vanishing and mothers are often killed by hunters who steal their cubs – this is a huge problem across Southeast Asia. Sun bears are also subject to the cruel bear bile trade,” Wong added.

“There needs to be more awareness and education about sun bears – they are a protected and special species and are in serious trouble.”

The United Kingdom government has been heavily criticized by Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee for underestimating the growth of Russia’s Wagner private mercenary group, despite it posing a major threat to the country’s interests.

In a damning report published Wednesday, the cross-party committee of lawmakers accused the government of viewing Wagner in overwhelmingly European terms, miscalculating its “activities in Africa,” and imposing deeply inadequate sanctions on entities and individuals linked to the group.

“We are deeply concerned by the government’s dismal lack of understanding of Wagner’s hold beyond Europe, in particular their grip on African states,” said Alicia Kearns, a Member of Parliament and chair of the Committee.

“For nearly 10 years, the Government has under-played and underestimated the Wagner Network’s activities, as well as the security implications of its significant expansion,” read the report, titled “Guns for Gold: the Wagner network exposed.”

The report assessed with high confidence that Sudan was one of seven countries where Wagner fighters have carried out offensive military operations since 2014, alongside Ukraine, Syria, Central African Republic, Libya, Mozambique and Mali.

Wagner “essentially operate like a criminal mafia,” Kearns said in an interview with Sky News Wednesday. “They go into countries, they breed corruption, they breed instability, they steal natural resources and they leave behind them a wake of atrocities.”

The report criticized the UK government for underestimating the size of these operations, which it said was the result of its viewing Wagner “through the prism of Europe,” and particularly its footprint in Ukraine.

“Wagner’s activities in Ukraine are not representative of the network’s operations globally,” the report said, adding that it was a “significant failing” to underestimate Wagner’s “geographic spread and the impact of its activities on UK interests further abroad.”

It also criticized the UK government for only beginning to seriously monitor the group after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.

“It is deeply regrettable that it was not until early 2022 that the Government began to invest greater resource in understanding the Wagner Network, despite Wagner fighters having already conducted military operations in at least seven countries for almost a decade,” read the report.

The report went on to describe the UK’s efforts to sanction individuals and entities linked to Wagner as “underwhelming in the extreme,” especially considering similar actions taken by the United States and the European Union, which have sanctioned roughly twice as many members of the network.

“The Government has not told us anything specific that it is doing to challenge the network’s influence and impunity outside of Ukraine,” the report said. “We received no evidence of any serious effort by the Government to track the Network’s activities in other countries.”

It recommended that the UK government “urgently proscribe the Wagner Network as a terrorist organization,” and “move faster and harder to sanction Wagner-linked actors.”

The report also recommended that the UK work to provide a “genuinely compelling alternative to priority countries in need of security partnership,” to prevent Wagner taking hold in “fragile and conflict-affected countries.”

Moored five miles off the coast of Yemen for more than 30 years, a decaying supertanker carrying a million barrels of oil is finally being offloaded by a United Nations-led mission, hoping to avert what threatened to be one of the world’s worst ecological disasters in decades.

Experts are now delicately handling the 47-year-old vessel – called the FSO Safer – working to remove the crude without the tanker falling apart, the oil exploding, or a massive spill taking place.

Sitting atop The Endeavor, the salvage UN ship supervising the offloading, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen David Gressly said that the operation is estimated to cost $141 million, and is using the expertise of SMIT, the dredging and offshore contractor that helped dislodge the Ever Given ship that blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week in 2021.

Twenty-three UN member states are funding the mission, with another $16 million coming from the private sector contributors. Donors include Yemen’s largest private company, HSA Group, which pledged $1.2 million in August 2022. The UN also engaged in a unique crowdfunding effort, contributing to the pool which took a year to raise, according to Gressly.

The team is pumping between 4,000 and 5,000 barrels of oil every hour, and has so far transferred more than 120,000 barrels to the replacement vessel carrying the offloaded oil, Gressly said. The full transfer is expected to take 19 days.

