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A four-decade-old moratorium on commercial whaling is to remain in force after a proposal to overturn it was withdrawn on Thursday at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Lima.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 “We are relieved that the dark and dangerous resolution to resume commercial whaling has been withdrawn,” said Grettel Delgadillo, Latin America representative for Humane Society International.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
‘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
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
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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