JAPAN
‘Voyeur’ stabs court officers
A man accused of taking pictures up a woman’s skirt stabbed two court officers yesterday as the verdict in his case was being delivered, a court spokesman and media said. Seiji Yodogawa, 30, reportedly yelled “what a rotten justice system,” as he lunged at the two officers standing in the court gallery and slashed them on their faces and backs with a hidden knife. Yodogawa was immediately taken into custody on attempted murder charges, the spokesman said. The two policemen were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, public broadcaster NHK reported. Yodogawa had been out on bail and did not go through a body search when he turned up for the verdict in his case yesterday. The original charge against him has been temporarily suspended since the verdict was not fully read, the court spokesman said.
PAKISTAN
Lion’s owner arrested
Police have arrested a man who took his pet lion for a nighttime drive through the streets of Karachi after video of the incident went viral on social media, police said on Thursday. Keeping wild cats as pets is not uncommon in the nation, where wealthy businesspeople have been known to operate private zoos and sometimes parade the animals for the public. The brief clip shows a docile lion lounging in the back of a pickup truck, restrained by a leash and collar, as curious onlookers walk past. Businessman Saqlain Javed was arrested on Wednesday, but later freed on bail. “The man was driving around with his lion near a local market and it was a matter of endangering public life and property,” senior police superintendent Muqadas Haider told reporters. Javed has a license to run a personal zoo and raise lion cubs, but he is not allowed to transport such animals on city streets., Haider said.
UNITED STATES
No peeing in elevator
Officials in an Arkansas county have a plea for courthouse visitors: Please stop urinating in the elevator. Craighead County officials hope new security cameras will deter the steady stream of culprits who have been relieving themselves in the courthouse elevator in Jonesboro, a college town about 185km northeast of Little Rock. Maintenance workers said the problem has persisted for years — even though the restrooms are only about 8m from the elevator. Officials told the Jonesboro Sun that the cameras, installed last fall, have caught three men in the act, one of whom has been cited for disorderly conduct and fined US$105. A third instance was recorded on Monday. County officials said they plan to issue a citation.
MEXICO
Trump parody beer a hit
Domestic and US brewers have reinvented US President Donald Trump as a gun-slinging mariachi folk musician to promote a new beer celebrating cross-border cooperation. The label of the new Amigous Cerveza craft beer — depicting a frowning Trump in a sombrero, his trousers held up with a swastika belt buckle — mocks his divisive campaign rhetoric against Mexico and his pledge to build a border wall. The rear label says the 71-year-old New Yorker belongs “in a mad house, not the White House.” “We knew that a Trump label was going to be controversial, but it’s been selling extremely fast,” Casa Cervecera Cru Cru CEO Luis Enrique de la Reguera said. Launched in May, the beer that misspells amigo to poke fun at Americans’ pronunciation of the Spanish word for friend, surprised its creators. The original batch of 1,200 bottles and 400 liters on tap sold out in the first week.
‘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
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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
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
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