The tanker was carrying a million barrels of oil. That would be enough to power up to 83,333 cars or 50,000 US homes for an entire year. The crude on board is worth around $80 million, and who gets that remains a controversial matter.

Here’s what we know so far:

Why the UN has been sounding alarms about this ‘ticking time bomb’

The ship has been abandoned in the Red Sea since 2015 and the UN has regularly warned that the “ticking time bomb” could break apart given its age and condition, or the oil it holds could explode due to the highly flammable compounds in it.

The FSO Safer held four times the amount of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez off Alaska in 1989 which resulted in a slick that covered 1,300 miles of coastline. A potential spill from this vessel would be enough to make it the fifth largest oil spill from a tanker in history, a UN website said. The cost of cleanup of such an incident is estimated at $20 billion.

The Red Sea is a vital strategic waterway for global trade. At its southern end lies the Bab el-Mandeb strait, where nearly 9% of total seaborne-traded petroleum passes. And at its north is the Suez Canal that separates Africa from Asia. The majority of petroleum and natural gas exports from the Persian Gulf that transit the Suez Canal pass through the Bab el-Mandeb, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

The sea is also a popular diving hotspot that boasts an impressive underwater eco-system. In places its banks are dotted with tourist resorts, and its eastern shore is the site of ambitious Saudi development projects worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

A complex and risky operation

The first step of the mission was to stabilize and secure the vessel to avoid it collapsing, Gressly said. That has already been achieved in the past few weeks.

Booms, which are temporary floating barriers used to contain marine spills, were dispersed around the vessel to capture any potential leaks.

The second step is to transfer the oil onto the replacement vessel, which is now underway.

After The Safer is emptied, it must then be cleaned to ensure no oil residue is left, Gressly said. The team will then attach a giant buoy to the replacement vessel until a decision about what to do with the oil has been made.

“The transfer of the oil to (the replacement vessel) will prevent the worst-case scenario of a catastrophic spill in the Red Sea, but it is not the end of the operation,” Gressly said.

While the hardest part of the operation would then be over, a spill could still occur. And even after the transfer, the tanker will “continue to pose an environmental threat resulting from the sticky oil residue inside the tank, especially since the tanker remains vulnerable to collapse,” the UN said, stressing that to finish the job, an extra $22 million is urgently needed.

What if a spill does occur?

A spill would shut the Yemeni ports that its impoverished people rely on for food aid and fuel, impacting 17 million people during an ongoing humanitarian crisis caused by the country’s civil war and a Saudi-led military assault on the country. Oil could bleed all the way to the African coast, damaging fish stocks for 25 years and affect up to 200,000 jobs, according to the UN.

A potential spill would cause “catastrophic” public health ramifications in Yemen and surrounding countries, according to a study by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea would bear the brunt.

Air pollution from a spill of this magnitude would increase the risk of hospitalization for cardiovascular or respiratory disease for those very directly exposed by 530%, according to the study, which said it could cause an array of other health problems, from psychiatric to neurological issues.

Up to 10 million people would struggle to obtain clean water, and 8 million would have their access to food supplies threatened. The Red Sea fisheries in Yemen could be “almost completely wiped out,” Rehkopf added.

The tanker has been an issue for many people in Yemen over the past few years, Gressly said. Sentiment on social media surrounding the removal of oil is very positive, as many in Yemen feel like the tanker is a “threat that’s been over their heads,” he said.

Who gets the oil?

The tanker issue remains a point of dispute between the Houthi rebels that control the north of Yemen and the internationally recognized government, the two main warring sides in the country’s civil conflict.

While the war, which saw hundreds of thousands of people killed or injured, and Yemen left in ruins, has eased of late, it is far from resolved.

Ahmed Nagi, a senior analyst for Yemen at the International Crisis Group think tank in Brussels, sees the Safer tanker issue as “an embodiment of the conflict in Yemen as a whole.”

