JAPAN
Eels a lot like Christmas
An aquarium in Japan is shocking visitors with its Christmas display — using an eco-friendly electric eel to illuminate the lights on its holiday tree. Each time the eel moves, two aluminium panels gather enough electricity to light up the 2m tall tree, decked out in white, in glowing intermittent flashes. The aquarium in Kamakura, just south of Tokyo, has featured the electric eel for five years to encourage ecological sensitivity. This year, it added a Santa robot that sings and dances when visitors stomp on a pad. “We first decided to get an electric eel to light up a Christmas tree and its top ornament using its electricity,” said Kazuhiko Minawa, on the public relations team for the Enoshima Aquarium. “As electric eels use their muscles when generating a charge, we also thought to get humans to use their muscles to light up parts of the tree and power Santa,” Minawa said.
CHINA
Toddler stuck in washer
A toddler who climbed inside a washing machine during a game of hide-and-seek got stuck and had to be rescued by emergency workers with a power saw. The three-year-old, identified as Chaofan, had been playing with his mother at their home in Taiyuan in Shanxi Province when he became trapped. Firefighters had to dismantle the washing machine first, then use a circular power saw to cut open the plastic drum to get the boy out. The child was freed after two hours on Sunday, according to state broadcaster China Central Television, which aired footage of the rescue operation on Tuesday.
NEW ZEALAND
Drummer convicted for pot
AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd was convicted of cannabis possession yesterday, in a decision his lawyers said could hamper the rocker’s globe-trotting tour schedule, reports said. Rudd did not contest charges that police found 27g of cannabis on his boat at Tauranga on the North Island, the local sunlive.co.nz news Web site reported. It said lawyers for Rudd, who was convicted under his legal name, Phillip Witschke, asked the Tauranga District Court to discharge the charge as the “low level” offense could hinder his international travel with the heavy metal band, Tuck told the court. Magistrate Robyn Paterson refused the request, saying Rudd should have known the potential impact a drug conviction could have on his career. “It was not just an accident. You were blindly ignoring the law. You have been playing Russian roulette,” she said. He was convicted and fined NZ$250 (US$190).
AUSTRIA
Murderer, 83, caught
Authorities said an 83-year-old murderer has been caught in Poland after she disappeared from her apartment. Bronislawa Jarosz, a Polish citizen, was convicted of beating her neighbor to death in the town of Korneuburg in 2007 and sentenced to 18 years behind bars. She was freed after serving 10 months because she was deemed too sick to stay, but a recent exam found her fit enough to be in prison. Prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant when she couldn’t be found after her exam. Police spokesman Alexander Marakovits said on Tuesday that Jarosz is being detained in a hospital in the Polish city of Krakow, but did not provide further details. Polish authorities could not immediately comment on the matter.
UNITED KINGDOM
Cancer cure a top concern
Nearly half of all Britons believe in aliens and almost 80 percent say cancer is the disease that most needs a vaccine, a poll by one of the world’s oldest scientific institutions showed on Tuesday. The Royal Society found that 66 percent of respondents to a survey to mark its 350th anniversary said that disease control and eradication should be a top priority for science. About 53 percent said they would like science to enable them to extend their lifespan. In terms of developing new vaccinations, after cancer, preventing HIV/AIDS was seen as important for 60 percent of the 2,000 people surveyed and malaria for 37 percent. Nearly half of people in Britain (44 percent) believe in the existence of aliens, according to the poll. More than a third think scientists should be actively searching for and attempting to make contact with aliens, a figure that rises to 46 percent for male respondents. However, fewer than one in 10 people believe that space exploration should be a top priority for the scientific community.
