UNITED STATES
Ginsburg hospitalized
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized after experiencing chills and fever, the court said on Saturday. The court’s public information office in a statement said Ginsburg was admitted on Friday night to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She was initially evaluated at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington before being transferred to Johns Hopkins for further evaluation and treatment of any possible infection. With intravenous antibiotics and fluids, her symptoms abated and she expected to be released from the hospital as early as yesterday morning, the statement said. Earlier this month Ginsburg, 86, suffered what the court described as a stomach bug.
FRANCE
Autographed ‘Tintin’ sold
A print from a classic Tintin comic book signed by US astronaut Buzz Aldrin fetched 33,800 euros (US$37,250), triple the auction house’s estimate, at a Paris sale on Saturday. The image from Explorers on the Moon, a 1950s adventure where the Belgian reporter becomes the first human on the moon, features an inscription from Aldrin: “First moonwalkers after Tintin.” Aldrin was the second man to walk on the lunar surface after Neil Armstrong during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission.
ITALY
Migrants rescued at sea
Coast guards on Saturday said they had rescued 143 migrants off the island of Lampedusa, although about 20 others were apparently missing, according to the survivors. “The crews of four patrols rescued 143 people who had fallen into the sea” from a 10m boat, the coast guard said in a statement. Two men, an Eritrean and a Libyan, said they had been unable to locate their wives following the rescue. A search for those missing continued on Saturday evening with two planes from Frontex — the border and coast guard agency for the EU’s Schengen area — and the Italian navy flying over the area. Police were also searching the Lampedusa coast to see if any of the migrants had managed to swim ashore. Those rescued were taken to Lampedusa, where they were allowed to disembark.
FRANCE
Heavy rains hit Cote d’Azur
Two people were missing and hundreds of homes flooded on Saturday as heavy rains hit the Cote d’Azur, disrupting air and rail transport and leading to hundreds of evacuations. One of the missing was a 77-year-old man. Near Muy, in the Car area, a woman was also missing after a lifeboat capsized with three crew members and three other people aboard. While five of them reached safety, she could not be found. Two other people were rushed to hospital as storms hit the area overnight. The two districts affected,
BRAZIL
Government ready for unrest
President Jair Bolsonaro said that his government is prepared for any unrest, as he expressed his concern about the wave of protests across South America. However, he said that he did not expect trouble in the country. “We always have to be prepared so that we are not surprised by events,” he told reporters at a military ceremony in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday. “There is no reason whatsoever, as we understand, for this movement to come here.” So far there have been no major demonstrations in the country, although the recent release from jail of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva might energize the opposition.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
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