JAPAN
Pro wrestler dies at 22
Hana Kimura, a pro wrestler who appeared in the latest series of the popular reality show Terrace House, has died. She was 22. Her organization Stardom Wrestling confirmed Kimura’s death on Saturday. Kimura was found dead at her home, local media reported. Kimura became the target of massive bullying on social media over her role on the Terrace House show on Netflix, which involves three men and three women temporarily living together at a shared house in Tokyo. The show was temporarily suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In her latest Instagram posting on Friday, she published a photograph of herself and her cat, with a message saying: “Goodbye.” Her death has triggered a wave of messages on social media against anonymous bullying.
JAPAN
Emergency to end in Tokyo
The government is set to lift the state of emergency in Tokyo, its surrounding regions and the northern island of Hokkaido today as new COVID-19 cases tail off, local media reported. The city of 14 million people on Saturday reported just two cases, the lowest number of infections since the state of emergency was declared early last month. If the trends are confirmed in data for yesterday, the government plans to end the state of emergency, Japan Broadcasting Corp reported, without saying where it got the information. The move would bring the measure to an end across the whole nation a week ahead of schedule and enable more businesses to restart in the Tokyo region, whose economy is about the size of Canada’s.
TUNISIA
Migrant killed in shipwreck
At least one migrant has drowned, six are missing and more than 80 have been rescued off the country’s coast, authorities said, amid a new wave of dangerous attempts to traffic migrants across the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. The coast guard rescued 11 migrants after an emergency call from a boat that was filling with water on Saturday off the city of Sfax, coast guard spokesman Lieutenant Houssameddine Jbabli said. Divers from emergency services retrieved one body, while the captain and chief trafficker fled, he said. Six others who had been aboard the boat were missing, Sfax Governor Anis Oueslati told the national news agency TAP. The coast guard also rescued 70 people from another boat in poor condition off the Kerkennah Islands, the governor said.
AFGHANISTAN
Ghani vows hasty release
President Ashraf Ghani yesterday vowed to speed up the release of Taliban prisoners after welcoming a surprise offer by the insurgents of a three-day ceasefire during the Eid al-Fitr. “As a responsible government we take one more step forward — I announce that I will expedite the Taliban prisoner releases,” Ghani said in an address to the nation marking the holiday. He also urged the militants to press on with the release of the security personnel they hold.
GREECE
Occupation claim denied
The government yesterday dismissed reports that Turkish soldiers had occupied a strip of Greek territory in the Evros border region, where Athens is expanding a fence to keep migrants out. Minister of Foreign Affairs Nikos Dendias said allegations, picked up the British press, that Turkish troops had occupied a patch of land that is normally submerged at this time of year on Greece’s side of the border were “utterly false.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema