“Haters gonna hate.” (Photos via 123RF)

“Dinosaurs were finished off by an asteroid impact. We don’t want it to happen again. So I want you—young people—to come up with a way to push one of these out of the way”
—Bill Nye the Science Guy, during a lecture this month at Miraikan in Koto-ku

WE’RE NUMBER ONE!

• At the International Wine Challenge in London, a brewery in Fukushima beat out 875 competitors to win the prize for best sake.
• All five Japanese teens who traveled to the so-called Physics Olympics, held this year in Mumbai, took home medals—one gold, two silvers and two bronzes.
• Archaeologists in Nagasaki say they may have discovered fossils belonging to the “largest carnivorous dinosaur that existed in Japan.”
• Headline of the Week: “Woman Conned 5 Days in Row Helps Cops Collar Suspect on 6th” (via Mainichi Japan)

THIS JUST IN

• A plan by The Peninsula Tokyo hotel to zip guests around in a private helicopter has drawn opposition from shop owners in nearby Ginza.
• Officials in Seoul opened the Center for Japanese Studies, which will analyze bilateral ties and “advise on South Korea’s medium- to long-term diplomatic strategy.”
• Last year was the first since the NPA began keeping track in 1989 that more elderly people than juveniles were the subject of “police actions.”
• Cops in Nagasaki busted two men for forging a driver’s license in an attempt to gain entry to a pair of AKB48 concerts. The shows’ organizer had restricted admission to one performance per person.

STATS

• ¥26.2 billion: Net loss by McDonald’s Japan in the first six months of 2015
• 9: Years since the company had suffered a loss in the January-June period
• 340: Wallets stolen from students at a summer camp in Nagano operated by cram school operator Waseda Academy

WAR STORIES

• Among the 24 Imperial Navy submarines recently discovered sunk off the coast of Nagasaki, is the I-402, which, at 122 meters long, was the largest sub of World War II.
• Author Hiroyuki Agawa, who was awarded the Order of Culture for novels and nonfiction works set during the war, died of natural causes at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 94.
• In what’s being described as a “valuable” find, researchers have come upon the notebooks of a Kyoto University physicist who was working on Japan’s wartime effort to develop an atomic bomb.
• Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took advantage of last month’s Marine Day holiday to push a 15-year plan to quintuple the number of engineers engaged in the development of “ocean resources.”

CRUEL SUMMER

• Twenty-seven people were hospitalized after a tour bus rear-ended a dump truck on an expressway in Mie.
• A college student in Niigata was arrested for tweeting that he had planted bombs at a movie theater in Shinjuku.
• A 24-year-old lesser panda named Kusu, believed to be the world’s oldest, died at a zoo in Kitakyushu.
• Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga visited Okinawa and toured the future site of a theme park planned by Universal Studios Japan.

ONWARD AND UPWARD

• Staff at the Japanese Society of Gender Identity Disorder want to establish a certification program for physicians who have undergone training in LGBT issues.
• Officials in municipalities with long waiting lists for daycare services say they’d like to open more facilities but can’t because of a lack of qualified teachers.
• In response, the central government plans to boost the number of nursery school staff from 380,000 to 450,000 over the next year or so.
• In light of the voting age being lowered from 20 to 18, authorities at the education ministry are considering mandatory courses on public affairs for high school students.

Compiled from reports by AP, Japan Today, The Japan Times, Jiji, The Tokyo Reporter, The Mainichi, The Japan News, AFP, Reuters, and Kyodo