A Japanese-led team of scientists has captured on film the world’s first live images of a giant squid, journeying to the depths of the ocean in search of the mysterious creature thought to have inspired the myth of the “kraken”, a tentacled monster.
The images of the silvery, three-metre-long cephalopod, looming out of the darkness nearly one kilometre below the surface, were taken last July near the Ogasawara islands, 1,000 kilometres south of Tokyo.
Though the beast was small by giant squid standards – the largest ever caught stretched 18 metres long, tentacles and all – filming it secretly in its natural habitat was a key step towards understanding the animal, researchers said.
“Many people have tried to capture an image of a giant squid alive in its natural habitat, whether researchers or film crews. But they all failed,” said Tsunemi Kubodera, a zoologist at Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, who led the team.
“These are the first ever images of a real live giant squid,” Kubodera said of the footage, shot by Japanese national broadcaster NHK and the Discovery Channel.
The key to their success, said Kubodera, was a small submersible rigged with lights invisible to both human and cephalopod eyes. (Reuters)
Farmer relieved of 655-year-old debt
A Swiss court has wiped the slate clean for a farmer and his family, relieving them of an annual debt to a Catholic church dating back to 1357, Swiss public broadcaster RTS reported yesterday.
The court in the northeastern canton of Glarus ruled that the farmer and his family no longer needed to pay some 70 Swiss francs (€58) a year to keep the sanctuary lamp of the Naefels Catholic church burning. The debt dated back to 1357, when a certain Konrad Mueller killed a man named Heinrich Stucki.
To save his soul and avoid revenge attacks from the victim’s family, Mueller gave a sanctuary lamp to a local church and vowed to finance its fuel “for eternity”.
If he failed to do so, his land would go to the Church, RTS reported. (AFP)
$10 million caviar smuggler walks free
A man who evaded authorities for 23 years on charges he unlawfully imported more than $10 million worth of caviar into the United States was spared jail time at his sentencing on Monday.
Instead, a judge in US District Court in Manhattan imposed a punishment of time already served on Isidoro “Mario” Garbarino, 69, who has been in custody since September 10.
An Italian national, Garbarino was also fined $10,000 and will likely be deported to Italy.
Garbarino was indicted in 1987. But while free on bail he fled to Italy in 1989 and remained a fugitive, mainly in South America, until he was captured in September 2012 by US marshals at an airport in Panama. (Reuters)
$450,000 in lost bank bag returned
A Jordanian, who found a bank money bag containing nearly half a million dollars on the street in the northern city of Zarqa on Monday, called a local radio station for help in returning the cash.
“Nayel Jamaan today found 320,000 dinars (about US$450,000) in Army Street in Zarqa that belonged to one of the banks,” the city’s police chief Hassan Thaher told state-run Petra news agency.
“He immediately contacted a local radio station to help him return the money. We have the money now and we are investigating.”
Three bank courier staff had told police earlier that they lost “an amount of money” while on a delivery from a bank in Zarqa, Petra added. (AFP)