AUSTRALIA
Pilots making errors: memo
Some Qantas pilots are making mistakes as they return from long breaks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, an internal memo reported yesterday by Australian media said. Among the errors listed in Qantas pilot reports were starting takeoff with the parking brake on and misreading the altitude as airspeed, a report by the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age said. It also cited switches in cockpit panels being in the wrong position, and crew looking back at an event and “not realizing that they were overloaded or had lost situational awareness.” The memo by Qantas’ fleet operations chiefs reportedly said that the COVID-19 related disruption to flights meant pilots had less recent flight experience, a requirement known as “recency.” As a result, the memo is quoted as saying, expert pilots “experienced a subsequent reduction in cognitive capacity.”
PERU
President faces prosecution
Prosecutors on Tuesday said that they would investigate President Pedro Castillo when his term ends for the alleged crimes of influence peddling, collusion and illegal sponsorship. Attorney general Zoraida Avalos Rivera “opened a preliminary investigation” into the president “for allegedly committing the crimes” of aggravated influence peddling, as perpetrator, and collusion, as participant, the agency said in a statement. The proceedings will be suspended until Castillo’s five-year term ends in 2026, as the president has “absolute immunity that transcends the scope of criminal proceedings.”
UNITED STATES
Twins split by new year
In years to come, Aylin and Alfredo Trujillo, who were born over New Year’s, might feel that they stand out in a crowd because they are twins. They will certainly have a tale to tell about their birthdays, which fall on different days, months and years. “It was a surprise,” their mother, Fatima Madrigal, 28, told reporters on Tuesday in an interview from Greenfield, California. At 11.45pm on New Year’s Eve on Friday, Fatima Madrigal gave birth to a son Alfredo Antonio Trujillo in Salinas, California. Fifteen minutes later, as the clock struck midnight and hospital staff rang in the new year, his sister Aylin arrived. The twins were more than two weeks early, as Madrigal’s due date was Jan. 16. Madrigal said her partner, Robert Trujillo, and their other three children, aged 11, three and one, were over the moon with the new arrivals. “I was kind of shocked because twins don’t run in my family, nor in my partner’s family,” she said. “So we were really surprised that we got blessed with two babies, and it’s a boy and a girl, so we’re complete.” For now, the twins will celebrate their birthdays on the same day, Madrigal said.
UNITED STATES
Dog leads police to crash
First thought to be a lost dog, a German shepherd named Tinsley successfully led New Hampshire law enforcement to the site of its owner’s late-night rollover crash. Both of the truck’s occupants were seriously hurt, but thanks to Tinsley’s efforts, they quickly received medical assistance once police found the vehicle, WMUR-TV reported on Tuesday. “They could tell the dog was trying to show them something,” Lieutenant Daniel Baldassarre of the New Hampshire State Police said. “He kept trying to get away from them, but didn’t run away totally. It was kind of: ‘Follow me. Follow me.’ And they did that and you know, to their surprise to see the guardrail damaged and to look down to where the dog is looking at, it’s just, they were almost in disbelief.”
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
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