People and their dogs attend the Guinness World Record Breaking Screening in support of ‘PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie’ at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, United States. PHOTO: AFP
UPI – A gathering of 219 dogs and their owners marked the preview of Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie, breaking the Guinness World Record for the largest canine audience at a film screening.
This extraordinary outdoor screening unfolded at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, graced by the presence of Guinness World Records adjudicator Michael Empric. He officially confirmed the count of dogs in the movie’s “paw-dience”.
Empric declared that the 219 dogs in attendance surpassed the previous record of 199 dogs, which had been established in October 2022.
The record attempt was organised by Paramount Pictures, the studio behind Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie, in partnership with the Los Angeles-based Best Friends Animal Society.
“I hope people reading about this milestone will be inspired to get out and adopt,”
Executive Director of the Best Friends Animal Society Brittany Thorn said in a news release.
People and their dogs attend the Guinness World Record Breaking Screening in support of ‘PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie’ at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, United States. PHOTO: AFP
Police officers patrol a road leading to the District Jail, in Attock, Pakistan. PHOTO: AP
ISLAMABAD (AP) – A Pakistani court yesterday extended custody for former prime minister Imran Khan on charges that he had revealed state secrets after his 2022 ouster, and ordered that he remain in custody for two more weeks.
The development is the latest in an unprecedented pile up of legal cases against the country’s top opposition leader and hugely popular former cricket star turned politician.
Since his ouster in a no-confidence vote in Parliament in April last year, Khan has campaigned against Shehbaz Sharif, who succeeded him.
The legal imbroglio underscores the deepening political turmoil in Pakistan since Khan’s ouster and ahead of the next parliamentary elections, due in the last week of January.
Sharif stepped down last month at the completion of Parliament’s term and an interim government took over to steer Pakistan through the elections.
Khan is facing over 150 cases, including charges ranging from contempt of court to terrorism and inciting violence, and was sentenced to a three-year sentence on corruption charges in early August.
Police officers patrol a road leading to the District Jail, in Attock, Pakistan. PHOTO: AP
Later that month, an Islamabad High Court suspended that sentence in what amounted to a legal victory for Khan.
Still, he remained behind bars as another court – a special tribunal – ordered he be held over allegedly revealing official secrets in an incident late last year when Khan had waved a confidential diplomatic letter at a rally. Khan described the document as proof that he was threatened and that his ouster was a conspiracy by Washington, Sharif’s government and the Pakistani military. All three denied Khan’s claims.
The document, dubbed Cipher, has not been made public by either the government or Khan’s lawyers but was apparently diplomatic correspondence between the Pakistani ambassador to Washington and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad.
Khan’s lawyer Naeem Panjutha told reporters that a special court hearing the Cipher case has extended custody for the former premier until October 10.
The custody was initially to expire yesterday.
Khan, 70, is being held at the high-security Attock Prison in the eastern Punjab province.
He was supposed to be moved to Adiyala Prison in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, just outside of the capital of Islamabad, where better facilities are available.
Khan’s lawyers say he has refused the move for reasons that remain unknown.
SYDNEY (AFP) – The leader of the Australian state of Victoria resigned unexpectedly yesterday after nine years that included battling the COVID-19 pandemic, declaring, “It’s not an easy job.
“Thoughts of what life will be like after this job have started to creep in,” said Premier Dan Andrews, who led the state’s centre-left Labor party for 13 years.
“I have always known that the moment that happens, it is time to go and give this privilege, this amazing responsibility, to someone else,” he told a news conference.
“It is not an easy job being premier of our state – that is not a complaint, that is just fact.”
Andrews was at the helm during the COVID-19 pandemic years, overseeing a series of strict lockdowns in the state capital Melbourne.
The city’s five million residents spent over 260 days confined to their homes. Frustration over that and the state’s vaccine mandates led to violent protests in 2021.
Andrews’ popularity fell to a two-year low last month but he remained slightly ahead of the state’s conservative opposition Liberal Party leader John Pesutto, a survey by Resolve Political Monitor for The Age newspaper indicated.
The premier said his job required 100 per cent commitment “from you and your family”.
“That, of course, is time-limited and now is the time to step away.”
Asked about his legacy, Andrews told reporters, “It will be for others to judge my time in Parliament and my years of leadership.”
NEW YORK (AFP) – A powerful United States (US) senator charged with bribery and extortion after gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash were found at his home rejected calls on Monday for him to resign.
“I recognise that this will be the biggest fight yet,” Democratic Senator Robert Menendez told reporters at a press conference in his home state of New Jersey.
“I firmly believe that when all the facts are presented, not only will I be exonerated, but I still will be New Jersey’s senior senator,” Menendez said.
Menendez, 69, is accused of providing sensitive information to the Egyptian government in order to help an Egyptian-American businessman protect his monopoly.
He stepped down “temporarily” as head of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee after the charges were unsealed last Friday.
Menendez was defiant on Monday in his first public appearance since the indictment, insisting he had done nothing wrong and there had been a “rush to judgement”.
“The allegations levelled against me are just that – allegations,” he said.
Democratic Senator Robert Menendez. PHOTO: AP
“The court of public opinion is no substitute for our revered justice system.”
“Prosecutors get it wrong some time,” Menendez said.
“Sadly I know that,” he said in a reference to a 2015 corruption case against him which ended in a mistrial.
A number of fellow Democrats, including New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, have urged Menendez to step down.
Prosecutors said they found more than a half-million dollars in cash in Menendez’s New Jersey home and in his wife’s safe deposit box, allegedly received from three New Jersey businessmen seeking his help.
Gold bars worth around USD150,000 and a luxury Mercedes Benz convertible, gifted by one of the businessmen, were also found.
Menendez, his wife, Nadine, and the three businessmen face two counts of bribery and fraud. Menendez and his wife were also charged with extortion.
A senator since 2006 and before that a member of the House of Representatives for 14 years, Menendez has been a Democratic stalwart in Congress for three decades.
He is up for reelection to the Senate next year.
Democrats head into the 2024 elections with a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate.
The Naranjo river flows through the Dios es fiel shanty town on the outskirts of Guatemala City. PHOTO: AP
GUATEMALA CITY (AFP) – Two children and four adults were found dead on Monday after a river swollen by heavy rains swept away shacks built on its banks in the Guatemalan capital, authorities said.
Thirteen people, including eight children, were still missing after the river tore through the Dios es Fiel informal settlement in the early morning hours, according to the Conred disaster relief agency. Hundreds of firemen, police, soldiers, and volunteers were taking part in the rescue efforts.
The Naranjo river washed away six homes, built mainly of zinc sheets, under a bridge in the centre of Guatemala City, Conred spokesman Rodolfo Garcia told reporters.
Hundreds of needy residents of the capital constructed their homes on the banks of the river despite a municipal prohibition due to it containing residential wastewater from the capital’s sewage system.
Water bearing stones, soil and human waste gushed through the settlement following heavy rains on Sunday, leaving mainly just debris in its wake, an AFP reporter observed.
The Naranjo river flows through the Dios es fiel shanty town on the outskirts of Guatemala City. PHOTO: AP
Resident Esau Gonzalez, a 42-year-old day worker, recalled how “the river… took homes, neighbours’ belongings. Neighbours disappeared”.
Gonzalez told AFP the community had nowhere else to go.
“Rent is very high. Salaries are not enough to pay rent with,” he said.
Tens of thousands of Guatemala’s 17.7 million inhabitants depend on precarious housing in often hazardous environments in a country with a 59-per-cent poverty rate.
The rainy season, which runs from May to November, has this year claimed 29 lives so far, affected some 2.1 million people of whom more than 10,000 lost their homes, and destroyed four roads and nine bridges.
MONTGOMERY (AP) – An Alabama inmate would be the test subject for the “experimental” execution method of nitrogen hypoxia, his lawyers argued, as they asked judges to deny the state’s request to carry out his death sentence using the new method.
In a court filing last Friday, attorneys for Kenneth Eugene Smith asked the Alabama Supreme Court to reject the state attorney general’s request to set an execution date for Smith using the proposed new execution method.
Nitrogen gas is authorised as an execution method in three states but it has never been used to put an inmate to death.
Smith’s attorneys argued the state has disclosed little information about how nitrogen executions would work.
“The state seeks to make Smith the test subject for the first ever attempted execution by an untested and only recently released protocol for executing condemned people by the novel method of nitrogen hypoxia,” Smith’s attorneys wrote.
Under the proposed method, hypoxia would be caused by forcing the inmate to breathe only nitrogen, depriving them of oxygen needed to maintain bodily functions and causing them to die.
Nitrogen makes up 78 per cent of the air inhaled by humans and is harmless when inhaled with oxygen. While proponents of the new method have theorised it would be painless, opponents have likened it to human experimentation.
The lawyers said Smith “already has been put through one failed execution attempt” in November when the state tried to put him to death via lethal injection.
The Alabama Department of Corrections called off the execution when the execution team could not get the required two intravenous lines connected to Smith.
Alabama authorised nitrogen hypoxia in 2018, but the state has not attempted to use it until now to carry out a death sentence.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. PHOTO: AFP
SAO PAULO (AP) – Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will undergo hip surgery on Friday and will work from the presidential residence for about three weeks, officials said.
Doctors will replace the top of his right femur with an implant to treat his arthrosis.
Spokespeople for the South American nation’s presidency said on Monday that the 77-year-old leader will not be able to travel for up to six weeks after the procedure.
Since the beginning of the week he has been wearing a mask to avoid any airborne diseases that could lead to a postponement of the surgery.
Lula has felt hip pains since August 2022.
Lula will have the surgery at a hospital in the capital city Brasilia and is expected to remain in the hospital until Tuesday next week.
Earlier this month, Lula told supporters during a government ceremony that he didn’t want to get the surgery during last year’s election campaign.
He narrowly beat the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, in October’s election and returned two months later to the job he previously held in 2003-2010.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. PHOTO: AFP
Refugees queue to register in a registration centre held by the Armenian Red Cross. PHOTO: AFP
GORIS (AFP) – Thousands more refugees fled Nagorno-Karabakh yesterday as officials in the self-proclaimed republic said a fuel depot explosion the previous day had killed 20 people.
The Armenian government has warned of possible “ethnic cleansing” by Azerbaijan following its lightning offensive against the breakaway region last week.
Armenia said yesterday that more than 13,000 refugees had fled since a first group arrived in the country on Sunday.
The influx overwhelmed the border town of Goris, where many refugees are staying.
Many slept in their cars laden with luggage, emerging yesterday with red-rimmed eyes and forming long queues outside phone shops to buy sim cards.
Azerbaijan has pledged equal treatment for residents of the majority ethnic Armenian enclave and has sent aid.
Adding to humanitarian concerns, the separatist government yesterday said 13 bodies were found at the scene of a fuel depot blast on Monday and seven more people had died of their injuries. It said in a statement that 290 people had been hospitalised and “dozens of patients remain in critical condition”.
Refugees queue to register in a registration centre held by the Armenian Red Cross. PHOTO: AFP
Armenia’s Health Ministry said it had sent a team of doctors to the rebel stronghold of Stepanakert by helicopter.
The Azerbaijani presidency said Baku had also sent medicine to help the wounded.
Meanwhile in Brussels, envoys from Baku and Yerevan prepared to meet in the first such encounter since Azerbaijan’s swift defeat of separatist forces last week.
Azerbaijan and Armenia, along with European Union heavyweights France and Germany, will be represented by their national security advisers.
The leaders of both countries are scheduled to meet next month.
AFP reporters on Monday saw the refugees crowding into a humanitarian hub set up in a local theatre in the city of Goris to register for transport and housing.
“We lived through terrible days,” said Anabel Ghulasyan, 41, from the village of Rev, known as Shalva in Azeri.
She arrived in Goris with her family by minibus, carrying her belongings in bags.
YEARS OF CONFLICT
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars in the last three decades over Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority ethnic Armenian enclave within the internationally recognised border of Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan’s operation on September 19 to seize control of the territory forced the separatists to lay down their arms under the terms of a ceasefire agreed the following day.
It followed a nine-month blockade of the region by Baku that caused shortages of key supplies.
The separatists have said 200 people were killed in last week’s fighting. Azerbaijan’s state media on Monday said officials held a second round of peace talks with Nagorno-Karabakh’s ethnic Armenian community aimed at “reintegrating” them.
But on the road heading to Armenia, more and more residents from the region appeared to be trying to get out as witnesses said cars were snarling up in traffic.
At the refugee centre in Goris, Valentina Asryan, a 54-year-old from the village of Vank who fled with her grandchildren, said her brother-in-law was killed and several other people were injured by Azerbaijani fire.
She was being housed temporarily in a hotel in Goris and said she had “nowhere to go”.
Cover art for the latest edition of the ‘Guinness World Records’. PHOTO: AP
NEW YORK (AP) – Do you know the highest average grossing movie franchise in history? That’s easy, Avatar. What about the record for the most balloons popped in one minute by a pogostick? Or the longest journey in a pumpkin boat?
These and many more superlatives are in the latest edition of the Guinness World Records, which for 2024’s edition has taken our watery world as its theme.
That means there’s extra entries for aquatic record-breakers, the largest octopuses, largest hot spring and deepest shark among the 2,638 achievements.
“To me the best records are the ones that you tell your friends in the playground or your mates down the bar, or wherever it is, in the gym. You just say ‘Look I saw this amazing thing today’. That to me, is the sign of a good record,” said Editor-in-Chief Craig Glenday.
He estimated that 75 per cent to 80 per cent of the entries are new and updated, reflecting a huge oversupply of content. The Guinness World Record researchers get many more records approved than they can fit in a single book.
This year’s book is balanced between zany items – most hula hoops spun simultaneously on stilts – to serious science, like heaviest starfish. There are visits to history – pirate ships and shipwrecks – and pages devoted to record-breakers, like musician Elton John and tennis player Shingo Kunieda.
There’s a whole series of records just for kids and a new impairment initiative, which gives people with physical and mental challenges the chance to break records within their communities. It is all cleverly packed with facts, drawings and images and puzzles.
Glenday sees the annual book – initially conceived to settle arguments – as a fundamentally optimistic collection, one that celebrates ambition and record-breaking as very human things.
Cover art for the latest edition of the ‘Guinness World Records’. PHOTO: AP
“We’re all striving to be a bit better at what we do and we enjoy the bit between life and death. So let’s just make the most of it. And I think that’s why it’s maintained its position over the last 70 years – it continues to just amuse and educate and inform and celebrate all these crazy, fun, inspiring things and people.”
The team at Guinness World Records get about 100 applicants a day and reject some 95 per cent.
Submissions, on the whole, must be measurable, breakable and provable.
They may not impinge on someone else’s human rights or hurt an animal. And each book is curated annually, so twerking records, a thing just a few years ago, get replaced by TikTok records.
“We want things to be officially amazing. So is it amazing? Everything is a record. I could say I had couscous for lunch and I could document it, but no one cares. Where’s the superlative in it?”
Rejections are done diplomatically. If, for instance, an applicant hopes to land the record for most pretzels stuffed in their nose, researchers might gently say no, but prod the applicant to the grape-stuffing section. “If stuffing is your thing, we might have a category already created for you.”
First published in 1955, the book has developed into an international phenomenon published in more than 100 countries and 37 languages. The publication itself is listed as the world’s best-selling copyrighted book.
“It’s really aimed at reluctant readers. It’s lots of little chunks and trivia and nuggets. The designers agonise over every spread and they start from scratch every year. We throw the whole thing away in terms of the design,” said Glenday.
It started when then managing director of a famous beverage Sir Hugh Beaver, was invited to go game bird hunting in Ireland. He and his companions soon began to squabble over which was Europe’s fastest game bird. There was no quick way to solve the dispute.
“He said, ‘There must be in places all around the country people fighting and arguing over things that are simple and yet they can’t find an answer’,” Glenday said. Beaver dreamed up a pamphlet that could be sold.
He asked twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, who were fact-finding researchers, to compile something that would be different from the day’s encyclopedias, which were dry and very highly academic. “What these guys did was create a book that said, ‘We’re going to reflect back what people are actually doing in the world’. And so what they inadvertently created was an annual snapshot of the world.
“It found this momentum, this life of its own, and took off and became much more than Sir Hugh ever imagined it could be because it was a unique way of thinking about the world.”
Glenday himself has been inspired to create categories. A few years ago, he was attending the X Games and saw a bulldog zip past him on a skateboard in the parking lot. He found the owner of the dog, asked if he could chalk off 100 metres and invited the dog to skate.
“We created a brand new record that became a thing, skate-boarding dogs.”
I’m fascinated just by the quirky and unusual and the slightly skewed view that Guinness World Records has on the world so it’s been a perfect fit.”
He believes everyone has a record in them, whether it’s most sweaters worn, the loudest burp or baking the largest cake pop. And just striving for the record is rewarding, too.
“It’s very difficult to climb K2 in the fastest time. It’s very difficult and it will cost a fortune and you need years probably of training and acclimatisation for weeks,” he said.
“But if you’re stuck at home with your kids and you think, ‘Let’s see how fast we can solve Mr Potato Head’, then you’ve got some bonding time with your child just trying to do Mr Potato Head at the fastest time.”
One record is always up for the taking no matter who you are: oldest human. “Anyone can attempt the oldest age. I mean, that’s what we’re all attempting,” he said, laughing. – Mark Kennedy
‘The Ferryman’ by Justin Cronin. PHOTO: BALLANTINE
THE WASHINGTON POST – “This is the way the world ends,” TS Eliot predicted, “not with a bang but a whimper”. Nope, said epic world-ender Justin Cronin.
