JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The last rhino in Mozambique has been killed by poachers.

At least that’s what the media would have you believe.

A few days ago, a local Johannesburg paper, the Times, ran a story about game rangers in the Mozambique section of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, who colluded with poachers to murder the last 15 rhinos out of an original population of 300.

Was the last rhino in Mozambique killed?

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

NEED TO KNOW

Powerful explosion in Prague. Part of the Czech capital (remember that guy?) has been sealed off after a large blast inside a building in the city center. At least a dozen people are receiving medical treatment and emergency services say others could still be trapped.

It’s not yet clear what caused the explosion, but police have suggested it was a gas leak. Would everyone’s buildings please stop falling down?

Syria’s PM survives car bomb. Wael al-Halqi, prime minister in President Bashar al-Assad’s government, was reportedly the target of a car bomb that went off in Damascus today. He wasn’t killed, but his bodyguard and possibly others were.

If confirmed, it’s the most daring direct attack on a member of Assad’s circle since the Interior Ministry was bombed in December, wounding the minister, and since the defense minister and his deputy – Assad’s brother-in-law – were killed in an attack on the national security headquarters last July. Some observers called those assassinations “the beginning of the end.” They weren’t.

WANT TO KNOW

Farewell to Kaesong. The last remaining South Koreans are preparing to leave the Kaesong industrial zone in North Korea, the closest thing the two Koreas had to a common project and the latest casualty of the stand-off between Seoul and Pyongyang.

More than 100 workers evacuated this weekend, and today, the final 50 or so managers and engineers are due to make South Korea’s withdrawal complete. How long are they leaving for? The South Korean government says it’s still open to negotiations, but with the assembly lines halted and the site all but abandoned, many fear the staff have said goodbye to Kaesong for good.

The Spanish are coming. For hard-up Spaniards, Latin America is looking a lot like the promised land. For most of the past few decades it was Latin Americans who crossed the Atlantic in search of better luck; now, with Spain’s economy – as the Mexicans say –chingada, the Latin American influx there is waning and Spaniards are instead coming to the Americas, where economic indicators point up, not down.

GlobalPost meets the latest wave of migrants leaving the Old World to see their fortune in the New.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

If a cheetah attacks a president and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It’s a question we never thought we’d ask ourselves, until we learned today that President Ian Khama of Botswana recently required two stitches after being clawed in the face by a captive cheetah. So that happened.

The government is only revealing the incident now, the president’s spokesman says, because it was a “freak accident, but not an attack” (we’d like the cat’s opinion on that) and as such there were “no real security implications.” You hear that, world? The cheetah is not, repeat not, a terrorist.

China has proof that some ladies do like porn.

When Kelin, a female panda at China’s panda breeding and research center, refused the amorous advances of her male companion Yongyong, researchers took action.

They placed a television in front of her enclosure and played a video of two pandas mating in the wild — otherwise known as panda porn.

After watching the footage “there was no stopping her,” a spokesman was quoted by The Telegraph as saying.

Panda porn helps Kelin get in the mood for love in China

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

KYIV, Ukraine — “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Mark Twain is said to have remarked. That was certainly true of news about three supposedly lovesick killer dolphins going AWOL from a military training program in Ukraine.

Information about the deadly swimming mammals was first reported by the Russian news agency RIA Novosti, which quoted what it said was a source from Russia’s Black Sea fleet base in Sevastopol. The news spread like wildfire, including through The Atlantic and The Huffington Post. (The Atlantic has since issued a correction).

The takeaway: “Watch out if you’re in the Black Sea, Ukrainian killer dolphins are on the loose… and in search of mates.”

Killer dolphins? No, not really

Photo by Getty Images

Tens of thousands of horses were killed in 2012, as the economic crisis had owners abandoning the once prized status symbols.

The Spanish government said nearly 60,000 were slaughtered in abattoirs in 2012, a number twice those killed in 2008.

Horses abandoned in Spain due to economic crisis

Photos by AFP/Getty Images

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Pope vote, day 2. The papal conclave in Rome ended its first day with black smoke, and so the secret battle to choose a new pope continues. 

GlobalPost is covering the action and reaction on our live blog. We’ve also gone in depth, with a special report looking into this decisive moment for a church deeply divided and tarnished by scandal.

As the cardinals meet to choose a replacement for Benedict XVI, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay out nearly $10 million to four men who say they were molested by a former priest, Michael Baker. 

Recently released files show Cardinal Roger Mahony — who is at the conclave — knew the priest had abused but put him back into ministry, where he abused again.

WANT TO KNOW

Syria’s children. Caught in the middle of a civil war, they are being used as porters, guards, informers, fighters and even human shields, the group Save the Children says in a new report.

Some two million children are in need of assistance in Syria, the report says. UNICEF has warned that a whole generation of Syrian children could be lost.

River of pigs. Chinese officials say the number of pig carcasses pulled from Shanghai’s Huangpu River has risen to nearly 6,000. The pigs are believed to have been dumped by farmers upstream after dying of disease.

The local government maintains that water from the river is safe, but these claims have been met with a healthy dose of skepticism on Chinese social media.

Kashmir police attacked. At least five paramilitary police officers have been killed in an ambush in Srinagar, the main city of Indian Kashmir. Gunmen threw grenades near a school where officers were on duty and children were playing cricket.

A decades-old separatist insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir has waned in recent years, but tensions have been high since the execution in February of a Kashmiri man over a 2001 attack on India’s parliament.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Only in Australia. Heavy rain down under has impacted the supply of a popular souvenir: kangaroo scrotums. Yep. Roo sacks are tanned and used to make everything from bottle openers to coin purses and key chains. 

