JAPAN
Robot awaits ‘compatriot’
The world’s first robot astronaut was pining for a conversation partner as he waited for Japanese spaceman Koichi Wakata aboard the International Space Station (ISS). “Mr Wakata, are you not here yet? I really want to see you soon,” the pint-sized android said in a message released by its project team in Japan on Wednesday. “Kirobo” — roughly the size of a chihuahua — left Earth on a cargo-carrying rocket and reached the space station on Aug. 10. Wakata along with Mikhail Tyurin of Russia and NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio were aboard the Soyuz-FG rocket that set off from Kazakhstan yesterday for a six-hour journey to the ISS. Kirobo is programmed to communicate in Japanese and keep records of its conversations with Wakata.
UNITED STATES
Glitch leads to bargains
Shoppers looking for a bargain got some big ones, if only temporarily, at Walmart.com on Wednesday. A technical glitch on the Wal-Mart Stores Inc US Web site offered some items at a fraction of their actual retail price. Treadmills, which normally cost hundreds of dollars, were priced at US$33.16 and LCD computer monitors were offered for US$9. Ravi Jariwala, a spokesman for Walmart.com, said that the problem had been fixed and that the mistakenly priced orders would not be honored. “Given the wide discrepancy in pricing, we are notifying customers who ordered these items that their orders have been canceled and that they’ll be refunded in full,” Jariwala said in an e-mail. Walmart.com will also offer those shoppers a US$10 gift card.
UNITED STATES
Third navy officer arrested
Authorities arrested a third senior navy official on Wednesday in connection with a massive bribery scheme in Asia involving prostitutes and luxury travel. In a criminal complaint, Commander Jose Luis Sanchez is accused of accepting prostitutes, luxury travel and US$100,000 cash from a Malaysian contractor known in military circles as “Fat Leonard.” Prosecutors say Sanchez passed on classified and internal navy information to Leonard Francis’ company.
UNITED STATES
Man sues over anal probes
A New Mexico man has filed a lawsuit claiming police subjected him to repeated anal probes and enemas after a routine traffic stop because they suspected he was hiding drugs. David Eckert, 54, claims violations of his civil rights in the lawsuit, which was filed in US District Court in New Mexico in August, but not made public until this week, his lawyers said on Wednesday. “This suit is about stopping officers and doctors from subjecting people in their custody and control to unlawful sadistic medical procedures that violate the most intimate parts of the human body,” attorney Shannon Kennedy said. The legal action stems from Eckert’s treatment by police after he was pulled over for failing to come to a complete stop while exiting a parking lot in Deming, New Mexico. Officers suspected that he was hiding drugs in his anus, based on the way he was standing and the fact that a police dog alerted to his driver’s seat, and obtained a search warrant “to include but not limited to [plaintiff’s] anal cavity,” according to the lawsuit. Eckert was taken to a medical center where he was forced to undergo eight searches — including digital penetration of his anus, three enemas, two X-rays and a colonoscopy. Ultimately, no drugs were found, according to the complaint, which says that the Gila Regional Medical Center billed Eckert for the services it performed.
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