JAPAN
Penguin search widened
Keepers looking for a runaway penguin widened their search yesterday, asking birdwatchers on Tokyo’s rivers for help in tracking down the escapee, five days after it broke out of an aquarium. Staff at Tokyo Sea Life Park said they believed the penguin was alive and well and somewhere in the capital after receiving reports it had successfully fed itself. “We haven’t given up hope,” Satoshi Toda of the park said. “We have received information that indicates the penguin caught some fish and ate them, so we are hopeful that the bird is still alive.” Keepers believe the 60cm bird made its break for freedom after being startled into climbing over a rock twice its size, in an escape that has been compared to the exploits of animals in the animated film Madagascar.
JAPAN
Whale catch below target
The country ended this season’s whale hunt in the Antarctic Ocean having caught less than one-third of its original target, the Fisheries Agency said yesterday. Whalers killed 266 minke whales and one fin whale, the agency said, well below the approximately 900 they had been aiming for when they left the country in December last year. The whalers had left the southern waters by Thursday “as scheduled,” the agency said. It made no reference to the frequent high-seas confrontations with anti-whaling activists.
PHILIPPINES
Quakes strike the northwest
Officials said two moderately strong earthquakes hit the northwest with no damage reported so far. The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said the magnitude 5.3 quake before dawn yesterday was centered 17km southwest of Looc township on Lubang island in Mindoro Occidental province. It was felt in Manila, about 130km northeast. Hours earlier, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck the same area, causing no damage.
AUSTRALIA
Rinehart spat spills out
Lawyers for mining magnate Gina Rinehart, one of the world’s wealthiest people, told her estranged children yesterday to “go out and earn for themselves” after she lost a legal challenge to keep details of a family dispute out of the media. Rinehart, identified by Forbes magazine the world’s 29th-richest person with a fortune of US$18 billion, has been battling her three eldest children, who want her ousted as trustee of the multibillion-dollar family trust. The children want to be appointed trustees in her place and they have made allegations of “serious misconduct.” “The plaintiff’s children have seen fit not to follow sound advice from family friends that if they are not happy they should go out and earn for themselves,” Rinehart’s law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth said in a statement.
CHINA
N Koreans repatriated
Beijing has repatriated all 31 North Korean refugees it arrested last month despite international pressure against the move, activists said yesterday, warning they could face severe punishment. Campaigners fear the refugees could suffer abuse or even face execution for fleeing the country during the mourning period for late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who died late last year. Do Hee-yun, head of the Citizens’ Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and North Korean Refugees, said the group of 31 people had been in three separate groups and were arrested in different places in China. “They were returned to the North clandestinely over the past two weeks,” Do said.
TURKEY
Topless protesters detained
Police detained four Ukrainian feminists who staged a topless protest in one of the busiest spots of Istanbul on Thursday, an Agence France-Presse photographer said. Four members of the Femen group chanted slogans and unfurled banners outside the Hagia Sophia church, now a museum, to protest domestic violence and to express solidarity with female victims of acid attacks. Shortly after the group’s protest marking International Women’s Day, police rushed to the scene and dragged the activists into a police vehicle. Femen, a small but feisty feminist group based in Ukraine, operates under the slogan: “I came, I stripped, I won,” and is known for protests that frequently see its members strip to the waist in public places.
UNITED KINGDOM
Woman’s torso found: police
Police searching for a missing former soap-opera actress have pulled a woman’s torso from a London canal. They said the headless and limbless body was found on Tuesday in Regent’s Canal, near east London’s hip Broadway Market area, after a passer-by spotted something in the water. London police said on Wednesday that detectives believe they know the identity of the victim, but are awaiting forensic confirmation. Local media said detectives suspect the remains are those of Gemma McCluskie, who has been missing since last week. McCluskie starred in the popular soap EastEnders in 2001. Police said a 35-year-old man had been arrested in connection with the inquiry.