The vessel was abandoned after the outbreak of the Yemeni civil war in 2015. The majority of the oil is owned by Yemeni state firm SEPOC, experts say, and there are some reports that it may be sold.

“From a technical point of view, the owner of the tanker and the oil inside it is SEPOC,” Nagi said, adding that other energy companies working in Yemen may also share ownership of the oil.

The main issue, Nagi added, is that the Safer’s headquarters are in the government-controlled Marib city, while the tanker is in an area controlled by the Houthis. The Safer is moored off the coast of the western Hodeidah province.

Discussions to determine the ownership of the oil are underway, Gressly said. The rights to the oil are unclear and there are legal issues that need to be addressed.

The UN coordinator hopes that the days needed to offload the oil will buy some time for “political and legal discussions that need to take place before the oil can be sold.”

While the UN may manage to resolve half of the issue, Nagi said, there still needs to be an understanding of the oil’s status.

“It still poses a danger if we keep it near a conflict zone,” he said.

Here’s a look at the life of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

Personal

Birth date: August 17, 1926

Death date: November 30, 2022

Birth place: Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province, China

Birth name: Jiang Zemin

Father: Jiang Shijun

Mother: Wu Yueqing

Marriage: Wang Yeping

Children: Jiang Miankang and Jiang Mianheng

Education: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Electrical Engineering, 1947

Religion: Members of the Chinese Communist Party are officially atheist.

Other Facts

When an uncle, a Communist partisan, was killed in combat, Jiang’s father gave Jiang to the uncle’s family so they would have a male heir.

Supported the suppression of the student-led pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square.

Timeline

1946 – Joins the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

1955-1956 – Trainee with the Stalin Automobile Factory in Moscow.

1971-1979 – Deputy director and later director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the First Ministry of Machine-Building Industry.

1981-1982 – Vice minister of the State Foreign Investment Commission.

1982 – Appointed vice minister of Electronics Industry and later in the year elected a member of the CCP Central Committee.

1983 – Promoted to minister of Electronics Industry.

1985-1988 – Mayor of Shanghai.

June 1989 – Appointed general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, succeeding Zhao Ziyang.

November 1989 – Succeeds Deng Xiaoping as chairman of the Central Military Commission.

1993-2003 – President of the People’s Republic of China.

September 1997 – Unveils plan to privatize China’s unprofitable state-owned enterprises.

October 28, 1997 – Meets with US President Bill Clinton at the White House and attends a US-China summit regarding nuclear power technology.

June 28, 1998 – In a live televised debate, discusses human rights with President Clinton in Beijing.

July 16, 2001 – With Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, signs the Treaty on Good-Neighborliness Friendship and Cooperation Between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China.

December 11, 2001 – China formally joins the World Trade Organization as the 143rd member.

October 2002 – In Jiang’s last visit to the United States as president and head of state, meets with former President George H. W. Bush in Houston and President George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas.

November 2002 – Retires as general secretary of the Chinese Communist party.

March 2003 – Limited to two five-year terms in office, Jiang steps down and Vice President Hu Jintao becomes president of China.

March 2005 – Formally steps down as chairman of the Chinese military, having offered his resignation in a letter in September of 2004.

October 9, 2011 – Appears at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of China’s 1911 revolution. It is the first time he has been seen in public since rumors of his death spread in July 2011.

December 6, 2011 – The Hong Kong Broadcasting Authority fines Asia Television Limited (ATV) almost $39,000 (HK $300,000) for airing a report in July that suggested Jiang had died.

September 13, 2019 – Marking 70 years of Communist rule, Jiang’s giant portrait is carried down Chang’an Avenue in Beijing following the portraits of Communist leader Mao Zedong and reformist leader Deng Xiaoping, who both served as China’s “core leader” before Jiang.

November 30, 2022 – Passes away at the age of 96.