TEGUCIGALPA (AFP) – The United States has asked Honduras to extradite former president Juan Orlando Hernandez who is suspected of drug trafficking, a Honduran official who declined to be named told AFP. The official added that Hernandez, who left office last month, is currently in Honduras as police special forces could be seen encircling his residence in the capital Tegucigalpa on Monday evening. The Honduran Foreign Ministry had said earlier on Twitter that an “official communication from the U.S. Embassy” was sent to the Supreme Court formally asking for the provisional arrest of an unnamed “Honduran politician” for extradition. News channel CNN broadcast images of the document, which made a “formal request for provisional arrest for the purpose of extradition to the United States of America of Juan Orlando Hernandez Alvarado.” Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Hernandez was included on a list last year of people accused of corruption or undermining democracy in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

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ASHGABAT (AFP) -- The son of Turkmenistan’s leader Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has been nominated to run for president next month, state media said, after the autocrat said he would step down and authorities called a snap vote. “At the extraordinary congress of the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan held in Ashgabat, the deputy chairman of the cabinet of ministers of the country, Serdar Berdymukhamedov, was nominated as a presidential candidate,” the state television announcer said. Berdymukhamedov senior, the current president, chair of the cabinet and senate chief, has been Turkmenistan’s decision-maker for the last 15 years. In a historic speech in parliament on Friday, 64-year-old Berdymukhamedov said he had reached “a difficult decision” about his leadership because of his age. The country needed “young leaders”, he added. The expected father-to-son leadership transition would be the first of its kind in ex-Soviet Central Asia, that also includes Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has said he wishes to remain in politics in his role as chairman of the Turkmen parliament’s upper chamber.

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NEW YORK (AFP) -- Astronomy experts say they originally misread the secrets of the night sky last month: it turns out that a rocket expected to crash into the Moon in early March was built by China, not SpaceX. A rocket will indeed strike the lunar surface on March 4, but contrary to what had been announced, it was built not by Elon Musk’s company, but by Beijing, experts now say. The rocket is now said to be 2014-065B, the booster for the Chang’e 5-T1, launched in 2014 as part of the Chinese space agency’s lunar exploration program. The surprise announcement was made by astronomer Bill Gray, who first identified the future impact, and admitted his mistake last weekend. NASA said in late January that it would attempt to observe the crater that will be formed by the explosion of this object, thanks to its probe that orbits around the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The agency called the event an “exciting research opportunity.”

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Ethiopian lawmakers have voted to end the country’s three-month state of emergency early as mediation efforts continue to end the deadly war in the north. Tuesday’s vote by lawmakers came after Ethiopia’s Council of Ministers, chaired by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, decided on Jan. 26 to end the state of emergency originally imposed for six months, citing recent developments in the conflict. The state of emergency was imposed in early November as Tigray forces fighting Ethiopian and allied forces moved closer to the capital, Addis Ababa. They withdrew back into the Tigray region in late December amid mediation efforts and under pressure from a drone-supported military offensive carried out by the government. Thousands of mainly ethnic Tigrayans were detained under the state of emergency, according to witnesses, lawyers and human rights groups. Many were released after December’s shift in the war. There was no immediate word Tuesday on when the rest of the people detained under the state of emergency would be released. They include a freelance video journalist accredited to The Associated Press, Amir Aman Kiyaro.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — The head of the World Health Organization’s Europe office said Tuesday that health officials are turning their attention to growing rates of COVID-19 infection in Eastern Europe, where six countries — including Russia and Ukraine — have seen a doubling in case counts over the last two weeks. Dr. Hans Kluge said the 53-country region, which stretches to former Soviet republics into central Asia, has now tallied more than 165 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 1.8 million deaths linked to the pandemic — including 25,000 in the last week alone. “Today, our focus is towards the east of the WHO European region,” Kluge said in Russian at a media briefing, pointing to a surge in the highly transmissible omicron variant. “Over the past two weeks, cases of COVID-19 have more than doubled in six countries in this part of the region (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine(”. “As anticipated, the omicron wave is moving east: 10 eastern Member States have now detected this variant,” he said. Omicron, however, is milder than previous variants and health care systems in most countries around the world aren’t under strain.

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TAIPEI (Reuters) -- A small Chinese civilian aircraft flew very close to a remote Taiwanese-controlled island next to China’s coast earlier this month, Taiwan’s defense ministry said on Tuesday, adding China may be trying a new strategy to test its reactions. The ministry said the aircraft flew very near to Dongyin, part of the Matsu archipelago off the coast of China’s Fujian province, on Feb. 5. Having previously not identified the aircraft, the ministry said they had confirmed it was a Chinese civilian Y-12, a light twin-engined aircraft.