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Earl, a Category 4 hurricane, on course toward US East Coast after battering Caribbean. Hurricane Earl, now a powerful Category 4 storm, barreled toward the U.S. coast early Tuesday after battering tiny islands across the northeastern Caribbean with heavy rain and winds that damaged homes and toppled power lines. Earl is forecast to potentially brush

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BEIJING (AFP) – Authorities are investigating a Chinese zoo where three dozen animals including 13 rare Siberian tigers died recently, amid charges it was harvesting their parts, state media said Monday. The probe of the zoo in the northeastern city of Shenyang will look at whether the animal parts were being used as ingredients in Chinese medicine and other products, Xinhua news agency said. China banned the international trade in tiger bones and related products in 1993, and is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which also bars such trade. But such transactions exist as many tiger parts, such as penises and bones, are commonly believed to increase sexual potency or cure certain illnesses. Xinhua quoted a manager at the Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo as saying that the carcasses of the dead tigers, 11 of which starved to death and two of which were shot after mauling a worker, have been cut up and put in cold storage. Story continues below… But another unnamed zoo worker said the bones had been used to make tiger-bone liquor that was used to “serve important guests”. The deaths, which came to light as China celebrates the Lunar Year of the Tiger, have been blamed on a combination of inadequate funding, an unusually cold winter and poor general conditions at the facility, the China Daily said. Zoo workers fed the tigers cheap chicken bones in recent months as funding dried up. On Sunday, the Shenyang government announced that it had allocated one million dollars to save surviving animals and fund the zoo. Besides the tigers, 22 other animals have died, including rare species that are protected in China, among them a red-crowned crane, four stump-tailed macaques, and one brown bear. The Shenyang government has a 15 percent share in the zoo, which is mainly privately owned. China says it has nearly 6,000 tigers in captivity, but just 50 to 60 are left in the wild, including about 20 wild Siberian tigers. In the 1980s, China set up tiger farms to try to preserve the big cats, intending to release some into the wild. But conservation groups say the farms are used to harvest ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine.

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Chinese meteorologists covered Beijing in snow Sunday after seeding clouds to bring winter weather to the capital in an effort to combat a lingering drought, state media reported. The unusually early snow blanketed the capital from Sunday morning and kept falling for half the day, helped by temperatures as low as minus 2 Celsius (29 Fahrenheit) and strong winds from the north, Xinhua news agency reported. Besides falling in the northeastern provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the northern province of Hebei, the eastern port city of Tianjin also got its first snow of the autumn, the report said. “We wont miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought,” the report quoted Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, as saying. Chinese meteorologists have for years sought to make rain by injecting special chemicals into clouds. Story continues below… Although the technique often gets results, a drought in the north of the country has continued for over a decade. Besides the snow, which the Beijing Evening News said was the earliest to hit the capital in 10 years, the cold weather and strong winds also delayed air travel from Beijing’s Capital Airport, while interrupting passenger shipping services off the coast of Shandong province in the east, Xinhua said.

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Chinese media claims Beijing snow ‘artificially induced’