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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion