Renewed outrage at White House’s use manga and anime imagery after US president is depicted as ninja Naruto
Japanese anime and manga fans are urging Donald Trump to stop using their favourite characters in his social media posts.
About 20,000 people have signed a petition on Change.org entitled Protect Japanese Manga, protesting against the official White House X account posting videos featuring unauthorised use of imagery from the popular Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto series. Angry fans have also been posting on social media.
SINGAPORE: A Ghanaian man sat down with a Singaporean woman to talk about why Singaporeans complain so much, when so many things in the city-state actually work.
Not that for Kojo Enoch, the content creator behind the YouTube channel Explore with Kojo, complaining in Singapore is necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, he wondered if one of the secrets behind Singapore’s efficiency is its citizens’ refusal to take things lying down.
Sabrina, the Singaporean woman he interviewed, acknowledged that things are really good for Singaporeans, with its high level of security and cleanliness, plus one of the most efficient public transport systems in the world. She acknowledged, however, that like all places, the city-state has its advantages and disadvantages, though as a whole, Singaporeans have a lot to be thankful for.
When Kojo asked Sabrina why Singaporeans complain a lot, she said that it has become part of the culture, admitting that even she begins to complain when the train is one minute late, “like it’s the end of the world.”
Kojo, who was struck by this, said, “When you say Singaporeans complain over the littlest thing, I want to believe that this might be a good thing in the sense that it keeps the authorities on their toes.
But if the authorities or the leaders know that people are not going to complain, then they are going to relax and not do what they are supposed to do to lift up the nation.”
He added that in his home country, people do not hold leaders accountable, “so we take whatever they give us.”
“It basically means you guys will not tolerate anything other than the best,” he added, while Sabrina nodded.
As far as he has observed, most people in developing parts of the world don’t complain, and he added that he wished the people in Ghana would “complain over everything,” not out of ingratitude, but to bring about better standards of efficiency.
Sabrina added that the Singaporean government endeavours through surveys to get feedback from people regarding policies and projects, and Singaporeans are encouraged to give their honest opinions.
“We started from almost nothing. So for us to be able to achieve so much in the last 65 years, it’s an incredible feat,” she added. /TISG
An infectious disease specialist has called on Hong Kong authorities to step up rodent checks, despite confirmation that no residents from the city were on board the hantavirus-hit cruise ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
A microscope image of Hantavirus. Photo: Cynthia Goldsmith, USCDCP.
Speaking on an RTHK programme on Friday, physician and infectious disease specialist Dr Joseph Tsang said the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD) should conduct regular monitoring of rats.
“The AFCD should conduct regular monitoring to test whether rats in the environment carry viruses,” he said.
The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) previously issued a statement on Thursday, saying there were no Hong Kong residents on the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, which carried 147 passengers and crew members.
The CHP also said that, as of Wednesday, no infections had been reported in Hong Kong.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of Thursday, there were eight reported cases linked to the MV Hondius, including three deaths. Five of the eight cases have been confirmed as hantavirus.
‘Cannot let our guard down’
Hantavirus is primarily transmitted through direct contact with the faeces, saliva or urine of infected rodents, or by inhaling aerosolised particles of their waste, according to the CHP. Human-to-human transmission is relatively rare, and there is currently no vaccine to prevent infection.
A resident takes her rubbish to a refuse collection point, on May 31, 2024. Photo: Kyle Lam/HKFP.
The risk to global health posed by the cruise ship incident is low, the CHP added, citing the WHO.
Tsang said that, despite the low risk, he still urged cleaners to be aware of the dangers.
“I wouldn’t say the risk of infection in Hong Kong is especially high, but we cannot let our guard down,” the physician said.
“Hantavirus is usually concentrated in places with more rats, such as refuse collection points, rear stairwells, or the back alleys of restaurants. Sanitation workers should take particular care.”
“I can’t even tell you how important community is to me,” Lourdes “Lola” Leon says on a recent morning. “I would’ve been dead in a ditch if it wasn’t for my friends. Not to be dramatic, but that’s how it feels.”
No one—not even Leon, whose starry life as a musician and model began in 1996, when her mother, Madonna, birthed her—is immune to the scars a heartbreak leaves. But she also knows that a low point in life can become a source of inspiration. That’s the idea behind the Los Angeles-born, New York City-based artist’s latest single, “T Shirt,” which she released with a deeply personal and pared-back music video directed by cinematographer Eric Yue on May 27. The song, as Leon describes it, is “pretty straightforward. It’s nothing too metaphorical: you’re in the throes of an unhealthy love. And as a young person, I think we try to rationalize horrible things that happen, people’s shitty behavior.” The antidote to that kind of hurt, Leon has found, is in the people who love you most, those who have stuck around. As such, her close friends (like Sammy, her longtime producer who made “T Shirt” with Sega Bodega) and family members, including her paternal grandmother, make cameos in the video. “I wanted to capture the core of who I am,” Leon says of the concept. “And not in a way where it felt so put on. This is really my life.”
Photograph by Eric Yue
After putting out her debut EP in 2022, Go, under the moniker Lolahol, Leon says she was “struggling with my visual identity. I was in such a transitional period that I didn’t feel rooted in anything.” Not to mention, she was in “such a wrong relationship for so many reasons,” she says. “But I was trying to make it seem all right. I was poisoning myself, drinking so much. I remember my friends looking at me like, ‘What are you doing?’ I was so reliant on certain people around me. I was always calling my grandmother and crying.”
Leon explains that she knew she would heal, “in the back of my mind. There’s a quote in the song: ‘My heart will know, my head will follow.’ That was like a mantra I repeated to make myself not literally become fully 5150.” That feeling of hopefulness pervades the track and the video, which feels more personal than anything Leon has put out in the past. “When I first put out music, I was so scared, literally shaking,” she recalls. “At first, you’ve got to keep this fierce, cunt wall up in front of you, just in case you get hurt. But now I’m at a place where I feel comfortable to an extent sharing that part of myself.”
Photograph by Eric Yue
Leon, who turns thirty in the fall, says she’ll be releasing more music later this year under her own name, Lola Leon; the material will sound “introspective,” she explains, like “T Shirt.”
“People keep saying, ‘This is a new era, this is a new era’—I don’t know where that came from!” she adds with a laugh. “It’s more just about embracing my roots and tapping back in with people who’ve watched me grow over the years. I’m still Lola! Just no more ’hol’—we’re dropping the ’hol.’”
Maya Classic Period (550-900 AD) rare polychrome pottery from the Jay I. Kislak collection, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. See long file names for additional information.
GQ columnist Frazier Tharpe hits the Croisette with the “funmaxxing” pop diva, bibliophile, and Nespresso ambassador, who swears she doesn’t have a secret Letterboxd account.
Archaeologists have long known that the ancient peoples of North America—not unlike us—played a lot of games. Going back millennia, cultures around the world developed myriad ways to keep entertained, and for a long time, it was thought that the first dice ever used could be traced to the ancient Eastern European and Near East cultures of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Caucasus. But according to a new paper by Robert Madden, published by Cambridge University Press, games of chance developed much, much earlier than originally thought—halfway around the world.
Researchers previously believed that the earliest dice originated about 5,500 years ago, but Madden shares that examples excavated in North America date back as far as the Late Pleistocene—the Ice Age. Among the oldest reported examples are a few found in modern-day Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. The rich archaeological sites in these places are associated with the Folsom Culture, representing a dispersed hunter-gatherer lifeway that extended across the North American West, Southwest, and Great Plains around 12,000 years ago.
Examples of dice with details showing microscopic traces of pigment, with color enhanced for illustration
“The dice tend to show up in liminal spaces where you have a lot of high mobility,” Madden told Live Science. “It might have something to do with how separated these people are and the need to relate to people you don’t see very often.”
In the report, Madden also says that “the making and using of dice represent humans’ first known efforts to intentionally generate, observe, and record streams of controlled, random events…” He adds that, possibly for the first time, people were comprehending patterns or regularities in probability—a kind of precursor to understanding what we now call the law of large numbers. Anthropologists consider this to be “a crucial early step in humanity’s evolving discovery and understanding of randomness and the probabilistic nature of the universe.”
Last month, the Office of the Ombudsman released its long-awaited investigation into the Hong Kong government’s work in combating animal cruelty.
Jack Chan, the Ombudsman, announces the report investigating the Hong Kong government’s work in combating animal cruelty on April 16, 2026. Photo: The Office of the Ombudsman.
The report was prompted by a series of horrifying abuse cases which, in the Ombudsman’s own words, “amount to a deliberate trampling on the dignity of life and run wholly contrary to the very conscience of a civilised society.”
The investigation focuses primarily on the failures of the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department (AFCD), which is responsible for animal management and welfare.
Among the key findings are the AFCD’s inefficient investigations and insufficient prosecutions. Out of 1,633 reports of suspected animal cruelty from 2020 to June 2025, only six prosecutions were brought – a striking, though not new, statistic.
The AFCD responded to the Ombudsman, saying that the majority of reports it received pertained to noise or nuisance complaints rather than cruelty. However, media reports on animal cruelty, including a recent shocking case of a 14-year-old student sharing online photos and videos of cat abuse, may suggest otherwise.
