JAPAN
Second arrest in cash theft
Police yesterday arrested a second suspect in the country’s biggest-ever cash robbery, in which US$7.5 million was stolen from a security company last month. Police arrested Yutaka Watanabe, 41, on charges of robbing Nichigetsu Keibihosho in Tachikawa on the outskirts of Tokyo and of assault that seriously injured a company employee, a police spokesman said. Police arrested a 31-year-old man on Wednesday on similar charges.
INDIA
Severe diarrhea kills giraffe
A 15-year-old female giraffe has died of severe diarrhea caused by a viral infection at New Delhi’s zoo, an official said on Thursday. “She wouldn’t eat and began showing symptoms of diarrhea around early evening on the 24th of May,” the curator of the National Zoological Park in the capital Riaz Ahmad Khan said. “She died the next morning. A post-mortem report showed massive internal bleeding in her stomach and doctors said she died because of a viral infection.” The giraffe, named Anita, bore four calves, two of which lived in the same zoo as their mother. An older male calf borne by Anita died earlier this year when his neck snapped after he got stuck trying to grab food from the branches of a tree. The country’s zoos have been the targets of fierce criticism from wildlife experts in the past over concerns including poor sanitation, contaminated food and overcrowding.
AUSTRALIA
Dead dolphins stir outrage
Animal activists expressed outrage yesterday at the discovery of two dead snub fin dolphins tied to mangroves and weighted with a concrete slab, saying every death took the rare species nearer to extinction. The dolphins were found in wetlands in the Great Barrier Reef region last week by a recreational fisherman. Police said they suspected they were caught in a net cast by illegal fishing crews. “The killing and concealing of these two dolphins is totally reprehensible and completely out of line with what the community expects,” the World Wildlife Fund’s Richard Leck told national radio. Authorities are seeking leads on the animals, which they suspect could have been accidentally caught in nets, but then dumped among the mangroves to hide the killings, which fishing boat operators are required to report. Only discovered in 2005, the snub fin species is now on the brink of extinction, with just 1,000 left in the wild, Leck said.
POLAND
Auschwitz sign moving
A council that oversees Auschwitz-Birkenau has decided that the notorious sign that once spanned the main gate at Auschwitz will not return to its original spot after being repaired for damage during a 2009 theft. Pawel Sawicki, a spokesman for the memorial site, said the sign bearing the Nazis’ cynical slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Sets You Free) will be housed in a planned exhibition center to open in coming years. It was accepted by the International Auschwitz Council at a two-day meeting that ended on Thursday.
ISRAEL
Sammy Ofer passes away
A businessman at the center of a recent scandal involving trade with Iran has died at age 89. Media reported that billionaire Sammy Ofer died yesterday after a long illness. Ofer’s name was recently in the news after the US government sanctioned one of his companies for doing business with Iran’s national shipping company. Along with his brother, Ofer owned one of the world’s biggest container shipping companies.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of