JAPAN
Typhoon kills one person
Typhoon Nanmadol yesterday brought ferocious winds and record rainfall to parts of the nation, killing at least one person, disrupting transport and forcing some manufacturers to suspend operations. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida delayed his departure to New York, where he is due to deliver a speech at the UN General Assembly, to tomorrow to monitor the impact of the storm, media reported. State broadcaster NHK said one man was killed when his car was submerged by a flooded river and firefighters were trying to determine if a man in his 40s was inside a hut that was buried by a landslide. At least 69 people were injured, it added. About 340,000 households, most of them in Kyushu, were without electricity early yesterday, the trade ministry said.
RUSSIA
Cosmonaut Polyakov dies
Valery Polyakov, the Soviet cosmonaut who set the record for the longest single stay in space, has died at age 80, space agency Roscosmos announced yesterday. Polyakov’s record of 437 days in space began on Jan. 8, 1994, when he and two others blasted off on a two-day flight to the Soviet space station Mir. While aboard Mir, he orbited the Earth more than 7,000 times, before returning on March 22, 1995. Upon landing, he declined to be carried out of the Soyuz capsule, as is common practice to allow readjustment to the pull of gravity. He was helped to climb out himself and he walked to a nearby transport vehicle. Polyakov had trained as a physician and wanted to demonstrate that the human body could endure extended periods in space.
SWITZERLAND
IS attacker gets nine years
A Swiss woman was yesterday given a nine-year jail term for slashing two people in the name of the Islamic State (IS) group, but her sentence was suspended so she can undergo psychiatric treatment. The criminal court judges found the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, guilty of two counts of attempted murder. She was also found guilty of terrorism-linked charges. The 29-year-old woman’s mental state has been at the heart of the trial at the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona, in the Italian-speaking Ticino region where the attack occurred. The attack, in which no one died, took place on Nov. 24, 2020, in the plush Manor department store in Lugano. The woman had suddenly lunged at two random women shopping at the store, attempting to slit their throats. One of the two victims suffered a serious neck injury, while the second sustained wounds on one hand and managed, with others, to control the assailant until the police arrived.
SOUTH KOREA
Stalker’s name revealed
Police yesterday unveiled the identity of a man accused of murdering a colleague ahead of a court ruling on whether he had stalked her, a case that sparked a public demand for tougher measures to stamp out such crimes. Jeon Joo-hwan, 31, was arrested on charges of murder over the stabbing death on Wednesday last week of a 28-year-old woman in a subway restroom while she was on duty, officials said. Both were employees of Seoul Metro, the operator of subway lines in the capital, though Jeon was relieved of his duties in October last year after police began investigating the stalking accusation. A court on Thursday last week had been set to decide on Jeon’s indictment for the stalking accusation, a police officer said, but that hearing has since been postponed to Thursday next week.
The rivalry between Asia’s two biggest countries has extended into outer space. After India’s landing of its Chandrayaan-3 rover on the moon last month — becoming the first country to put a spacecraft near the lunar south pole and breaking China’s record for the southernmost lunar landing — a top Chinese scientist has said claims about the accomplishment are overstated. Ouyang Ziyuan (歐陽自遠), lauded as the father of China’s lunar exploration program, told the Chinese-language Science Times newspaper that the Chandrayaan-3 landing site, at 69 degrees south latitude, was nowhere close to the pole, defined as between 88.5 and 90 degrees. On Earth,
SCIENTIFIC TREASURE: Preserved building blocks from the dawn of our solar system, the samples would help scientists better understand how the Earth and life formed NASA’s first asteroid samples fetched from deep space on Sunday parachuted into the Utah desert to cap a seven-year journey. In a flyby of Earth, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft released the sample capsule from 100,000km out. The small capsule landed four hours later on a remote expanse of military land, as the ship set off after another asteroid. “We have touchdown,” mission recovery operations announced, immediately repeating the news since the landing occurred three minutes early. Officials later said the orange striped parachute opened four times higher than anticipated — at about 6,100m — basing it on the deceleration rate. To everyone’s relief, the
Venezuela’s Tocoron prison was like a town all unto itself, boasting restaurants, a pool, a zoo, a playground for inmates’ kids and so much more as a powerful gang ruled the roost, using the facility as a criminal operations center. “Steak House. Enjoy,” read a sign on the wall of one of the restaurants in the prison, which thousands of soldiers and police stormed this week. Tocoron is empty of the 1,600 prisoners who lived here and have been moved elsewhere. Gone is the gang that controlled it — Tren de Aragua, which has tentacles in various Latin American countries. “Life was nicer
A little-known former shipping executive and ex-Goldman Sachs trader on Sunday pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Greek political history after winning the leadership of SYRIZA, the main opposition party. Stefanos Kasselakis, 35, is a self-styled self-made entrepreneur who says he wants to promote transparency, boost labor and social rights, speed up justice, and eliminate perks for bankers and politicians. Picking up more than 56 percent of the vote based on preliminary results, he defeated four other candidates — three of them prominent SYRIZA former ministers — after a whirlwind campaign mostly waged on social media. “We want a Greece where
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