AUSTRALIA
No funeral for PM’s father
The father of Prime Minister Julia Gillard donated his body to science and did not want to be buried or remembered at a funeral, but privately mourned, his death notice said yesterday. John Gillard, 83, died suddenly on Saturday morning in Adelaide, prompting the prime minister to rush home from an APEC summit in Russia to be with her family. A death notice in the Adelaide Advertiser newspaper described Gillard as a “humble man who always sought to help others” and wanted those wishing to honor his memory to donate to Medecins San Frontieres, his favorite charity. “He died as he lived, and has donated his body to science and requested that there should be no formal funeral service,” the notice read. John Gillard and his wife, Moira, moved to Australia from Wales in 1966.
JAPAN
Judoka denies raping teen
Retired double Olympic judo gold medalist Masato Uchishiba yesterday denied raping one of his teenage students in a hotel room, as his trial opened in Tokyo. Uchishiba, 34, who won the under-66kg title at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, maintains he had consensual sex with the girl, who was drunk after a training camp party in the capital in September last year. Prosecutors say Uchishiba attacked the girl, a member of the college judo team he coached, in a hotel room after she fell asleep at a karaoke parlor, intoxicated. “When she became aware, she resisted by saying: ‘What are you doing? Stop.’ But he turned up the volume of the television and covered her mouth with his hand,” prosecutors said, according to NHK. Married man Uchishiba admits that sex took place, but denies it was forceful.
ESTONIA
Mock ad sparks uproar
A magazine insists it did not mean to cause offense following an uproar over a mock diet advertisement showing emaciated prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp. “It was published on our jokes page. I think people living in other cultural environments than ours just don’t understand it like we do,” said Sulev Vedler, deputy editor of Eesti Ekspress. He claimed the “Doctor Mengele weight-loss pill” ad was a swipe at national gas firm GasTerm Eesti, which last month posted a photo of the Auschwitz death camp’s notorious “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate on its Web site. GasTerm Eesti rapidly pulled the photo and apologized for what it claimed was a misplaced attempt to contrast lethal gas — which was used to kill Jews at Auschwitz — with the safe, home-heating variety. “For us it was an anti-fascist joke and a reaction to the recent, improper advertisement of one Estonian company. We didn’t mean to have fun at the expense of any nationality, there is no nationality mentioned in the picture,” Vedler said.
RUSSIA
Team eyes mammoth clone
Scientists have discovered well-preserved frozen woolly mammoth fragments deep in Siberia that may contain living cells, edging a tad closer to the Jurassic Park possibility of cloning a prehistoric animal, the mission’s organizer said on Tuesday. North-Eastern Federal University said an international team of researchers had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow about 100m underground during an expedition in the northeastern province of Yakutia. Expedition chief Semyon Grigoryev said South Korean scientists with the team had set a goal of finding living cells in the hope of cloning a mammoth. “Only after thorough laboratory research will it be known whether these are living cells or not,” Grigoryev said.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Tainted alcohol kills eight
Eight people have died after drinking bootleg vodka and rum containing methanol, police and media said on Tuesday, in the worst case of fatal alcohol poisoning in the country in at least 30 years. About 20 people remain in hospital and police warned more cases could emerge. While such serious cases are rare, state and industry officials estimate that illegal alcohol sales are up and account for 10 to 20 percent of the market. The first victim was taken into hospital last Thursday in the Moravian-Silesian region in the northeast of the country. Police have detained a 36-year-old man suspected of being the source of the tainted alcohol. Prime Minister Petr Necas called the situation serious. The health ministry has stepped up checks on restaurants and bars after some of the suspect alcohol turned up in Prague.
GERMANY
Implants for transsexuals
Male-to-female transsexuals have a legal right to breast enlargement operations when hormone therapy fails to give them a feminine shape, the Federal Social Court in the central city of Kassel said on Tuesday. A transsexual may receive implants if her new breasts have not yet reached the size of a bra’s A-cup, the court said. “Transsexual insurance policyholders can make a claim to treatment measures to allow them to adapt their gender, including surgical procedures on healthy organs to minimize their psychological suffering, so as to approach the appearance of the other sex that is desired,” the court said. It said such a procedure was justified even if the patient had not yet had a sex-change operation. The court ruled in the case of a 62-year-old whose health insurance plan paid for hormone treatment and a sex change, but whose breasts failed to grow to female proportions.
UNITED STATES
Lake source of bad smell
A rotten egg smell which had Californians turning up their noses was caused by dead fish or algae in a nearby lake, and nothing more sinister, experts said on Tuesday. More than 200 people called authorities on Monday after the sulfurous odor was detected over a 240km area, leading to online speculation, including that it was some kind of geothermic event preceding a long-feared mega earthquake experts believe will shake California. However, experts at the South Coast Air Quality Management District said the source was almost certainly the Salton Sea, a huge lake a couple of hours east of San Diego. “We now have solid evidence that clearly points to the Salton Sea as the source of a very large and unusual odor event,” the air monitoring body’s executive officer Barry Wallerstein said. Hydrogen sulfide, “a product of organic decay such as that occurring in the Salton Sea, has an unmistakable rotten-egg odor,” the center said.
UNITED STATES
Boy, 8, safe after drive
Authorities said an eight-year-old boy escaped injury after taking his mother’s car for a spin through the neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Monday morning and hitting several objects before his joy ride ended on a neighbor’s lawn. Police in the town of Cheektowaga told reporters that the boy would not be charged with reckless driving. The boy’s mother said she woke up to find her son missing and called police. The boy was already in the car driving down the street. When he came to a nearby road with heavy traffic, he turned around and headed back home. On the way, he jumped a curb, ran over a street sign, a fire hydrant and a fence before the car came to a rest on a neighbor’s lawn.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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