JAPAN
Housewife, 79, kills husband
A 79-year-old housewife who allegedly clubbed her husband to death in a row over an affair he had four decades ago has been arrested, police and press reports said yesterday. Yoshiko Suzuki used a “stick-like object” when she attacked her husband, Masaharu, also 79, at their home on Sunday night in the town of Nakai, about 60km west of Tokyo, a regional police spokesman said. “My husband lost his job about 40 years ago because of an affair with a woman. We have often quarrelled over this matter,” the suspect told investigators. Police intervened in one of these quarrels in September last year, TV Asahi said. The couple lived together with their daughter, 43, who was out shopping at the time of the alleged attack. Suzuki was arrested on charges of assault resulting in death on Monday and handed over to public prosecutors in Kanagawa prefecture on Tuesday.
CHINA
Dog-meat festival held early
Residents in a southern city that has come under fire for an annual summer solstice festival in which thousands of dogs are slaughtered for food have held their feasts early to avoid attention. Chinese state media say some residents of Yulin started gathering last weekend and eating dog meat and lychees to celebrate the longest day of the year, ahead of Saturday’s actual solstice. Reports say the residents wanted to avoid protests by animal rights activists who are angered by the practice. Photographs on state media show groups of Yulin city residents tucking into plates of meat and vegetables around dining tables strewn with lychees. According to Yulin tradition, eating dog and lychee and drinking liquor on the solstice is supposed to keep people healthy during winter.
CHINA
Test-takers hire surrogates
At least 127 test-takers in Henan Province hired other people to take the country’s all-important college entrance exam on their behalf, the provincial college admission office said. The Higher Education Admission Office of the province promised a full investigation into the scam after state broadcaster China Central Television ran an expose about it on Tuesday. Education authorities have imposed increasingly strict rules to guard against cheating during the exam, which is called the gaokao and has the reputation of creating a level playing field for academic advancement. Cheating is not unheard of, especially using electronic gadgets, but hiring surrogate test-takers has been rare until now. Almost all high-school graduates must take the exam, and their scores are the key criterion for what tier of university they can enter. Competition in Henan Province is especially intense because it has a larger student population and fewer allocated slots in universities than many other provinces.
MALAYSIA
Boat sinks, 37 missing
Thirty-seven people remained missing yesterday after an apparently overloaded boat carrying Indonesian illegal migrants heading home for Ramadan sank overnight in rough seas off the west coast, killing at least two. Officials said 58 people had been rescued or made it to land by themselves after the accident at about midnight near Port Klang, the country’s largest port. “But 37 people are still missing and we have found two bodies,” said Mohammed Hambali Yaakup, head of the Port Klang office of the Maritime Enforcement Agency. “We plucked some of the survivors from the sea and others were found on land.”
UNITED STATES
Boy finds ‘mummy’
An adolescent boy found the mummified body of a man hanging in a closet while exploring what appeared to be an abandoned house in southwestern Ohio. Ken Betz, director of the Montgomery County coroner’s office in Dayton, said the body found on Sunday had the hardened, leathery appearance of a mummy because 53-year-old Edward Brunton’s tissue had dried up and was preserved in his home’s cold, dark conditions. Betz said Brunton was homeless before inheriting money from his mother to buy the house in October 2009 and probably died soon after that. He said Brunton’s death was ruled a suicide caused by hanging by the neck. Brunton’s house appeared vacant and the property was overgrown with weeds and posted with city cleanup warnings.
UNITED STATES
Georgia inmate executed
A Georgia inmate convicted of rape and murder has become the first person to be executed in the nation since the botched lethal injection of a prisoner in Oklahoma in April. Fifty-nine-year-old Marcus Wellons was executed by injection on Tuesday night after last-minute appeals were denied. A corrections spokesman said he was pronounced dead at 11:56pm. The execution proceeded smoothly: From the time he was brought into the room and the tubes with the drugs were administered took about 35 minutes. Wellons was lying still with his eyes shut while the drugs were administered. Wellons was convicted and sentenced to die in 1993 for the 1989 death of his 15-year-old neighbor, India Roberts, a high-school sophomore from the Atlanta suburbs who was raped and strangled. Georgia uses one drug — the sedative pentobarbital — for executions. Oklahoma uses three.
GERMANY
Researcher being rescued
A mountain rescue service said it could complete the rescue of an injured cave researcher from the country’s deepest cave today or tomorrow, as experts make good progress through the labyrinth’s passages and shafts. Johann Westhauser suffered head injuries on June 8 while nearly 1,000m underground in the Riesending cave system in the Alps near the Austrian border. Teams of rescue experts embarked on Friday last week to bring Westhauser, who is strapped to a stretcher, to the surface. By Tuesday, they had raised him to about 500m below the ground. Mountain rescue official Stefan Schneider told reporters the operation is on schedule. “Let’s wait and see whether the rescue we’re all eagerly awaiting comes off on Thursday or Friday,” he said.
FRANCE
‘Avenger’ guilty of kidnap
A court has convicted a 76-year-old man of ordering a cross-border kidnapping to avenge his daughter’s death. The conviction yesterday culminates Andre Bamberski’s decades-long mission for justice after his 15-year-old daughter Kalinka died in 1982. Magistrate Marie-Helene Calvano in Mulhouse said the court handed Bamberski a one-year suspended prison sentence. Bamberski was accused of hiring henchmen to kidnap the girl’s stepfather, Dieter Krombach, in Germany in 2009 and bring him to France for trial. As a result, Krombach is now serving a 15-year prison sentence for “intentional violence that led to unintentional death.” Krombach, 79, was accused of giving the girl a dangerous injection so he could rape her. Germany had refused to extradite Krombach, so Bamberski took justice into his own hands.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
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