JAPAN
Home sought for dolphin
The plight of a lonely dolphin and dozens of penguins that have been abandoned in a derelict aquarium in Japan since the start of the year sparked protests this week, with activists and ordinary Japanese alike calling for the animals to be saved. The female bottlenose dolphin, nicknamed Honey, was captured in 2005 near Taiji, a western port town that has become notorious for its annual dolphin hunt, media reports said. Honey and 46 penguins, along with hundreds of fish and reptiles, remain at the aquarium, an official with the Chiba prefectural Health and Welfare Department said. “Honey is a symbol of both the problem of marine parks and Taiji’s hunting practices,” said Akiko Mitsunobu, chief of aquarium issues for the Animal Rights Center, a local group.
BOLIVIA
Woman may be oldest at 118
Julia Flores Colque still sings with joy in her indigenous Quechua tongue and strums the five strings of a tiny Andean guitar known as the charango, despite a recorded age of almost 118 years. Her national identity card says Flores Colque was born on Oct. 26, 1900, in a mining camp in the Bolivian mountains. Guinness World Records says it has received no application for her, but Flores Colque does not seem to care, as she has not even heard of the reference book. “If you would have told me you were coming, I’d have remembered all the songs,” she said jokingly while playing the diminutive guitar. She then dipped a finger into a cake, and smiled while she licked the frosting. “She’s always been active, easygoing and fun,” said the grandniece, Agustina Berna.
UNITED STATES
Video game shooter ‘troubled’
The suspect in a deadly shooting at a Florida video game tournament had previously been hospitalized for mental illness, according to court records in his home state of Maryland. Divorce filings from the parents of 24-year-old David Katz of Baltimore say that as an adolescent he was twice hospitalized in psychiatric facilities and was prescribed antipsychotic and antidepressant medications. “His hair would very often go unwashed for days. When I took his gaming equipment controllers away so he couldn’t play at 3 or 4 in the morning, I’d get up and find that he was just walking around the house in circles,” the mother said, according to a transcript in the court files. On the Madden competition circuit, Katz was known to barely speak to other gamers, his competitors said. “We’ve always known he was a little off and stuff just because he wasn’t social at all,” Shay Kivlen, 21, of Seattle, said in an interview on Monday.
UNITED STATES
Woman kept in dog kennel
An eastern Texas man and woman have been arrested after a 70-year-old woman said they kept her in a dog kennel, beat and kicked her, withheld food and water and forced her to walk on broken glass. Tyler television station KLTV reports that 47-year-old Leonnia Darlene Anderson Castillo of Log Cabin, Texas, is charged with first-degree felony injury to the elderly and being held at the Henderson County Jail in Athens on a US$50,000 bond. A jail booking officer declined to say if she had an attorney. Tommy Lee Anderson, a 49-year-old Malakoff resident, is charged with felony unlawful restraint and free on US$15,000 bond. A police affidavit says the victim approached a Malakoff police officer and said she had been staying with the woman, to whom she was related, and her boyfriend when the ordeal began in January. Other relatives rescued her on Wednesday last week.
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
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing