TOKYO (AFP) – Three people were stabbed outside the prestigious University of Tokyo ahead of nationwide college entrance exams yesterday, with police saying they had arrested a high-schooler for allegedly carrying out the attack.

The victims included an 18-year-old boy, a 17-year-old girl and a 72-year-old man, police said.

“We arrested a 17-year-old male student for allegedly slashing in the back (of the three) with the intent to kill,” a Tokyo police spokesman told AFP.

The student was seized by police at the gate of the University of Tokyo after the early morning attack, they added.

He was not taking the exams and was not acquainted with the three victims, but told police he “wanted to die after causing an incident as I didn’t do well in my studies”, public broadcaster NHK reported.

The two teenagers did not sustain life-threatening injuries but the 72-year-old is severely wounded, according to local media.

NHK said the university, where 3,700 students were scheduled to take the tests, went ahead with the exams as planned.

Violent crime is rare but stabbings do occasionally happen in Japan, where gun possession is strictly controlled.

ATLANTA (AP) – Forecasts of snow and ice in the United States (US) as far south as Georgia have put a big part of the Southeast on an emergency preparedness footing as shoppers scoured store shelves for storm supplies and crews raced to treat highways and roads as a major winter storm approached from the Midwest.

In Virginia, where a blizzard left thousands of motorists trapped on clogged highways earlier this month, outgoing Governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency and urged people to take the approaching storm seriously.

In North Carolina, some store shelves were stripped bare of essentials including bread and milk.Elsewhere, trucks began spraying a briny mixture on hundreds of miles of interstates and other roads to prevent icing across the region.

Travis Wagler said he hadn’t seen such a run on supplies at his Abbeville, South Carolina, hardware store in at least two winters.

“We’re selling everything you might expect: sleds, but also salt, shovels and firewood,” Wagler said from Abbeville Hardware on Friday.

That region faced predictions of a quarter-inch of ice or more on trees and power lines, which could lead to days without electricity.

“People are worried,” Wagler said.

Parts of Tennessee could get as much as six inches of snow, forecasters said, and northern Mississippi and the Tennessee Valley region of Alabama could receive light snow accumulations.

With lows predicted in the 20s across a wide area, any precipitation could freeze, making driving difficult if not hazardous. By Friday, the fast-moving storm had already dropped heavy snow across a large swath of the Midwest, where travel conditions deteriorated and scores of schools closed or moved to online instruction.

The storm, after its expected weekend dip into the Southeast, was then expected to head into the Northeast while dropping snow, sleet and rain around the densely populated Eastern Seaboard.

A winter storm watch extended from just north of metro Atlanta to Arkansas in the west and Pennsylvania in the north, covering parts of 10 states including Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. Travel problems could extend into metro Atlanta, where about two inches of snow brought traffic to a slip-sliding halt in 2014, an event still known as ‘Snowmaggedon’.

A mixture of ice and up to an inch of snow is expected in Atlanta, according to an advisory issued yesterday by the US National Weather Service.

Nearly 1,000 flights within the United States have already been cancelled in anticipation of snow and ice in the South, according to the flight tracking site flightaware.com, which tracks flight cancellations worldwide.

A major US airport hub for American Airlines – Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina – leads the list of cancellations at US airports.

Possible power outages and travel problems could be exacerbated by any coating of ice — and winds gusting to 35 mph, the National Weather Service said.

“Hopefully, the storm will underdeliver, but it could overdeliver. We just don’t know,” said Georgia Governor Brian Kemp as he announced storm preparations.

He was taking no chances as he declared a state of emergency and crews began treating major roads and highways in north Georgia.

Governor Henry McMaster in neighbouring South Carolina also issued an emergency order, saying the state would likely start feeling the effects of the major winter storm.

“There is a potential for very dangerous conditions caused by accumulations of ice and snow, which will likely result in power outages across the state,” he said.

The city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had to borrow workers from other departments to help treat roads ahead of the storm because COVID-19 had caused a shortage of workers, spokesman Randy Britton said.

Even volunteers pitched in to help as the city stepped up its normal schedule of preparing for winter weather, he said.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper signed an emergency order and the administration urged people to stay at home once the storm hits.

The state highway agency warned that labour shortages meant crews might not respond to problems areas as quickly as normal.

Many schools and businesses will be closed tomorrow for the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, which could help reduce travel problems along with temperatures that are supposed to rise into the 40s.

BELGRADE, SERBIA (AP) — Environmental protesters demanding the cancelation of plans for lithium mining in western Serbia took to the streets again yesterday, blocking key roads and for the first time a border crossing.

Traffic on the Balkan nation’s main north-south highway was halted for more than an hour in Belgrade, the capital, along with several other roads throughout the country, including one by Serbia’s border with Bosnia.

Minor incidents have been reported with angry drivers trying to push their way through the crowds. Witnesses told N1 television that a man was injured in one incident in the western town of Sabac.

Environmental groups want Serbia’s populist government to halt the possibility of lithium mining in western Serbia. Activists have pledged to press on with blockades until their demand is met and the Rio Tinto mining company is “expelled” from Serbia.

Thousands joined similar demonstrations several weeks ago, forcing the government to withdraw two laws that activists said were designed to speed up the country’s mining plans.

“This is an ecological catastrophe, that I think Serbia is already one foot in, and even a worse one (catastrophe) is threatening,” said Belgrade resident Mirjana Podolsek.

Another protester, Janko Krizan, believes that “it is our duty to come here.”

“Rio Tinto will not only pollute Serbia, but it will pollute everything else, entire system, everything,” he said.

Rio Tinto has performed explorations in western Serbia but environmental groups want the project abolished, saying that lithium mining would devastate nearby farmland, waters and the area’s entire ecosystem.

Environmental issues have become a public concern in Serbia because the nation of seven million people is facing bad air pollution, poor waste management and many other environmental problems that have accumulated after decades of neglect. Serbia must tackle those environmental issues to advance in its bid to join the 27-nation European Union.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Five letters, six attempts, and just one puzzle to solve per day: the Wordle formula couldn’t be simpler, but in a matter of weeks the online brain teaser has got millions guessing around the world.

“It just grabs you,” daily player Susan Drubin told AFP of the code-breaking word challenge – perhaps best described as a cross between the retro board game Mastermind and a daily crossword.

“The great thing about it, is it only takes a few minutes, usually, and it’s a very nice, tiny distraction,” said the 65-year-old from the Washington suburbs.

The puzzle’s rise has been meteoric: according to The New York Times, 90 people played on November 1. Two months later, on January 2, more than 300,000 tackled the challenge. The Guardian put the daily player count last weekend at two million, and rising…

Wordle’s rules are disarmingly simple: find the word of the day in six tries or fewer. Each guess must be a valid five letter word: letters in the correct space turn green, while letters that are part of the answer but in the wrong spot turn yellow.

Only one word is offered up per day, and it is the same for everyone. Can’t crack today’s puzzle? You’ll just have to wait until tomorrow for the next one.

Although the game itself is accessed on a website, rather than an app, players can generate a shareable widget, with six lines of coloured squares indicating how many tries it took to solve the riddle – without giving away the day’s answer, of course.

After a couple of weeks, Drubin – like legions of players – took to sharing her results on social media under the hashtag #Wordle.

And thus, a viral phenomenon was born.

Part of what makes Wordle special is that it costs nothing to play – and is also, more unusually, ad-free.

Its designer Josh Wardle, a software engineer based in Brooklyn but originally from Wales, has decided not to monetise the game.

“I think people kind of appreciate that there’s this thing online that’s just fun,” Wardle told The New York Times on Monday. “It’s not trying to do anything shady with your data or your eyeballs.”

While the game website – “powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle” – is free of ads or pop-ups, it did not take long for enterprising copy-cats to try to mimic the game concept, devising app store clones for purchase which have since been taken down.

The lone app left standing is an unrelated game called Wordle! with an exclamation mark, created by a teenager five years ago.

Its developer Steven Cravotta, now 24, said he initially “had no idea what was going on” when his app starting logging more than 40,000 daily downloads.

“I didn’t know it was a craze,” Cravotta told The Wall Street Journal.

For Mikael Jakobsson, a research coordinator for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Game Lab, Wordle falls into the “gap-filler” category, a game “that you can pull out when you’re waiting for a friend or… for the bus”.

He puts its success partly down to how easy it is to share results with friends, either by social media or word-of-mouth.

When you crack the puzzle, “you feel very proud of yourself… You have that share button right there. So then you can brag a little bit about it, which we tend to like doing”.

A psychologist specialising in video games Rachel Kowert also points to the social comparison theory, which holds that everyone wants to evaluate themselves in relation to others.

The temptation is such that tongue-in-cheek debates have sprung up online about muting friends who tweet out their “humble-brag” scores.

Another key part of the game’s allure, said Kowert, is that being “limited to one a day gives you a sense of psychological scarcity”.

“You’re not overdoing it in any one session, and it keeps you wanting to come back to continue to play day after day,” she said.