UNITED STATES
Four die in helicopter crash
The navy on Tuesday said that four people died in the crash of a contractor’s helicopter on the Hawaii island of Kauai. The Pacific Missile Range Facility said the aircraft crashed on the north side of the installation shortly after 10am. There were no survivors. The names of those killed were not yet available, it said. The helicopter was being flown by Croman Corp in support of a training operation, the missile range facility said in a news release. The National Transportation Safety Board said on Twitter that the agency is investigating the crash of the Sikorsky S-61N helicopter. The Sikorsky S-61N was built between 1959 and 1980 by Sikorsky Aircraft, which is now part of Lockheed Martin. It was designed to carry a substantial freight or passenger payload.
ECUADOR
Prisoners to be pardoned
President Guillermo Lasso on Tuesday announced that about 5,000 prisoners would be pardoned to reduce overcrowding in the country’s prisons, which were hit with riots that left more than 320 inmates dead last year. “I hope that at least 5,000 people deprived of their freedom will be released,” the president told reporters. He said he aimed “to end overcrowding by the end of the year and thus have a much more favorable environment for security and for social rehabilitation inside the prisons.” The country’s 65 prisons have capacity for 30,000 inmates, but house about 39,000, equivalent to 30 percent overcrowding.
UGANDA
Author arrives in Germany
An award-winning Ugandan author who fled the country after being charged with insulting President Yoweri Museveni and his son has arrived in Germany to seek medical treatment after being “tortured” in jail, his lawyer said yesterday. “He arrived in Germany this morning,” Eron Kiiza, the lawyer for Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, told reporters, describing the news as “a big relief.” The novelist was detained shortly after Christmas and later charged with “offensive communication.”
TONGA
Web connection restored
The country’s main Internet connection to the rest of the world has finally been restored more than five weeks after a huge volcanic eruption and tsunami severed a crucial undersea cable. Three people were killed by the Jan. 15 tsunami, dozens of homes were destroyed and drinking water was tainted. The fiber-optic cable is now fully operational again after being reconnected on Tuesday, said Samiuela Fonua, chairperson of Tonga Cable Ltd, the state-owned company that owns the cable. “It’s a huge relief when you know things have come to the end and are working well,” Fonua said.
UNITED STATES
Oscar awards slimmed down
To combat slumping ratings, the Academy Awards are undergoing a radical slimming down, with eight awards to be presented off-air during next month’s telecast. In a letter sent on Tuesday to members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, the group’s president, David Rubin, said that the awards for film editing, production design, sound, makeup and hairstyling, music (original score) and the three short film awards for documentary, live-action and animated short would be presented at the ceremony before the live broadcast begins on ABC. Instead of starting the ceremony and broadcast all at once, the Dolby Theatre ceremony is to begin an hour before the telecast does.
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
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