What happened
United Nations investigators yesterday reported they had found “reasonable grounds” to believe the U.S. committed war crimes in Iran with its “indiscriminate attack” on an elementary school and sports center, killing at least 178 civilians, mostly children. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran also determined that the Iranian government had “committed crimes against humanity” by murdering, imprisoning and torturing protestors.

Who said what
U.S. officials “have ascribed the school strike to a targeting error,” The New York Times said, though the Pentagon “has not published the results of its investigation” into the bombing. The U.N. investigators said the “clearly identifiable” elementary school was “the intended point of impact,” and the U.S. military’s use of outdated targeting data “went beyond mere negligence.” The White House said Iran is the “only party in this conflict that has committed war crimes,” and the U.N. Human Rights Council, which created the mission in 2022, has been “spouting unserious nonsense for decades.”

What next?
The investigators are set to present their findings to the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday. U.N. fact-finding missions are “investigative, not judicial bodies,” and can’t “initiate any criminal cases,” Reuters said. But this report “adds to international evidence gathered about crimes in the war in Iran,” The Associated Press said, “and could eventually be used in efforts to reach justice in international courts.”

What happened
A team of biologists yesterday said they have identified the first new living feline species in more than 100 years: a small spotted tiger cat that lives in Bolivia’s cloud forests. Genetic testing confirmed that Leopardus tilcayo (pictured above) is a new member of the cat family, the researchers reported in the journal Current Biology. Weighing about 5 pounds, the cat resembles a “leopard that shrank to the size of a house kitten,” The Washington Post said.

Who said what
“Little is yet known about the cat’s biology and lifestyle,” Reuters said, and it’s unclear how many there are. “Our information at this moment is limited to the two live individuals that we examined, and a small number of camera-trap records,” said study co-lead author Jonas Lescroart of Belgium’s University of Antwerp. The “discovery is monumental, and not just because it’s the first new cat discovered since the pampas cat in 1923,” said National Geographic. The genomic analysis “redraws the cat family tree to have a lot more branches than previously thought.

What next?
“Showing the general public” there are still new species of a “flagship group such as cats,” said study co-author Edurado Eizirik, transmits the “important message” that unless we preserve endangered habitats, the “many undiscovered species” are “at risk of disappearing before we even discover them.”

The South Korean government has launched an app that notifies victims if their stalkers come within range. More than 400 people are enrolled in the program, which has been operating since June.

Control centers in Seoul and Daejeon electronically monitor more than 5,000 people and handle 19,000 alerts a day. “Most are filtered out by staff at the centers, but about 300 a day are serious enough to send out a probation officer,” said The Guardian. 

Stalking cases are on the rise in South Korea. In the four years since a dedicated stalking law was introduced in 2021, reports have tripled, reaching 44,687 last year. Many South Koreans believe the government needs to do more to address the root causes of the epidemic.

The new app alerts victims if their stalkers are within a 1.2-mile radius, flagging their precise location on a real-time map. If offenders come closer than half a mile, the app notifies police. Probation authorities then call the victims to establish their safety and can dispatch officers to the area.

The government is also planning lower-tech measures to increase victim safety. In April, it will change the legal process to let stalking victims “directly petition courts for restraining orders” instead of relying on law enforcement agencies to file requests on their behalf, said The Straits Times. This past July, a new task force was launched to focus on “addressing gaps in laws, systems and on-the-ground responses” around stalking offenses, said Korea’s JoongAng Daily. And the country’s justice ministry has developed a “specialized psychological treatment program to identify risk factors for recidivism” in stalkers.