News Headlines - 01 March 2021

▽Spokeswoman for Japan PM Suga resigns over expensive dinners with his son | Reuters

Makiko Yamada, a key spokeswoman for Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, will resign after she and other senior bureaucrats were reprimanded for attending expensive dinners hosted by Suga’s son, the government said.
Yamada will tender her resignation on Monday, the Japanese government’s spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told reporters.
Suga’s administration, including Cabinet Public Relations Secretary Yamada, 60, has faced public anger after weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun last month reported that Suga’s oldest son, Seigo Suga, an executive at a film company, had paid for expensive dinners for senior bureaucrats.

▽Tokyo Electric completes nuclear fuel removal from Fukushima No. 3 unit

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. said Sunday it has completed removal of all 566 nuclear fuel assemblies from the storage pool of the No. 3 reactor building at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where a decades-long process to scrap the complex continues.
The No. 3 unit is one of the three reactors that suffered core meltdowns following the earthquake and tsunami disaster on March 11, 2011. There still are 1,007 fuel assemblies stored in the pools in the heavily damaged No. 1 and No. 2 reactor buildings.
Of the plant's six reactors, the company known as TEPCO finished retrieving stored fuel from the No. 4 reactor building in 2014. The Nos. 5 and 6 reactors were not operating when the quake struck and suffered little damage.

▽Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns of young authors self-censoring out of 'fear' - BBC News

Sir Kazuo, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, warned that a "climate of fear" was preventing some people from writing what they want.
He said they may be concerned that an "anonymous lynch mob will turn up online and make their lives a misery".
He told the BBC: "I very much fear for the younger generation of writers."
The 66-year-old said he was worried that less established authors were self-censoring by avoiding writing from certain viewpoints or including characters outside their immediate experiences.

▽Archaeologists find unique ceremonial vehicle near Pompeii | The Guardian

Archaeologists have unearthed a unique Roman ceremonial carriage from a villa just outside Pompeii, the city buried in a volcanic eruption in 79 AD.
The almost perfectly preserved four-wheeled carriage, made of iron, bronze and tin, was found near the stables of an ancient villa at Civita Giuliana, about 700 metres north of the walls of ancient Pompeii and close to where the remains of three horses were unearthed in 2018, including one still in its harness.

▽Lady Gaga's dog walker speaks out after Hollywood shooting

Lady Gaga’s dog walker, who was shot last week during a robbery in Hollywood when two of the singer’s French bulldogs were stolen, described the violence and his recovery “from a very close call with death” in social media posts Monday.Ryan Fischer’s posts included pictures taken from his hospital bed, where he says “(a) lot of healing still needs to happen” but he looks forward to reuniting with the dogs.
Fischer was shot once as he walked three of Lady Gaga’s dogs on Wednesday night on a street just off the famed Sunset Boulevard.