NEW ZEALAND
Student charged in crash
Police on Friday charged a US student with careless driving over a crash on a remote highway that killed three of his college classmates. The 20-year-old Boston University student was charged with three counts of careless driving causing death and four of careless driving causing injury, police said. The crash occurred on Saturday last week, when the van he was driving — one of two carrying 16 students on a hiking excursion — rolled, near Tongariro National Park on North Island. The students were taking courses at Auckland University as part of an exchange program. Police did not name the driver, but local media identified him as US citizen Stephen Houseman. He appeared at Auckland District Court on Friday and was bailed to reappear on June 8 after surrendering his passport.
JAPAN
Penguin still on the run
A penguin that has been on the run from a Tokyo aquarium is alive and well, a park official said on Thursday. More than 30 sightings of the 60cm Humbolt penguin have been reported to Tokyo Sea Life park since it fled in early March, “many of them recently, including today,” park spokesman Takashi Sugino said. With an identification ring attached to its wing, the one-year-old bird has been spotted swimming in various locations around Tokyo Bay, “mostly in our neighborhood,” Sugino said. “It is difficult to capture the animal unless we gather more information and narrow down the area of its movement,” he said. “It moves fast like a fish and cannot be captured by a net from a boat. One idea is to catch it when it is on the land.”
JAPAN
Two whaling ships set sail
A pair of whaling vessels left on Friday for the northwestern Pacific, aiming to catch 260 whales for scientific research, a fisheries ministry official said. The Yushin Maru and Yushin Maru No. 2 departed from Shimonoseki port in Yamaguchi to join the mother vessel, Nisshin Maru, which has already set sail, the official said. The fleet is scheduled to catch about 260 of the mammals, including 100 minke whales and 10 sperm whales, between now and early August, the official said. Commercial whaling is banned under an international treaty, but Japan has since 1987 carried out “lethal research” in the name of science.
NORTH KOREA
North denies jamming
Pyongyang has denied claims that it jammed electronic signals on hundreds of flights and ships in South Korea. Seoul said the North interfered with GPS on civilian flights and commercial ships operating near the nations’ western border between late last month and earlier this week. The North’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications on Friday called Seoul’s claim a “smear campaign” and accused the South of trying to escalate tension.
UNITED STATES
Japan unnerved by plaque
Japanese officials are asking a small northern New Jersey town with a large Korean immigrant population to remove a public monument dedicated to women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II. The New York Times reported on Friday that Palisades Park administrators were surprised by the request from two delegations of visiting Japanese officials. Town officials have declined the request to remove the plaque. It was dedicated in 2010 to the “comfort women” of World War II, many of whom were Korean.
INDIA
Bus crash kills 16 people
About 16 people died when a bus carrying Muslim pilgrims exploded in a ball of fire after colliding head-on with a truck in the north of the country, officials said yesterday. The bus, which was en route to the Muslim shrine of Ajmer Sharif, slammed into a truck parked on a road near Bahraich Town, 105km from Lucknow, the state capital of Uttar Pradesh, on Friday, district officials said. The bus erupted in flames after it crashed, leading to police to suspect that cooking gas cylinders carried by the passengers were to blame for the explosion.
MALAWI
Gay ban repeal urged
President Joyce Banda urged parliament on Friday to repeal the country’s ban on homosexuality along with unpopular laws that allow newspaper bans and warrantless arrests. Banda is seeking to repeal some of the more oppressive laws pushed through by her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika, who died of a heart attack on April 5. Mutharika’s increasingly hardline laws led to the nation being ostracized by many in the international community, including major donors the US, Britain and Germany, which suspended funds to the country. Banda’s move to repeal the laws is a latest effort to address donor concerns about poor governance.
ITALY
Dog, cat tax withdrawn
A proposal to levy a tax on cats and dogs that stunned the nation on Friday turned out to be all bark and no bite after a wave of popular anger saw it withdrawn on the same day it was made public. Protests were voiced by everyone from animal rights groups — who said it would prompt more people to abandon animals — to politicians who called it everything from “grotesque” to “surreal” to “idiotic” to “shameful.” However, the proposal was withdrawn by early Friday evening and it seemed everyone on the commission where it was discussed was denying its paternity. “The only thing that’s left to tax are wives and children,” parliamentarian Domenico Scilipoti said.