FRANCE
Man tells of mutilation
A man on trial for chopping off a love rival’s penis gave a detailed account on Thursday of his act and of the uneasy silence that followed as they awaited an ambulance. Blaise Fragione, 38, admitted that in October 2008 he knocked out the victim, named only as “F,” with a blow to the head, severed most of his penis with a razor and flushed it down the toilet. Fragione, from Marseille, said that he “lost it” after F. came to brag to him that he was having a relationship with “Mado,” his partner of 14 years and mother of his two children. “Everything that I’d refused to believe, everything came to the surface and I lost it,” Fragione, a smaller but muscular man, told the court. “When I came back from the toilet I came back to earth,” he said. He called the emergency services while his wounded rival “was prostrate in a corner” applying pressure to staunch the bleeding from his mutilated groin. The victim’s lawyer, Gregoire Ladouari, said the victim, now aged 36, has “spent the last three years living in the hope of reconstructive surgery.” The woman has returned to her original partner, the accused, with whom she has had a third child. They plan to marry. Fragione faces up to 15 years in prison if found guilty of “aggravated assault accompanied by mutilation.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Submariner charged
A Royal Navy submariner appeared in court on Thursday, charged with leaking official secrets that could aid an enemy of the state. Petty Officer Edward Devenney, 29, is charged with communicating information that could be “directly or indirectly useful to the enemy,” in breach of the Official Secrets Act. Devenney, from Northern Ireland, was arrested on Tuesday in the English port of Plymouth, home to a large naval base. Devenney spoke only to confirm his name and age during a short hearing at London’s City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court. He did not enter a plea.
BRAZIL
Dolphin rescue goes viral
A dramatic video showing 30 beached dolphins being rescued by beachgoers has become an Internet sensation. The video shows dolphins suddenly beaching en masse on the Rio de Janeiro state coastline on Monday. They were apparently caught in a strong ocean current. Stunned beachgoers in swimming trunks at first look on as the dolphins’ high-pitched squeals are heard, but within seconds, people quickly race into the surf to help the dolphins. Dozens of people are seen swimming into the ocean and dragging the mammals by their tails in an effort to them back into deeper waters. The effort was apparently successful. After all the dolphins were rescued, the crowd of dolphin-savers and onlookers broke into cheers.
PAKISTAN
Bin Laden’s widows charged
Authorities have brought charges against Osama bin Laden’s three widows for illegally entering and living in the country, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Thursday. The al-Qaeda leader was killed in a secret raid by US special forces in the garrison town of Abbottabad in May last year after a decade-long manhunt. His three wives and an undisclosed number of children were among the 16 people detained by Pakistani authorities after the raid. “They [the wives] were presented before the court. After that, they are on judicial remand and are being kept in a proper, legal manner,” Malik said. “Cases have been registered against the adults, not the children.” Two of the wives are Saudi nationals and one is from Yemen, according to the foreign ministry. Malik did not specify which court was dealing with the case, or where the women were being held. They will have to stand trial, but it was not clear what punishment they faced if convicted.
JAMAICA
Prince Harry cuts program
Britain’s Prince Harry proved he was a top shot on Wednesday during his trip to the island nation, but he also changed his plans after learning that six fellow troops had been killed in Afghanistan. The British prince fired 16 live rounds on a 30m practice range and earned praise from a local army trainer. “Excellent shooting, a perfect grouping with perfect results,” Defense Force Sergeant Anthony Forbes said. However, the prince, who is an Apache helicopter pilot in the British Army, canceled a planned rappeling event after it emerged that the six troops had been killed in Afghanistan when a massive roadside bomb engulfed their armored vehicle. A statement said Prince Harry “did not wish to take part in a military activity which would be deemed peripheral to an Apache pilot,” following the deaths. “The focus for the British Army should be on its core professional roles and of looking after the bereaved of those tragically killed in Afghanistan,” on such a tragic day, the statement said.
SAUDI ARABIA
Nayef in US for tests
Crown Prince Nayef has arrived in the US for medical tests, state television said yesterday. Prince Nayef arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, for “scheduled medical tests,” it said, without giving further details. King Abdullah appointed Interior Minister Prince Nayef as the new crown prince of the world’s top oil exporter in October, after former Crown Prince Sultan died of colon cancer in New York. Nayef, who is about 78 and is considered a conservative even by Saudi standards for his close ties with the austere Wahhabi sect of Islam, has been a pivotal figure and supervised the daily affairs of the kingdom in the absence of the king, who has back problems.
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
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of