FRANCE
Families challenge car name
Two families called Renault went to court on Thursday to stop the car company of the same name calling its new electric model “Zoe,” for fear that their daughters called Zoe will face ridicule. “We don’t want to hear ‘It’s time for your oil change’ or ‘show us your airbags,’” the plaintiff’s lawyer David Koubbi told a court, accusing the firm of “stealing a child’s name to compensate for an underperforming car.” “Industrialists, in order to humanize and market products, are turning names into brands. So, if you’re lucky, you could end up as a pretty pot of flowers. If you’re not, as a whip, a vibrating dildo or a toilet brush.” Renault’s ZOE, which the firm registered as a trademark when spelled in capitals without the accent on the final “e” found in the French name, is a small zero-emissions car due to be released in 2012.
NETHERLANDS
Ship hits passenger ferry
A German freight ship struck a small passenger ferry in a canal near Amsterdam yesterday, capsizing the smaller vessel and knocking the skipper and any other passengers who may have been aboard into the water, national police say. “There’s one person missing, possibly more,” spokesman Frans Zuiderhoek said on television. “At this moment we don’t know how many people were on board the ferry.” He said neither the skipper nor any other victims have been found, more than two hours after the collision occurred at 7am. The ferry is used to shuttle pedestrians and often their bicycles across the Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal, a broad, heavily used internal waterway.
ITALY
Historian Robert Katz dies
US writer and historian Robert Katz, whose meticulous reconstruction of an infamous Nazi massacre in Rome brought him fame and sparked a trial over whether he defamed the pope, has died, his family said on Thursday. He was 77. Katz, who had been a longtime resident of Tuscany, died in a hospital there from complications from cancer surgery on Wednesday, his wife said. Katz wrote extensively on 20th-century Italian history in books, essays and articles, some of which were made into films. In Days of Wrath, Katz chronicled the 1978 kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, a former prime minister, at the hands of the Red Brigades. In The Battle for Rome he looked at the months that followed the fall of leader Benito Mussolini at the end of World War II. But it was his book Death in Rome — and the subsequent movie based on it, called Massacre in Rome — that made the biggest splash. The book dealt with one of the worst Nazi atrocities in occupied Italy, the 1944 slaughter by German troops of 335 innocent men at the Ardeatine Caves in retaliation for an attack by partisans the day before.
UNITED KINGDOM
Royal family’s water to close
US drinks giant Coca-Cola is closing Malvern Water, a luxury brand of bottled water favored by the British royal family for centuries, a spokeswoman said on Thursday. Coca-Cola will halt production at the small factory in Colwall from the end of next month, after Malvern’s share of the market shrunk to just 0.4 percent. Elizabeth I, the 16th-century “virgin queen,” is recorded as having drunk the water and legend has it that the country’s longest-reigning monarch, Queen Victoria, would not travel without it. The current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, still orders crates of the water before foreign trips, Buckingham Palace said.
UNITED STATES
NASA detects ice on moon
There are large quantities of frozen water in some regions of the moon, according to a study of debris kicked up by a rocket that crashed into its surface last year. Last autumn, NASA scientists steered the upper stage of an Atlas V rocket traveling at 9,000kph into a deep crater as part of the US space agency’s hunt for signs of water on the moon. The impact was recorded by a spacecraft flying behind the rocket, called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), and by cameras on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter as it circled the moon. In a series of papers published in the journal Science, NASA researchers describe how the crash punched a crater in the moon between 25m and 30m wide and created a plume of debris more than 0.8km high. Sensors aboard LCROSS detected about 155kg of ice in a single “snapshot” following the impact. In one of the papers, a team led by Anthony Colaprete at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California estimated that frozen water accounted for about 5.6 percent of the material in the crater.
BRAZIL
Christ statue opens arms
The iconic Christ statue that towers over Rio de Janeiro came to life overnight on Wednesday, appearing to open and close its arms in part of a government campaign against child sex abuse. The special effect projected onto Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue was achieved with the aid of eight computers and was conceived by filmmaker Fernando Salis. It is part of a nationwide campaign being carried out under the banner “real tenderness,” to help fight pedophilia and the sexual trafficking of children. Each time 500 Internet users click on the Web site www.carinhodeverdade.org.br, the Christ statue will once again appear to open its massive arms.
UNITED STATES
O’Donnell regrets witch ad
Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said she regrets airing the campaign ad in which she declared “I’m not a witch.” Speaking to ABC television in an interview broadcast on Thursday, O’Donnell agreed with the suggestion that the ad only brought fresh attention to the issue surrounding her past statements as a TV commentator. “I haven’t publicly stated this, and I don’t know if I’ll get in trouble for saying that, but our intention was to kill it, and that’s not what happened,” she said in the interview. O’Donnell’s comments about witchcraft were made over a decade ago during a taping of comedian Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect TV show. “I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven,” she said on the video, a clip of which hit the Internet just days after she beat longtime congressman Mike Castle in the Republican primary in her third bid for Senate.
UNITED STATES
New pumpkin record set
Guinness World Records has confirmed that a massive pumpkin grown in Wisconsin is officially the world’s heaviest. The gourd grown this year by Chris Stevens of New Richmond tips the scales at 821.24kg. That’s 38.56kg heavier than the previous record, a 782.45kg pumpkin grown last year in Ohio. Stevens’ pumpkin has a circumference of 4.7m. When turned on its side, the pumpkin is more than waist-high to an average-size person. Stevens unveiled his pumpkin earlier this month at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Minnesota. He said at the time his secret is a precise mixture of sunshine, rain, cow manure, fish emulsion and seaweed.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion