TUNISIA
Prez candidate arrested
Police yesterday arrested presidential candidate Ayachi Zammel, a member of his campaign said, amid growing fears among rights groups and the opposition that prominent rivals to President Kais Saied would be excluded from the race. The electoral commission was yesterday to announce the final list of candidates for the Oct. 6 vote. Police had arrested Zammel at his home at about 3am on suspicion of falsifying popular endorsements, Mahdi Abdel Jawad said, adding that “the matter has become absurd and aims to exclude him from the election.” The commission and the Ministry of the Interior did not immediately comment.
NORWAY
‘Spy whale’ found dead
A beluga whale that was suspected of spying for Russia after being discovered in Norwegian waters five years ago has been found dead, said nonprofit organization Marine Mind, which had been monitoring the whale. The body of Hvaldimir — a combination of the Norwegian word for whale and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin — was spotted floating in the sea by a father and son fishing in the south over the weekend, public broadcaster NRK reported. Hvaldimir was wearing a harness with what appeared to be a mount for a small camera when he was first found in 2019 near the island of Ingoya in the north, about 300km from the Russian maritime border. The harness was stamped with “Equipment St Petersburg” in English. The whale was very interested in people and responded to hand signals, leading the Norwegian intelligence agency to presume he had been held in captivity in Russia as part of a research program before crossing into Norwegian waters. Moscow has never responded to the allegations about Hvaldimir.
POLAND
State burial for war dead
The nation yesterday held a state burial of the remains of more than 700 victims of Nazi Germany’s World War II executions that were recently uncovered in the so-called Valley of Death in the nation’s north. The observances in the town of Chojnice included a funeral Mass at the basilica and interment with military honors at the local cemetery. The remains of Polish civilians, including patients of an asylum, were exhumed in 2021 to this year from two separate sites near Chojnice. Historians have established that the Nazis, shortly after invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, executed some of the civilians. Other remains are from an execution that took place in January 1945, when the Germans were fleeing the area. The nation lost 6 million citizens, or a sixth of its population, of which 3 million were Jewish, in the war.
AUSTRALIA
Sex abuser pleads guilty
Former childcare worker Ashley Paul Griffith, 46, yesterday pleaded guilty to raping, sexually abusing and exploiting dozens of girls under his care in 12 locations in Australia, as well as Pisa, between 2003 and 2022. It took Judge Anthony Rafter more than two hours to read out the 307 charges against Griffith in the Brisbane courtroom, where several victims and their families had gathered, state broadcaster ABC said. Griffith was first arrested in 2022 for making child sexual abuse content. A year later he was charged with 1,623 offenses against 91 children. However, some charges were dropped and the ABC reported that yesterday charges related to about 60 children. Many of the victims were under the age of 12. Griffith is in custody and is to be sentenced at a later date.
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
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