PERU
Whaling moratorium stays
A four-decade-old moratorium on commercial whaling is to remain in force after a proposal to overturn it was withdrawn on Thursday at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Lima. Another proposal to declare whaling a source of global food security was also abandoned in a plenary session after failing to gain consensus among delegates from 60 countries. “We are relieved that the dark and dangerous resolution to resume commercial whaling has been withdrawn,” said Grettel Delgadillo, Latin America representative for Humane Society International. The first proposal was submitted by Antigua and Barbuda, which is not a whaling nation, but has said it would pursue the matter at the next IWC meeting in Australia in 2026. Delgadillo said pro-whaling stances by countries that do not consume whale meat “demonstrates how Japan continues to influence the IWC, despite not being a member anymore.” The food security proposal was submitted by a host of African countries, which also have no whaling tradition, but are allies of Japan, non-governmental organizations said. Japan is one of three countries to continue whale hunting, along with Norway and Iceland. An estimated 1,200 whales are killed by hunters every year.
INDIA
Boy ‘killed’ in sacrifice
Five people were arrested for the killing of a seven-year-old boy in an alleged ritual sacrifice aimed at bringing good fortune to a public school, police said yesterday. The boy was found dead in his bed on Sunday night at the hostel where he lived in the city of Hathras. Instead of alerting authorities, police said that school director Dinesh Baghel hid the body in the trunk of his car. Police officer Himanshu Mathur said the boy was killed before a black magic ceremony conducted by Baghel’s father. “The boy was meant to be taken to an altar as part of a ritual, but got killed before the ceremony could be completed,” he said. Baghel and his father were arrested along with three other teachers at the school, he said. Mathur did not give further details on how the child had died and local media reports said the body was undergoing a post-mortem examination.
UNITED KINGDOM
Bronte memorial corrected
With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Bronte sisters have got their dots back. More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was on Thursday amended to restore the diaereses — the two dots over the “e” in their surname. The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II. They were restored after Bronte historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Bronte Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them. “There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.” It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
Millions of dollars have poured into bets on who will win the US presidential election after a last-minute court ruling opened up gambling on the vote, upping the stakes on a too-close-to-call race between US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump that has already put voters on edge. Contracts for a Harris victory were trading between 48 and 50 percent in favor of the Democrat on Friday on Interactive Brokers, a firm that has taken advantage of a legal opening created earlier this month in the country’s long running regulatory battle over election markets. With just a month
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is in “excellent health” and fit for the presidency, according to a medical report published by the White House on Saturday as she challenged her rival, former US president Donald Trump, to publish his own health records. “Vice President Harris remains in excellent health,” her physician Joshua Simmons said in the report, adding that she “possesses the physical and mental resiliency required to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” Speaking to reporters ahead of a trip to North Carolina, Harris called Trump’s unwillingness to publish his records “a further example
RUSSIAN INPUT: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov called Washington’s actions in Asia ‘destructive,’ accusing it of being the reason for the ‘militarization’ of Japan The US is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful” activities in the disputed South China Sea, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told ASEAN leaders yesterday during an annual summit, and pledged that Washington would continue to uphold freedom of navigation in the region. The 10-member ASEAN meeting with Blinken followed a series of confrontations at sea between China and ASEAN members Philippines and Vietnam. “We are very concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful activities in the South China Sea which have injured people, harm vessels from ASEAN nations and contradict commitments to peaceful resolutions of disputes,” said Blinken, who
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