🇲🇺 A skull surfaces in a Quatre-Bornes backyard

A skull surfaces in a Quatre-Bornes backyard

A resident of Corps de Garde, in Quatre-Bornes, was turning over his yard for planting on Sunday when his tools struck something harder than soil. Among what he pulled from the ground was a human skull. The Quatre-Bornes police were alerted within hours and opened an investigation.

First indications suggest the bones have lain there for more than two years. That rules out a recent death, but almost nothing else, and it leaves an ordinary back garden as the centre of a quiet mystery. Neighbours who spent years walking past the spot now have reason to look again.

The remains go next for post-mortem and scientific examination, the slow work that turns anonymous bones into an identity and a timeline. Investigators will want to know who this was, how long they lay there, and whether anyone living nearby knew. Until those answers come back, no one can say whether this is a crime scene or a forgotten grave.

The grid held this year; summer is the real test

600 megawatts was the demand the Central Electricity Board (CEB) braced for in 2026. The peak stopped at 560.3, the rolling 20 to 30 minute cuts of 2025 never came back. To get there the CEB leaned on bigger operating reserves, retimed maintenance and a demand response deal that pays some hotels to dial back at peak.

That reprieve has a shelf life. Summer lands in about two months, and Prof Khalil Elahee, who heads the renewable energy agency MARENA, warns the evening window from 18:00 to 21:00, when solar adds nothing, could squeeze the grid harder than in 2025. The margin is still thin.

Cabinet backs an India fuel supply deal thin on detail

The Council of Ministers has signed off in principle on a deal for the State Trading Corporation to buy refined fuel from Indian Oil, part of a broader India-Mauritius energy pact. The aim is to lock in supply for years, not shop cargo by cargo.

Here is the catch: the duration, the volumes and the pricing formula have not been made public. A long contract can steady supply without ever touching the price at the pump, and until those numbers surface, the win for households stays theoretical.

Water cuts now, dearer vegetables next

The Irrigation Authority is throttling water to the fields. With La Nicolière running low, it trimmed irrigation supply from 10 August and told growers to hold off replanting until the rain returns. Stalls still look normal today, but market gardeners expect vegetable prices to climb within weeks if the next plantings miss their window.

Mauritius pushes back on WhatsApp's new usernames

What happens when a chat app lets you drop your phone number? Mauritius is not keen to find out. Authorities have come out against WhatsApp's new usernames feature, sold abroad as a privacy upgrade, because it could let users mask who they are and make abusive or criminal accounts much harder to trace.

Shorts

PM Ramgoolam joins the SADC summit in Durban – PM Ramgoolam landed in Durban for the 46th SADC summit, Southern Africa's main regional bloc.

Agaléga's north island loses half its ovens – One of the two ovens has broken down, so the north now leans on the south for bread.

Ethiopian Airlines keeps its Mauritius link – The Addis Ababa route now runs to 23 December, extending flights first meant to end sooner.

Bus fleet tracking system slips its timeline – Minister Osman Mahomed admits the promised bus Fleet Management System will run late.

New faces take over at the finance watchdogs – The FSC and FIU, which police finance and money laundering, both bring in fresh senior hands.

30

women have come through a National Insurance Company empowerment programme as certified entrepreneurs, the sort of small-business pipeline that rarely makes news but quietly widens who gets to own a firm.

Rs 234 million

of cannabis sits at the heart of a case now reaching across the water: Ravindra Chimajee denies making the run to Réunion, even as investigators retrace a late-July crossing.

2 records in a day

Kate Douglass broke the 50m freestyle world record twice on the same day at the Pan Pacific Championships, while Lani Pallister out-touched Katie Ledecky in the 800m. Some days the record book just keeps flipping.

Morocco stops hundreds at the Ceuta border again

Moroccan forces intercepted scores of would-be migrants, most from sub-Saharan Africa, near the Spanish enclave of Ceuta over the weekend. Police put the arrests at about 111 and blamed false social-media rumours that the border had swung open. It came barely two weeks after thousands rushed the tiny territory in a single surge.

UN warns South Sudan's refugees could lose aid

Two UN agencies warn that hundreds of thousands of refugees in South Sudan risk losing food and shelter within weeks as donor funding dries up.

Congo's Ebola tracing stalls as staff walk out

Unpaid for three months, health workers in DR Congo have walked out, contact tracing is slipping just as the outbreak needs it most.

Iran says Qatar is holding its pilots; Qatar says no

Iran says Qatar is holding three of its pilots, downed over the Gulf back in March, and it wants them home. Doha calls the claim misleading and denies holding anyone at all. The row reopens a wound from the spring air war that both sides had mostly stopped discussing, and neither is offering any proof in public.

Britain mourns a professor who resigned in scandal

Britain's PM called for reflection after the death of Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who had quit amid plagiarism allegations.

Colombia asks Trump to lift tariffs after its quake

Still digging out from a deadly earthquake, Colombia has asked President Trump to suspend US tariffs while it rebuilds.

Pamplemousses gives the dodo a home at last

Inside the new Dodo Museum at Pamplemousses, you meet a white skeleton and one egg in a nest, ten years of Éric Typhis Degtiarenko's research behind it.

Two portraits face off across a century: a 1624 miniature by the Mughal painter Ustad Mansur, who saw the bird alive, and the Roelant Savery canvas that fixed the dodo in popular imagination. Known only by its leftovers, it finally has a home.

🙏 Merci, à demain! 👋

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