UNITED STATES
Marathon reading of Melville
Moby-Dick fans from around the world are getting ready for their own grueling quest — a marathon reading of Herman Melville’s classic. The New Bedford Whaling Museum this weekend is holding its 20th annual nonstop reading of the man versus whale novel. More than 150 volunteers are to recite snippets of the novel aloud in a cover-to-cover reading that starts at midday tomorrow, goes through the night and ends on Sunday about 25 hours later. Hundreds are expected to attend the reading while thousands more follow online. This year’s celebrity reader, who always reads the first section of the book and its famous first line “Call me Ishmael,” is author Nathaniel Philbrick.
UNITED STATES
Florida executes Oscar Ray
Florida put to death on Thursday a former truck driver who murdered three young women in 1986 and made headlines again after one of his defense team fell in love with him. Convicted serial killer Oscar Ray Bolin, 53, became the first person to be executed in the US this year after receiving a lethal injection at 10:16pm, a local prison administration official said. Bolin was also convicted of kidnapping and rape in another case. His victims were aged 17, 25 and 26.
BOLIVIA
Titicaca to be cleaned up
Bolivia and Peru on Thursday agreed to provide more than US$500 million toward cleaning up Lake Titicaca, whose polluted waters are home to some animals nearing extinction, a Bolivian environment official said. The deal, which is meant to improve the lake’s biodiversity, includes environmental management and recovery through to 2025. Lake Titicaca, the highest in the world, at an altitude of 3,800m above sea level, provides a habitat for a number of frogs, birds and fish, including two species that are close to extinction. Minister for the Environment and Water Alexandra Moreira and Peruvian Minister of State for the Environment Manuel Pulgar signed the agreement during a public event. “For the short term we have a limit of US$117 million and for the long term US$400 million,” Moreira’s advisor Sergio Arispe said. “It’s a logistical matter we are trying to manage through 2025,” he said. Part of the waste in the lake is generated by the Bolivian city of El Alto, near La Paz, which is home to about 800,000 people.
HONDURAS
‘White City’ search begins
Honduras on Thursday said it was starting a major archeological dig for a mysterious, ancient “White City” supposedly hidden in jungle in its northeast that explorers and legends have spoken of for centuries. “Today a group of archeologists and scientists is traveling to the White City to start excavations in coming days,” President Juan Orlando Hernandez said in a speech. The hope is that they might uncover incontrovertible proof of the existence of the fabled site, which has also been called “the City of the Monkey God” and, in Spanish, la Ciudad Blanca. According to 16th-century Spanish conquistadors and to legend, the settlement, dating back thousands of years, is meant to be filled with fabulous riches. Explorers over the past century have claimed several times to have spotted the White City in the thick jungle inside the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve on Honduras’ Caribbean coast. Archeologists in recent decades found what looked like ancient mounds. Then in 2012 an American documentary team using mapping technology in a small plane discovered what appeared to be the overgrown remains of an ancient civilization.
‘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
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
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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