Two people have died in the Japanese city of Yokohama after a teenage girl jumped to her death from a shopping centre, hitting a pedestrian below.

The 17-year-old high school student jumped from a building in a crowded shopping district, hitting a 32-year-old woman who was out with her friends on Saturday evening.

The two were immediately taken to hospital around 18:00 local time (09:00 GMT), where the girl died an hour later. The woman also died soon after.

It's not clear why she might have killed herself, though more people under the age of 18 in Japan kill themselves on 1 September - just ahead of the new school term - than on any other day, according to official statistics.

Last year, 513 children took their own lives in Japan, with “school problems” cited as the most common factor.

Notorious for a hardworking culture, Japan launched an initiative to help people cut back. But three years into the effort, the country is having a hard time coaxing people to take a four-day workweek.

Japanese lawmakers first proposed a shorter work week in 2021. The guidelines aimed to encourage staff retention and cut the number of workers falling ill or dying from overwork in an economy already suffering from a huge labor shortage. The guidelines also included overtime limits and paid annual leave.

However, the initiative has had a slow start: According to the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare, only about 8% of companies in Japan allow employees to take three or more days off a week.

It's not just companies — employees are hesitant, too.

Electronics manufacturer Panasonic, one of Japan's largest companies, opted into the effort in early 2022. Over two years in, only 150 of its 63,000 eligible employees have chosen to take up four-day schedules, a representative of the company told the Associated Press.

Other major companies to introduce a four-day workweek include Uniqlo parent Fast Retailing, electronics giant Hitachi, and financial firm Mizuho. About 85% of employers report giving workers the usual two days off a week.

Much of the reluctance to take an extra day off boils down to a culture of workers putting companies before themselves, including pressure to appear like team players and hard workers. This intense culture stems from Japan's postwar era, where, in an effort to boost the economy, then-Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida enlisted major corporations to offer their employees lifelong job security, asking only that workers repay them with loyalty.

An Italian man has said he kept his dead mother’s remains in a freezer to cover up her death and continue to collect her pension.

Sandro Mallus told police he put the body of Rosanna Pilloni, 78, in the family’s chest freezer after she passed away at home in the small town of Sarroch, near Cagliari in Sardinia, in January last year.

He made the admission after police began investigating concerns from neighbours that the woman hadn’t been seen for months.

According to local media, Mr Mallus continued shopping as if he was buying for two people, maintaining the pretence that his mother was alive.

Police are due to carry out a post mortem examination on Monday and have not ruled out the possibility Pilloni was killed, something Mr Mallus denies.

“My mother died of natural causes,’’ Mr Mallus told the newspaper, L’Unione Sarda. “I would never have harmed her.

“When I discovered her body I was desperate. I had no money for the funeral, so I locked her in there.”

Yoshinoya Holdings Co. is hoping that its customers don't bury their heads in the sand but give a new exotic meat offering on the menu a try.

The operator of the popular “gyudon” beef bowl chain announced on Aug. 28 that it has begun offering an ostrich rice bowl.

Ostrich is known for its high-protein, low-fat and low-calorie meat.

Yoshinoya is positioning ostrich as its fourth meat offering, following beef, pork and chicken.

The company said this is also part of its effort to diversify ingredients and continue offering healthy and satisfying meals.

As a first step, the bowl with thigh and fillet ostrich meat prepared in a roast beef style on rice is being sold at around 400 of Yoshinoya’s cafe-style stores, called “Cooking and Comfort,” across the country.

The dish is priced at 1,683 yen ($11.60) including tax.

An Austrian surgeon allegedly let his teenage daughter drill a hole in a patient's skull.

Following a forestry accident in January, a 33-year-old man was flown by air ambulance to Graz University Hospital, Styria, southeastern Austria, with serious head injuries, according to Kronen Zeitung, an Austrian newspaper.

He needed emergency surgery, but the doctor allegedly let his 13-year-old daughter take part in operating on him.

The newspaper reported that she even drilled a hole in the patient's skull.

While the operation was said to have gone off without issue, the patient is still unable to work and investigations by the Graz public prosecutor's officer against the entire surgical team are continuing.

It wasn't until April that an anonymous complaint was logged to the public prosecutor's office about the allegations, the newspaper reported.

The alleged victim initially learned about the case in the media before later being told by authorities he was a witness in an investigation.

Eighty percent of German businesses reported being hit by data or IT theft, industrial espionage or sabotage in the last 12 months, with 45% of companies tracing cyberattacks or other acts of industrial spying to China, a survey showed on Wednesday.

The survey by Bitkom, a trade association for Germany's IT sector, also saw Russia being blamed for 39% of attacks.

That figure, however, is down from a previous 46%, while the statistic for China is three percentage points more than in the last survey in 2023.

The survey estimated that the German economy had suffered damage of up to €267 billion ($297 billion) in the last 12 months from acts of industrial espionage, including cybercrime. That figure is up 29% from the year before.

Nissan Motor Co. said it has developed a new type of paint that significantly reduces the temperature inside vehicles parked in direct sunlight.

The surface of a car coated with the innovative material remains up to 12 degrees cooler than that of a vehicle with standard paint, tests showed.

The company said the coating material can help rein in the temperature rise not only on the car's body but also in the vehicle when exposed to direct sunlight.

