JAPAN
Troops dig cars from snow
The Self-Defense Forces yesterday mobilized to help dig out more than 200 vehicles stuck in heavy snow in the west of the nation, officials said. Tottori Prefecture has seen heavy snowfall since Monday night with a record 1 meter accumulating in one town. Tottori Governor Shinji Hirai had requested the military aid early yesterday. “In addition to 28 personnel who arrived in the early morning, 33 more are on the way,” Daisuke Amano of the prefecture’s disaster prevention unit said. He said there were about 240 cars unable to move at 7:30am.
BANGLADESH
Trees to attract lightning
The government has begun planting 1 million palm trees nationwide to help prevent hundreds of people being killed by lightning strikes every year, a top official said yesterday. Authorities last year declared lightning a natural disaster as official tallies recorded more than 200 deaths last year, with 82 people dying on a single day in May. Experts say the real number was actually much higher, with one independent monitor saying 349 people were killed by lightning strikes last year.
CHINA
Japanese hotelier snubbed
The National Tourism Administration has urged tour operators to sever ties with a Japanese hotel chain amid an escalating row over the hotelier’s denial of the 1937 massacre by Japanese troops in Nanjing in 1937. A furore erupted this month over books by Toshio Motoya, president of Tokyo-based hotel and real-estate developer APA Group, that air his revisionist views and are placed in every room of the firm’s more than 400 hotels. Motoya, using the pen name Seiji Fuji, wrote that stories of the Nanjing Massacre were “impossible.”
INDONESIA
Weapons smuggling probed
Authorities are investigating allegations of weapons smuggling by dozens of its peacekeepers who were arrested in Sudan, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. Sudanese media reported on Friday last week that the North Darfur State administration arrested Indonesian police officers who were suspected of trying to smuggle out 29 Kalashnikov rifles and about 70 guns in their luggage at El Fasher Airport. Ministry spokesman Armanatha Nasir said the initial information they received was that the luggage did not belong to the police unit and the UN is currently conducting an investigation. National Police spokesman Martinus Sitompul said the police officers are being held in a transit camp in Sudan. He insisted that the luggage that contained guns did not belong to the group, citing the chief of the police unit as saying it did not bear the identification stickers they use.
SOUTH KOREA
‘Pokemon Go’ released
Nintendo Co’s smash hit Pokemon Go was unleashed in the country yesterday, six months after it was released elsewhere in the world, a delay caused by security fears over Google Maps. “We have waited very long and worked very hard to launch ‘Pokemon Go’ in South Korea,” Pokemon Korea chief executiv Lim Jae-boem said. Pokemon Go relies on Google Maps to work, but in most of the country those functions have been limited by the government for national security reasons. Neither Niantic nor Pokemon Korea specified how they managed to work around the Google Maps challenge. “We used various publicly accessible data sources,” Niantic art director Dennis Hwang said.
PARLIAMENT CHAOS: Police forcibly removed Brazilian Deputy Glauber Braga after he called the legislation part of a ‘coup offensive’ and occupied the speaker’s chair Brazil’s lower house of Congress early yesterday approved a bill that could slash former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s prison sentence for plotting a coup, after efforts by a lawmaker to disrupt the proceedings sparked chaos in parliament. Bolsonaro has been serving a 27-year term since last month after his conviction for a scheme to stop Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from taking office after the 2022 election. Lawmakers had been discussing a bill that would significantly reduce sentences for several crimes, including attempting a coup d’etat — opening up the prospect that Bolsonaro, 70, could have his sentence cut to
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook Japan’s northeast region late on Monday, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. A tsunami as high as three metres (10 feet) could hit Japan’s northeastern coast after an earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 7.6 occurred offshore at 11:15 p.m. (1415 GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued for the prefectures of Hokkaido, Aomori and Iwate, and a tsunami of 40cm had been observed at Aomori’s Mutsu Ogawara and Hokkaido’s Urakawa ports before midnight, JMA said. The epicentre of the quake was 80 km (50 miles) off the coast of
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
A passerby could hear the cacophony from miles away in the Argentine capital, the unmistakable sound of 2,397 dogs barking — and breaking the unofficial world record for the largest-ever gathering of golden retrievers. Excitement pulsed through Bosques de Palermo, a sprawling park in Buenos Aires, as golden retriever-owners from all over Argentina transformed the park’s grassy expanse into a sea of bright yellow fur. Dog owners of all ages, their clothes covered in dog hair and stained with slobber, plopped down on picnic blankets with their beloved goldens to take in the surreal sight of so many other, exceptionally similar-looking ones.
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