JAPAN
‘Dead man’ hands self in
A man faked his own death by claiming his late brother’s body was his own, police and media said yesterday. Even while Tsukasa Oizumi’s older sibling was alive, he used to use his driving license to get around the fact that his own had been revoked for repeated traffic offences, the Mainichi Shimbun said. When the brother fell ill and died aged 56 in 2008, Oizumi decided to take over his identity completely. Oizumi, now 58, went on to claim social security benefits in his brother’s name, the Asahi Shimbun said, but turned himself in to a local welfare office in June because of “a guilty conscience.” Police — who took months to establish the truth of Oizumi’s confession — arrested him on Wednesday “for allegedly disguising himself as his dead brother and registering incorrect data for official certificates,” a spokesman said.
THAILAND
Panty thief nabbed
Police said on Wednesday that they had apprehended a thief with more than 1,000 pairs of women’s underwear in the trunk of his car. Police also found more than 10,000 pairs at the house of the 48-year-old suspect. They said the man admitted to stealing and collecting women’s underwear since the age of 18. “He smelled them all the time even while driving,” police Major General Saroj Promcharoen said. The suspect will be charged with stealing property, though not the underwear for now, because there is no plaintiff, police said.
IRELAND
Artist builds ‘euro home’
An unemployed artist has built a home from the shredded remains of 1.4 billion euros (US$1.82 billion), a monument to the “madness” he said has been wrought on the country by the single currency, from a spectacular construction boom to a wrenching bust. Frank Buckley built the apartment in the lobby of a Dublin office building that has remained vacant since its completion four years ago at the peak of an ill-fated construction boom, using bricks of shredded euro notes he borrowed from the national mint. “It is a reflection of the whole madness that gripped us,” Buckley said.
FRANCE
Activist not guilty of racism
A court has acquitted a spokeswoman for a movement that fights racial inequality who was accused of insulting white French. The trial centered on a word that Houria Bouteldja invented and used during a TV interview to refer to native white French, who are sometimes called de souche (from stock). However, her neologism — souchiens — also sounds like French for “lower than dogs” and drew a legal complaint from the far-right group, the General Alliance Against Racism and For the Respect of French and Christian Identity. The group said on Wednesday that it would appeal.
FRANCE
PIP head arrested
Police arrested Jean-Claude Mas, the founder of the breast implant company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) at the center of an international health scare, a police source said yesterday. “Jean-Claude Mas was arrested at the home of his companion ... and taken into custody,” the source said, adding that officers had picked him up yesterday morning. Mas was arrested over an investigation opened last month in Marseille into the health implications of the company’s breast implants. Between 400,000 and 500,000 women around the world are believed to have received implants made by the now-defunct company.
Agencies
Lego man sent into space
A video posted on YouTube on Wednesday appeared to show the amazing voyage of a Lego man sent into space on a homemade spacecraft by two Toronto students. Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, used a weather balloon ordered online and a makeshift Styrofoam spacecraft to send the plastic astronaut 24km into the stratosphere, reports said. Their high school principal Lecourgos Papathanasakis confirmed the “amazing voyage,” but neither of the teens was immediately available for comment. An accelerated video clip posted online shows highlights of the Lego man during his 97-minute odyssey. Ultimately, he is seen holding a Canadian flag with the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of space in the background. Canadian media said the pair had fitted a box tethered to the balloon with four cameras and a mobile phone enabled with a GPS device to capture the journey. They then added a nylon parachute stitched on Muhammad’s mother’s sewing machine to ensure that the Lego man would return to Earth safely. The balloon was filled with helium purchased from a party supply store. The Lego man re-entered the atmosphere and touched down in a field 120km from the launch point.
UNITED STATES
Alleged brain-eater arrested
A Florida man has been arrested for allegedly hacking to death a man and eating the victim’s eye and part of his brain, police said on Wednesday. Tyree Lincoln Smith, 35, was arrested on Tuesday night on a warrant for murder, police in Florida said. A property inspector discovered the body of Angel Gonzalez on Friday last week on the third floor of an abandoned home in the state of Connecticut, according to that city’s police department. A medical examiner determined that the cause of death was blunt head trauma and ruled Gonzalez’s death a homicide. On Monday, a cousin of Smith’s in Connecticut contacted police about Gonzalez’s death. She told detectives that Smith had arrived at her house on Dec. 15 and said he wanted to “get blood on his hands,” before going to a park and then to the abandoned home, where he used to live, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. The next day, Smith returned to the cousin’s house with blood on his pants, hands and an axe, the affidavit said. Smith’s cousin said he told her that he was sleeping on a porch at the abandoned home when he was awakened by a Hispanic man, who he invited inside. Then Smith described beating the man’s face and head with the axe, collecting one of his eyes, a piece of his skull and some of his brain matter, which he consumed in a nearby cemetery, the affidavit said.
UNITED STATES
Orangutan gets contraceptive
A Cleveland Clinic women’s health specialist has made a house call at a zoo to demonstrate how to fit an orangutan with a newer brand of implanted birth-control device. The Plain Dealer reported that Cleveland Metroparks Zoo’s Kitra is the first orangutan in the US to get the device called Implanon. It’s about 4cm long, slightly thicker than pencil lead and meant for humans. General curator Geoffrey Hall said the zoo does not want the Bornean orangutan to breed, at least not now. The procedure by Judith Volkar went well and the animal was back on her feet within hours. A spokesman said Kitra had previously been fitted with an implanted device commonly used by the zoo, but that she developed a negative reaction.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema