UNITED KINGDOM
Ad riles North Koreans
Staff at a London hair salon say they had a close shave with North Korean officials after using the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to promote a discount. M&M Hair Academy says it was visited by two men from the nearby North Korean embassy after putting up a poster last week featuring a picture of Kim and the slogan “Bad Hair Day?” Barber Karim Nabbach said the manager refused to remove the poster and reported the incident to police. Metropolitan Police said on Tuesday that officers had spoken to both sides of the dispute and concluded “there were no offenses for us to investigate.”
UNITED STATES
Court to hear campaign case
Negative campaigning and mudslinging may be a fact of life in politics, but can false accusations made in the heat of an election be punished as a crime? That debate makes its way to the Supreme Court next week as the justices consider a challenge to an Ohio law that bars false statements about political candidates during a campaign. Groups across the political spectrum have criticized the law as a restriction on the First Amendment right to free speech. The court is not expected to rule directly on the constitutional issue, but will focus on whether the law can be challenged before it is actually enforced.
URUGUAY
‘Poorest’ leader lists worth
President Jose Mujica has declared US$322,883 in wealth. Mujica’s insistence on living simply has earned him the nickname “the poorest president in the world,” but his sworn declaration this year shows a 74 percent increase in wealth since 2012. He said that is because he did not put his money, about US$104,000, into bank accounts until recently. He still lives on a ramshackle flower farm with his wife, Senator Lucia Topolansky, and he reported the farm’s value at about US$108,000. The couple share ownership in two other properties. He also reported that he has three tractors and two 1987 VW Beetles. Meanwhile, Vice President Daniel Astori says he is worth US$389,000.
UNITED KINGDOM
Musicians lose appeal
Musicians who performed in the London production of War Horse have lost a legal bid to stop the National Theatre from replacing them with a recorded soundtrack. The five performers, laid off last month, asked the High Court for an injunction so they could keep their jobs pending a legal challenge. Judge Ross Cranston refused on Tuesday, saying reinstating the musicians would cause “not insignificant practical difficulty” for the company. However, he said the five had a strong case to argue for breach of contract. War Horse is one of the theater’s most successful shows, with productions running elsewhere in the county and in the US and Germany.
AUSTRALia
Pemier quits over wine
New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell quit yesterday amid mounting evidence that he failed to declare a A$3,000 (US$2,800) bottle of wine that arrived as a gift on his Sydney doorstep. O’Farrell told a corruption inquiry on Tuesday that he never received a bottle of 1959 Penfolds Grange Hermitage as a gift from businessman Nick Di Girolamo congratulating him weeks after his 2011 election win. Grange is an iconic label and is synonymous with expensive wine. Grange vintages are consistently rated among the nation’s best shiraz. O’Farrell, who described himself as “no wine aficionado,” was supposed to add such a valuable gift to a public register aimed at deterring political donors from buying influence.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
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