But constant rain and flooding has driven the kangaroos beyond the range of hunters, and now the country is facing a kangaroo scrotum shortage. 

One taxidermist told a Brisbane newspaper that of the kangaroos still being shot, many are younger males that “don’t have the right-sized testicles.” He added: “We want the big ones. The more experienced kangaroos seem to know when the weather is not in favor and they take off.”

BANGKOK, Thailand — More auspicious than delicious, shark fin is rubbery in both taste and texture. While its flavor is muted, a bowl of shark fin soup says plenty in traditional Chinese culture: The hosts have money and they’re generous enough to spread it around.

But in Asia, the soup’s culinary home turf, the dish is increasingly regarded as, well, tasteless. Anti-finning advocates, armed with gruesome facts about threatened shark species, are attacking shark fin’s reputation as a status-boosting delicacy. Their mission: to see the culinary tradition die off before the sharks do.

In Asia, tide slowly turning against shark fin soup

Photo by AFP/Getty Images

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Delhi rape suspect dead. The alleged ringleader of the rape and murder of a young woman on a Delhi bus last year has been found dead in prison.

Ram Singh, the driver of the bus in which the 23-year-old physiotherapy student was allegedly beaten and gang raped, hung himself with his own clothes, according to officials from Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

However Singh’s family and lawyer have denied it was suicide, and said the death should be treated as a murder.

‘War games’ begin. The US and South Korea launched joint military drills today despite threats of war from the North.

Pyongyang has severed its hotline with Seoul (or rather, just stopped answering the phone) and confirmed its decision to scrap the armistice ending the Korean War, again threatening nuclear attack against both South Korea and the United States.

WANT TO KNOW

Congratulations, Kenya. But not you, Uhuru Kenyatta. While the US, UN and UK have commended Kenya for a peaceful election, none have extended the good wishes to president-elect Kenyatta, who won with just over half the country’s vote.

Kenyatta is facing charges at the International Criminal Court for his role in post-2007 election violence. His main opponent Raila Odinga has vowed to contest what he called the “massive tampering” of votes, but vowed to do so in the courts and not the streets.

GlobalPost’s Senior Correspondent Tristan McConnell, based in Nairobi, writes that ”on both sides of the wide political divide, the desire for peace and for life to get back to normal was strong.”   

Shark protection. Delegates at the CITES conservation meeting in Bangkok have voted to restrict trade in threatened shark species, in an attempt to save them from extinction due to demand for their fins.

Campaigners say the move to regulate trade of the oceanic whitetip shark and three species of hammerhead shark is historic. According to GlobalPost Senior Correspondent Patrick Winn, the tide may finally be turning against shark fin soup.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Neigh. Or should it be yay? While consumers were appalled to learn that European horsemeat was being passed off as beef, that’s nothing, writes Paul Ames, GlobalPost’s Senior European Correspondent.

Donkey, puffin and even rat show up on continental dinner plates — and in vitro beef may soon follow.

Ames weighs in on great horsemeat debate, and even provides recipes, offering a new answer to the question: what’s for dinner?

NEED TO KNOW

North Korea hits back. The Hermit Kingdom has responded to new UN sanctions with characteristic vitriol, vowing to scrap peace pacts with its neighbor to the south.

An announcement carried by North Korea’s state news agency said the main border crossing to South Korea will be shut, and a hotline with Seoul closed down.

Yesterday the UN unanimously approved a fresh round of sanctions in response to North Korea’s nuclear test last month and its threat of a “preemptive” nuclear strike against the United States.

As North Korea experts weigh in on this latest flare-up in tensions, we can’t help but wonder what former NBA star Dennis Rodman, new BFF of the “awesome” Kim Jong Un, makes of it all. Or maybe not.

WANT TO KNOW

Kenya counts… and counts… In Kenya the protracted race for president may be drawing to a close, with leading candidate Uhuru Kenyatta, the current deputy prime minister, approaching the 50 percent mark needed to avoid a second round of voting.

While votes are still being counted, Kenyatta’s opponent, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, will need a strong performance in the remaining ballots to force a run-off.

A win by Kenyatta would be a headache for the West: the son of Kenya’s founding father, Kenyatta is facing International Criminal Court charges for his role in the violence that followed the 2007 presidential election.

Chavez the eternal? The late Venezuelan president will join the ranks of Mao, Lenin, Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung, under a plan that will see Hugo Chavez’s corpse embalmed and put on display “for eternity” at a military museum in Caracas.

The embalming will follow today’s state funeral and an extended period of lying in state to meet the demands of huge crowds. GlobalPost’s John Otis, who has covered Chavez since his first run for president, tells us why he will miss him.

Bin Laden “spokesman” arrested. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, said to be a spokesman and son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, has been arrested in Jordan and will be tried in New York City. He is to appear in court today, and faces charges including material support for terrorism and conspiracy to kill Americans.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

A dog’s day. We end this Friday with the latest fashion from Crufts 2013, a posh dog show in Birmingham, England. You see, it was raining as these pampered pedigreed pooches headed into the first day of competition at Crufts. And, well, this happened.

Not to be outdone, an extreme dogstyling competition in the US has taken an avant-garde approach to its design aesthetic. Looks ruff. (sorry!)

TOKYO, Japan — Japan’s declining appetite for whale meat is nothing new; but is the country also losing patience with its whaling industry?

The answer is yes, according to a new report that highlights the huge cost to the Japanese taxpayer of sustaining its whaling fleet. Without government subsidies, the industry would collapse, it said.

“Whaling is an unprofitable business that can survive only with substantial subsidies and one that caters to an increasingly shrinking and aging market,” according to the report, released earlier this month by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

Japanese turn against whaling

Photo by AFP/Getty Images