In 2010, Cronin published The Passage, one of the most frightening apocalyptic novels of the modern age.
Now, Cronin is looming over us again with another apocalyptic novel, this one more batty than vampiric. The Ferryman grabs bits of stardust from several sci-fi classics. The eerie first half – by far the better – is set on Prospera, an island paradise hidden from the rest of the world by an impenetrable electromagnetic barrier. “Prosperans”, as the glorious inhabitants are called, enjoy a civilisation “free of all want and distraction”. They devote their attractive selves entirely to “creative expression and the pursuit of personal excellence”.
Prosperans imagine that everything about their system of static privilege is “entirely beneficent”. But members of the vast “support staff” harbour a somewhat different impression. Crammed onto a dreary adjacent island known as the Annex, these men and women of supposedly “lesser biological and social endowments” are expected to perform their various duties without complaint. If a few stress fractures are starting to zigzag across the surface of that social arrangement, the powers that be remain convinced they can
keep control.
Control turns out to be the primary principle of this society, as it is in so many utopias. Beneath their shiny skins, Prosperans are biologically sterile but technically immortal. They maintain their vitality through a repeated process of bodily “reiteration”. They all arrive – or re-arrive – as polite 16-year-olds and begin living lives of “the highest aspirations”.
Each one of them has something like a super-duper Apple Watch embedded in their forearm that constantly monitors physical and emotional health. When their natural faculties begin to fade they’re ferried to Nursery Isle, where they’re reiterated in some new identity. Most Prosperans willingly sail off to the Nursery, eager “to be reborn as a fresh-faced bright-eyed teenager in perfect health”. But sometimes, alas, a reluctant or confused old fogey must be persuaded.
‘The Ferryman’ by Justin Cronin. PHOTO: BALLANTINE
Our narrator, Proctor Bennett, is one of the highly respected ferrymen who lead expiring Prosperans to the dock and launch them over to Nursery Isle for a refresh. The hypnotic horror of this exposition arises from how reasonable and gracious Proctor sounds, how much pride he takes in ritualised euthanasia. But the placid tone of Proctor’s life is shattered early in the novel. Soon after he explained to us the exquisite order of life on Prospera, he receives an unusual assignment: He’s to escort his own 126-year-old father to the ferry for reiteration. “You’ll make new memories,” Proctor told his old man, falling back on the usual script. “Think how wonderful it’s going to feel to be young again, your whole life ahead of you.” His father seems resigned to the process, to his duty, and everything is going fine until suddenly it isn’t. In a flash of resistance, the old man must be violently restrained. His dignity evaporates. It’s a scandal.
But Proctor is even more deeply shaken by this experience. Nightmares – typically not possible for Prosperans – continually trouble his sleep.
Worse still, Proctor feels that something about his surroundings has gone fundamentally askew. Friends are sympathetic. Colleagues are concerned. High-ranking officials are alarmed about what Proctor’s father might have told him in those frantic moments before he was ferried off to the Nursery. And rebel agents from the Annex believe they may have found in Proctor someone to help their cause.
All the elements are here for a spectacular sci-fi thriller full of piercing implications for our own class-bound society, with its paralysing fear of ageing. But Cronin has something far more ambitious and metaphysical in mind, which throws The Ferryman off its tracks.
Just as the class-warfare plot starts to rumble, the ground shifts wildly beneath Proctor’s feet – and ours. “Then I was falling,” he said. “Falling and falling and falling. Down and down and down,” carrying my hopes for this long novel along with him. The creepy utopia Proctor depended on vanishes, and he finds himself in a hallucinatory realm of baffling experiences. This is clearly meant to be a stunning development, ripe with provocative reflections on the nature of consciousness and the creative power of perception. But unfortunately, those deeper issues dissolve in a vat of melodrama: chases, shoot-outs and fires along with clones, billionaires and maniacal villains spouting cartoonish dialogue. And all of this is somehow glommed on to the lachrymose story of a grieving parent and a dying world.
The Ferryman wants to explore what’s real and what’s illusion, and I’m as eager as the next Platonist to be enlightened by the true nature of reality, but this late in the philosophical game, authors have got to bring something special to the cave wall. Unfortunately, Cronin’s topsy-turvy thriller is torn apart by the unsustainable imbalance between its profound intentions and its ultimately silly execution. – Ron Charles