UNITED STATES
Brooklyn bees turn red
A bunch of Brooklyn bees have been coming home looking flushed. New York City beekeeper Cerise Mayo was puzzled when her bees started showing up with mysterious red coloring. Their honey also turned as red as cough syrup. She told the New York Times a friend joked that the bees were imbibing the runoff at Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Co in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. Mayo — whose first name means “cherry” in French — raises bees in that neighborhood and across the water on Governor’s Island. Tests confirmed the bees were riddled with Red Dye No. 40 — the same food coloring found in the cherry juice. Bee expert Andrew Cote told the newspaper that bees had been creating a big nuisance at the factory. The solution? Put up screens or provide a closer source of sweet nectar.
UNITED STATES
Robber hit with pastries
Police said a clerk in New Mexico foiled a robbery last week when she hit the culprit on the back of the head with a package of empanadas, a type of Spanish pastry. Police told the Deming Headlight that the masked man didn’t say a word when he grabbed the cash register at Amigo’s Mexican Food in Deming and tried to flee. Deming police Captain Brandon Gigante said the man dropped the register when the clerk threw the pastries and hit him. Barbara Orquiz, who owns Amigo’s with her husband, Arnold, said the cash register’s cord got caught when the man tried to take it. The clerk saw him grab it, screamed and got him with the empanadas. Orquiz said the man was covering his head as he ran away.
UNITED STATES
Police fooled by mask
A white man who pleaded guilty to six robberies in Cincinnati, Ohio used a black mask so lifelike that police initially arrested a black man for one of the crimes, authorities said on Tuesday. The mother of the wrongly accused man even thought a photo of the robbery suspect she saw on television was a photo of her son, the prosecutor’s office and the attorney for the white defendant said. Conrad Zdzierak, 30, pleaded guilty on Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court to one count of aggravated robbery and five counts of robbery in a plea deal with prosecutors. He faces up to 35 years in prison at his Jan. 7 sentencing. In exchange, prosecutors dismissed 12 charges and decided not to seek indictments for other crimes, the prosecutor’s spokeswoman said on Tuesday. Zdzierak was arrested at a hotel after his girlfriend called police after seeing reports of the robberies and finding two masks and money stained by dye that is used to track robbers, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
UNITED STATES
Drugs linked to deaths
Almost one in five drivers who died in car crashes tested positive for drugs, according to the national highway-safety regulator. Of drivers tested after dying in car crashes last year, 18 percent had drugs in their bodies, up from 13 percent in 2005, the Washington-based National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement yesterday. Sixty-three percent of the 21,798 drivers who died in accidents last year were tested. The study is the agency’s first analysis of drugged-driving deaths. The study, which included illicit and some prescription drugs, looked at crashes from 2005 to last year.
UNITED STATES
Man meets spud pledge
The head of the Washington State Potato Commission ended a self-imposed diet of potatoes only that he said allowed him to shed more than 9kg in two months. Chris Voigt, 45, began his spuds-only regimen to protest a Department of Agriculture rule barring low-income recipients of food vouchers under the federal Women, Infants and Children program from using their benefits to purchase white potatoes. And while Voigt is not recommending his diet to others as a “healthy sustainable” weight-loss plan, it did help him lower his blood sugar, cut his total cholesterol by over a third, and reduce his weight from 89kg to 80kg, he said. By the time his self-imposed diet ended at midnight on Monday, Voigt had consumed 181kg of potatoes.
UNITED STATES
Trafficker jailed for 30 years
A Colombian drug trafficker who tried to buy a DC-8 jetliner to smuggle cocaine has been sentenced in New York to 30 years in prison. Francisco Gonzalez Uribe was arrested last year during a sting in the Dominican Republic. He pleaded guilty to trafficking charges in June and was sentenced on Tuesday. Prosecutors say Gonzalez Uribe smuggled tonnes of cocaine to Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela. The drugs were then taken to the US and Europe. Authorities say they secretly recorded Gonzalez Uribe as he negotiated the purchase of a DC-8, a four-engine jetliner. Gonzalez Uribe’s lawyers had argued that 30 years was too harsh. They said he was a “manager” of drug traffickers, but not an “organizer,” adding that prosecutors had exaggerated the amount of cocaine involved.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
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