Indian IT firm Infosys has been accused of being “exploitative” after allegedly sending job offers to thousands of engineering graduates but still not onboarding any of them after as long as two years. The recent graduates have reportedly been told they must do repeated, unpaid training in order to remain eligible to work at Infosys.

Last week, the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), an Indian advocacy group for IT workers, sent a letter [PDF], shared by The Register, to Mansukh Mandaviya, India’s Minster of Labor and Employment. It requested that the Indian government intervene “to prevent exploitation of young IT graduates by Infosys." The letter signed by NITES president Harpreet Singh Saluja claimed that NITES received “multiple” complaints from recent engineering graduates “who have been subjected to unprofessional and exploitative practices” from Infosys after being hired for system engineer and digital specialist engineer roles.

According to NITES, Infosys sent these people offer letters as early as April 22, 2022, after engaging in a college recruitment effort from 2022–2023 but never onboarded the graduates. NITES has previously said that “over 2,000 recruits” are affected.

NITES claims the people sent job offers were asked to participate in an unpaid, virtual “pre-training” that took place from July 1, 2024, until July 24, 2024. Infosys' HR team reportedly told the recent graduates at that time that onboarding plans would be finalized by August 19 or September 2. But things didn’t go as anticipated, NITES’ letter claimed, leaving the would-be hires with “immense frustration, anxiety, and uncertainty.”

An 88-year-old Italian woman who got lost in a forest while looking for mushrooms survived for four days by drinking rainwater from puddles, reciting the rosary and talking to a fox.

Giuseppina Bardelli ventured into the mountains near her home in the village of Maccagno con Pino e Veddasca, on the border with Switzerland, taking a path that she had walked many times before. She was with her 57-year-old son, Sergio, but they became separated once they got to the woods.

“She lost her orientation, and she wandered off the path that she has known for more than 40 years,” Roberto, her other son, said.

She went missing last Wednesday, August 21, and it was not until four days later that she was found by rescuers.

“She drank rainwater that she found in puddles,” Roberto told Corriere della Sera newspaper. “At night she slept under trees, using vegetation to cover herself.”

She also befriended a wild fox that came sniffing around her out of curiosity.

“The fox approached her several times. They sort of became friends. And every evening she recited the rosary. She knew that every day could be her last,” her son said.

This summer, Californians have had to endure blistering heatwaves, raging wildfires – and now snow.

An unusually strong and rare snow system dusted California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range early Saturday, the first time snow has fallen in August in the so-called Golden State in more than 20 years.

About 3in fell in Lassen Volcanic national park, according to the weather service. But most areas just got a dusting with summertime temps returning 24 hours later.

The rare summer snowstorm nonetheless caused a record amount of rainfall in Redding, Red Bluff and Stockton in northern California on Saturday, the weather service said.

The “anomalous cool conditions” spread over much of the western US through Sunday morning, according to the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

Home insurance is becoming unaffordable for a growing number of Australian households as increased climate threats drive up their premiums, potentially putting billions of dollars in mortgage loans at risk, a report said on Monday.

As of March 2024, 15% of Australian households were experiencing home insurance affordability stress, which is defined as having premiums that cost more than four weeks' of their incomes, the report from the Actuaries Institute found.

That is equivalent to 1.61 million households, compared to 1.24 million found to be facing affordability stress a year ago – an increase of 30%.

Rising insurance costs have fuelled inflation in Australia and there are signs that some homeowners can no longer afford to protect their homes due to climate-related risks and high construction costs.

From Beijing to Hangzhou, the sight of robotic dogs in a park is becoming more and more common.

Climbing stairs? No problem. And what about hills? They can do that too.

Josh Yuan showed us his robo-dog in one of Beijing's fanciest shopping districts, guiding it through a crowd of curious onlookers with a handheld remote-controlled device.

He paid £1,300 for his new companion a few months ago.

"I think at the moment it's for people like me, or tech geeks and programmers," Mr Yuan said.

"But I think in the future, it will be quite common and humanoid robots will definitely enter people's homes when they are more affordable."

There are dozens of robot companies in China. A few of them, like the Hangzhou company Unitree, are focused on robotic dogs.

The Unitree team showed off their two latest models. One is a small dog, that can be used as a companion or dressed up in a dragon or panda costume for fun.

They also have a larger model, strong enough to lift me on its back.

It's designed for industries to use and can carry supplies, be sent into a fire or emergency, or be used to check pipelines and infrastructure.

In May, however, robodogs received some extra - and unwanted - attention after China's state media channel showed them being used in training exercises with weapons firing from their back.

The People's Liberation Army was using these gun-toting robots as they trained with Cambodian forces. But Unitree says the video came as a surprise.

The company's marketing manager, Duke Huang, explained: "We learnt about this [video] from the internet, just like everyone else. We didn't know anything about it before that."

These robots aren't designed for military use, but the video caused a storm.

"We can't control how buyers use the dog after they buy it," Mr Huang says. "But we are thinking about how to prohibit military use in the future."

With drones already operating on the battlefield, could robodogs be next? Unitree doesn't think so.

"The dog is not that smart, it's very simple," Mr Huang says. "It still needs my control to move. It doesn't have a brain."

P W Singer, a strategist at the US think-tank New America who specialises in 21st-century warfare, says "almost every advancement made with AI and robotics in the civilian economy is being mirrored on battlefields".

He notes that "many of the uses of AI and drones in wars like Ukraine and Gaza are almost direct applications of civilian tech".