RUSSIA
Amnesty condemns jailings
The head of the nation’s branch of Amnesty International said on Thursday that jailed opposition leaders Sergei Udaltsov and Alexei Navalny were “prisoners of conscience.” Both Navalny, a charismatic lawyer and whistle-blowing blogger and Udaltsov, a shaven-headed radical activist, are currently serving the latest in a series of 15-day terms for disobeying police at protests. The position of Amnesty International is that they are prisoners of conscience, Sergei Nikitin, director of the group’s office in Moscow said, confirming earlier comments to the Russian news agency Interfax.
RUSSIA
Man rescued from chute
A man had to be rescued by emergency workers from a garbage chute where he jumped to escape his girlfriend, but ended up getting stuck after sliding down three floors, officials said on Thursday. “According to the 31-year-old victim, he jumped into the metal chute on the eighth floor to escape his girlfriend,” the emergency ministry branch in the oil-rich Tyumen region said on its Web site. The un-identified man apparently traveled three floors down the chute before getting jammed on the fifth floor level, when he started calling for help. Rescue workers had to use an “electric instrument” to cut the metal and extricate the victim and passed him to a waiting ambulance team, the ministry said.
MEXICO
Murder suspects detained
The army says it has detained eight suspected members of the Gulf cartel and seized drugs, guns and hand grenades during investigations into the May 13 discovery of 49 dismembered bodies on a highway in the north. The Defense Department says the suspects were caught on Thursday as part of an operation designed to capture those responsible for the grisly discovery in the city of Cadereyta. The department said on Friday that a total of 44 people have been detained and 140 guns and about 3.6 tonnes of marijuana have been seized during the investigations.
BRAZIL
Police on guard for terrorists
Authorities will closely monitor security at major international events the country will be hosting to thwart any terrorist plots, Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said on Friday. Patriota was reacting to an unsourced report from Washington in the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera stating that security services were on alert following plans by a group allegedly close to Iran to attack in Brazil, Colombia and possibly Bolivia. In November last year, Roberto Troncon, chief of the Sao Paulo federal police, said he was concerned about possible terror attacks during the 2014 World Cup, saying that authorities were working on “a scenario of rather high risk.”
UNITED STATES
Priest sentenced in death plot
A Texas jury has sentenced a former Roman Catholic priest to 60 years in prison for plotting the death of a man who accused him of sexual abuse. Prosecutors had asked jurors on Friday for a life sentence for 53-year-old John Fiala. His defense attorney argued that anything more than 15 years would be a “travesty.” The Dallas Morning News reports the former priest will be eligible for parole after 15 years. Fiala was convicted on Thursday for solicitation of capital murder. Prosecutors say Fiala tried to hire a neighbor’s brother to kill the man who accused him of abuse in 2008, when Fiala was the priest at a rural West Texas parish and his accuser was 16.
UNITED STATES
Gay marriage goes viral
President Barack Obama’s announcement that he favors same-sex marriage led to a huge spike on the video--sharing Web site YouTube. The announcement resulted in a record number of searches and a rush of users uploading videos on the subject. Gay marriage was also the most popular topic on YouTube’s news and politics category this week. Gay rights issues have a history of sparking online viral videos. Following Obama’s announcement, more videos with the key words “gay marriage” were uploaded on YouTube than ever before, drawing more than 3 million views and 100,000 comments.
VENEZUELA
Four die in helicopter crash
The defense minister said a military helicopter had crashed during a training flight, killing four servicemen. Minister of Defense General Henry Rangel Silva said one of the five on board the helicopter was injured, but survived. Rangel said the Russian-made MI-17 helicopter crashed during a training flight at an airport in the western town of San Felipe. He said among those killed in Friday’s crash was Colonel Oscar Martinez Mora, a flight instructor and commander of a helicopter battalion in the town. Rangel said the helicopter had been about 10m off the ground when it suddenly dropped and crashed. He said officials are investigating what might have caused the accident.
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
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
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
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