Hard Numbers: Bye-bye birdie, High Court sides with Maduro, Feds intervene in Canadian rail strike, El Salvador ain’t so safe, Aid trickles into Darfur, World’s oldest woman
11: Sphen, one-half of Sydney Sea Life Aquarium’s beloved same-sex gentoo penguin couple, passed away of natural causes this week, his caretakers announced on Thursday. Sphen and his partner, Magic, spent six years together and successfully adopted and raised two chicks. When keepers showed Magic Sphen’s body to help him understand his partner had died, the entire colony reportedly broke into birdsong.
0: Venezuela's Supreme Court has confirmed President Nicolas Maduro’s victory in last month’s presidential elections, even though the opposition says they are the rightful winner. But the court's impartiality – which is closely aligned with his regime and has ruled against the government exactly zero times – is highly questionable. The court’s certification contradicts experts from the United Nations and the Carter Center who were invited to observe the election and sided with the opposition.
9,000: After Canada’s top two railroads, Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City, locked out more than 9,000 unionized workers on Thursday, the government moved to issue a back-to-work order. Canadian National Railway will begin returning to work, while the stoppage at Canadian Pacific Kansas City will continue. But the union and company officials are scheduled to meet the board Friday morning.
1: Data from the attorney general’s office of El Salvador shows that one person in the tiny Central American country goes missing each day despite frequent claims from strongman President Nayib Bukele that his mass arrests of suspected gang members have made El Salvador the “safest country in the Western Hemisphere.” The Working Group for Missing Persons in El Salvador, an association of nine NGOs, says this represents a 10% annual increase, and it has set up a website where Salvadorans can register missing loved ones.
15: A tiny trickle of humanitarian aid managed to enter Sudan’s Darfur province on Wednesday, but just 15 of 131 trucks were allowed to cross the border from Chad before Sudan’s army shut the route. The trucks are carrying enough food for 13,000 people in a region on the brink of famine, but there are more than 6 million people in Darfur who don’t know where their next meal will come from.
116: The Guinness Book of World Records confirmed that 116-year-old Tomiko Itooka of Japan is the world’s oldest living person after she proved she was born on May 23, 1908, in Osaka. She played volleyball in high school, managed her husband’s textile factory, and was an active hiker, summiting the 10,000-foot Mount Ontake twice. When informed of her new global status, she replied simply, “Thank you.”