A snow leopard cub named Ling Xiaohan has died despite 26 days of intensive treatment at a wildlife rescue center in Qinghai Province. The cub was admitted on Oct 7 with multiple skull fractures, brain hemorrhages, cerebral edema and an intracranial infection.

Two Chinese nationals handed over their real passports to a stranger on WeChat, got American ones back, and tried walking into the US. Jin Fu Wei and Xiaodan Lei flew from Mexico into John Wayne Airport in California in August, presenting US passports belonging to actual American citizens. Facial recognition caught them instantly, their faces didn't match. Neither man's real name was even on the flight manifest. Here's how it allegedly worked. A contact on WeChat arranged everything: travel to Mexico, a passport swap with an unknown person there. The men handed over their genuine Chinese passports and got American ones in return. The plan was to enter the US, then meet someone who'd swap the documents back. Wei was also carrying an expired Texas driver's license belonging to the real passport holder. The two claim they didn't know each other before this trip, and say they had no idea who the actual American citizens were whose identities they were using. One of those passports reportedly belonged to someone with a prior arrest record. Prosecutors aren't treating this as simple fraud. One official called it a national security concern, pointing out that foreign citizens entering under false identities raises bigger questions about who's actually crossing the border. Both men face up to 10 years if convicted. The FBI is still trying to find out who supplied the passports in the first place. A WeChat contact, a stranger in Mexico, and two real Americans whose identities ended up in someone else's hands.

The Philippine Side Has Allowed a Certain Politician to Abuse Its Chairmanship to Put up Obstacles to China's Participation in the ADMM-Plus Question: This year, China's defense minister didn't attend the 13th ASEAN Defense Ministers' Meeting-Plus (ADMM-Plus) held in the Philippines. Why did the Chinese side make the decision to send its defense attaché to the meeting? Zhang Xiaogang: The ADMM-Plus is the highest-level and largest defense and security dialogue and cooperation mechanism in the Asia-Pacific. Established in 2010, it has served as an important platform for countries to build trust, strengthen cooperation, and uphold regional peace and stability. As the rotating chair of this year's ADMM-Plus, the Philippine side has allowed a certain self-serving politician to act recklessly and abuse its chairmanship to put up obstacles to China’s participation. Such moves seriously violate ASEAN's principle of consensus through consultation and run counter to the open and inclusive spirit of the ADMM-Plus. They do not conform to basic diplomatic protocols, and undermine China's legitimate rights as a member of the mechanism. Many ASEAN countries have raised questions and opposition over this.

Ancient Carved Caves You Never Heard Of. In June 1992, four farmers in Longyou County, Zhejiang Province, China, decided to settle an old village rumor. Around Shiyan Beicun, on a low hill called Fenghuang Hill beside the Qu River, sat several small ponds. Locals had long called them bottomless. Some held almost no fish. The water just sat there, dark and still, as if it had somewhere else to go. On June 9 they pooled their money, hired diesel pumps, and began draining one pond. For seventeen days the pumps ran day and night. When the water finally dropped, there were no fish thrashing on the mud. There was a stone staircase. Then a doorway. Then a cavern so large the men could barely take it in. They had not drained a pond. They had opened a forgotten underground hall. They kept pumping. Four more ponds gave up four more halls. Later surveys found still more. At least 24 separate man-made caverns now sit in that hill. Some accounts mention additional chambers nearby. The five largest have floor areas of roughly 1,000 square meters or more, spans of 18 to 34 meters, and ceilings rising as high as 20 to 30 meters. Together they enclose more than 30,000 square meters of carved space. They are not connected. Each cave is its own sealed world, even though the walls of neighboring chambers sometimes come within two feet of each other. A short tunnel would have been easy. Whoever cut these rooms chose isolation. The rock is pelitic siltstone of the Cretaceous Quxian Formation, reddish, fine-grained, soft enough to work by hand when freshly cut, then hardening as it weathers. Every surface carries the same signature: parallel chisel courses about 60 centimeters wide, the tool marks set at a consistent 60-degree angle, wrapping walls, sloping roofs, and massive rock pillars like a repeating current. In places the pillars take a fishtail cross-section. In one chamber a relief of a horse, a bird, and a fish still rides the stone. Estimates of the stone removed run near one million cubic meters. No spoil heaps have been found. No tools were left behind. No contemporary chronicle, gazetteer, or imperial record names the project. China kept meticulous accounts of canals, walls, palaces, and tombs. These halls do not appear in them. The only later written echo is a 17th-century poem by Yu Xun. Pottery shards from silt inside one cave date to the Western Han, between 206 BC and 23 AD, so the work is at least two thousand years old. How much older is still argued. Perhaps 1000s of years. Theories pile up and collapse: quarry, tomb, storehouse, military cache, ritual hall, palace of a forgotten court. Each explanation answers one question and fails another. The rooms are too finished for a simple mine, too empty for a tomb, too isolated for an army, too vast for a private shrine. For two millennia the water kept them. Full flooding may be why the thin roofs and slender pillars never failed. Then four farmers wanted fish, and the hill gave up its secret. They are called the Longyou Caves, or the Xiaonanhai Stone Chambers. Five of them are open. The rest still wait under the ponds that hid them, and the oldest question in the hill has not changed: Who cut these rooms, and what were they for?

An attack on a police convoy in Pakistan’s restive northwest killed 28 policemen and militants on Wednesday, underscoring worsening violence in the region bordering Afghanistan

An animal rights activist was caught on video allegedly smacking a horse-drawn carriage driver in the face with her skateboard after launching into a profanity-laced tirade about animal abuse.

An Israeli airstrike on a building at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, killed at least five people, including a surgeon and wounded 20 others, a ⁠spokesman for Gaza's civil defense service told Reuters