Stolen shoe mystery solved at Japanese kindergarten
Tokyo, Nov 24: Police thought a shoe thief was on the loose at a kindergarten in southwestern Japan, until a security camera caught a furry culprit in action.
A weasel with a tiny shoe in its mouth was spotted on the video footage after police installed three cameras in the school in the prefecture of Fukuoka.
“It’s great it turned out not to be a human being,” Deputy Police Chief Hiroaki Inada told The Associated Press Sunday. Teachers and parents had feared it could be a disturbed person with a shoe fetish.
Japanese customarily take their shoes off before entering homes. The vanished shoes were all slip-ons the children wore indoors, stored in cubbyholes near the door.
Weasels are known to stash items and people who keep weasels as pets give them toys so they can hide them.
The weasel scattered shoes around and took 15 of them before police were called. Six more were taken the following day. The weasel returned November 12 to steal one more shoe. That was when it got caught on camera.
The shoe-loving weasel only took the white indoor shoes made of canvas, likely because they’re light to carry.
The children got a good laugh when they saw the weasel in the video.
Although the stolen shoes were never found, the remaining shoes are now safe at the kindergarten with nets installed over the cubbyholes. The weasel, which is believed to be wild, is still on the loose. (AP)
Earth bids farewell to its temporary mini moon that is possibly chunk
of our actual moon
Cape Canaveral, Nov 24: Planet Earth is parting company with an asteroid that’s been tagging along as a “mini moon” for the past two months.
The harmless space rock will peel away on Monday, overcome by the stronger tug of the sun’s gravity. But it will zip closer for a quick visit in January.
NASA will use a radar antenna to observe the 33-foot (10-metre) asteroid then. That should deepen scientists’ understanding of the object known as 2024 PT5, quite possibly a boulder that was blasted off the moon by an impacting, crater-forming asteroid.
While not technically a moon – NASA stresses it was never captured by Earth’s gravity and fully in orbit – it’s “an interesting object” worthy of study.
The astrophysicist brothers who identified the asteroid’s “mini moon behaviour,” Raul and Carlos de la Fuente Marcos of Complutense University of Madrid, have collaborated with telescopes in the Canary Islands for hundreds of observations so far.
Currently more than 2 million miles (3.5 million kilometres) away, the object is too small and faint to see without a powerful telescope. It will pass as close as 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometres) of Earth in January, maintaining a safe distance before it zooms farther into the solar system while orbiting the sun, not to return until 2055. That’s almost five times farther than the moon. (AP)