Other problems highlighted by the Ombudsman’s report include weak enforcement powers; inconsistent case handling; poor internal monitoring and staff training; delayed reform of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Ordinance (Cap. 169), first promised in 2019; and alarmingly low penalties for illegal animal traps, which currently carry a maximum fine of HK$50,000 with no provision for imprisonment.
Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department logo. File photo: Tom Grundy/HKFP.
These are important findings, and the Ombudsman deserves credit for highlighting institutional deficiencies that animal advocates have raised for years.
But while the report has identified some of the government’s major failures, it also reveals a deeper problem: Hong Kong’s approach to animal welfare remains fundamentally reactive rather than preventive, with most suggestions focusing on punishment, not prevention.
Worse still, the report overlooks many of the structural and everyday forms of animal plight that are normalised across the city. This article, then, intends to address these blind spots.
Duty of care
The most glaring limitation of the investigative report concerns its ambivalence over nudging the government to implement a “duty of care.”
While the Ombudsman acknowledges that the government has struggled to reach consensus on this proposal, it stops short of urging its adoption. This hesitation matters.
The Office of the Ombudsman. Photo: Peter Lee/HKFP.
A duty of care would fundamentally shift existing animal law from punishing cruelty after suffering occurs to preventing suffering in the first place. Without such a framework, Hong Kong continues to operate on an outdated logic: authorities intervene only after visible injury, starvation, or death.
If a cat falls from an unprotected high-rise window, or a dog is chronically confined in a tiny flat with little exercise or social contact, the current legal framework can hardly intervene until obvious harm has already occurred.
With a duty of care, caregivers would be legally required to provide appropriate food, shelter, veterinary care, and living conditions that meet animals’ physical and behavioural needs safely. In other common law jurisdictions, including the UK and Australia, duty of care provisions have already become a cornerstone of animal protection.
Undoubtedly, one of the report’s recommendations is to “further strengthen outreach and education in schools, helping students and young people build an awareness of animal protection from childhood.”
This is a fantastic recommendation for preventing animal cruelty, but it remains frustratingly vague. What kind of education are we talking about?
Dogs in Hong Kong. File photo: GovHK.
If Hong Kong genuinely wants to cultivate respect for animals, it must first confront contradictions in the current education system.
Attending a local secondary school, I still remember many science classes where animal dissection was presented as a normal part of learning, from dissecting ox eyes to hearing classmates describe experiments on mice.
These activities are still recommended by the Education Bureau’s Biology Curriculum and Assessment Guide, although the government also expects secondary school students to “learn about how humans can live in harmony with animals and show respect for all living things” in the very same subject.
Humane education
Not only do such laboratory practices risk reinforcing a worldview in which animals exist primarily as instruments for human use, but the pedagogical value of animal dissection has been convincingly challenged by a large corpus of research.
Yet, the issue is perhaps just one of the many voids in our education system that should help enhance animal well-being and stop the everyday exploitation of animals. Learning about veganism, the intersection between animal exploitation and other social problems, conservation, and other elements of animal education are equally important.
Humane education should equip citizens with the ability to locate the many practices of cruelty against animals in Hong Kong, many of which the Ombudsman’s report says nothing about.
Of course, the development projects and human activities that disrupt animals’ habitats should not be ignored. Just think of how Chinese white dolphins have lost their habitat because of reclamation or been injured because of high-speed ferries’ propeller blades, to name just one example.
Whether one supports these institutions and projects or not, it is difficult to argue that they fall outside the conversation on animal welfare.
A Chinese white dolphin spotted in the southern part of Lantau on September 10, 2021. Photo: Kelly Ho/HKFP.
The government’s poor animal management policies in urban areas are another major omission in the Ombudsman’s investigation. The report rightly condemns illegal animal traps but ignores government-led practices that also cause suffering, including the wild boar culling operations.
If Hong Kong truly wants to become a “civilised” city that respects life, then animal welfare cannot be confined to criminal prosecutions of isolated abuse cases. It must also confront the legal, educational, economic, and cultural systems that normalise animal suffering in everyday life and prevent it from happening in the first place.
Another step that must be taken to safeguard animals’ well-being is to ask a harder question: What kinds of relationships do we, as a city, continue to build with the animals who live among us?
As philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds us, animal justice should not be measured simply by the absence of cruelty, but by whether animals can actualise the capabilities essential to their flourishing.
For dogs, that includes play, movement, and social bonding. For dolphins, it means the ability to hunt, communicate, and live within their natural habitat. Survival alone is not welfare; a decent life is.
The Ombudsman’s report is an important step. But it should not be mistaken for an ultimate solution. Rather, it should remind us that there is always more that we – as policymakers, educators, and citizens – must do.
HKFP is an impartial platform & does not necessarily share the views of opinion writers or advertisers. HKFP presents a diversity of views & regularly invites figures across the political spectrum to write for us. Press freedom is guaranteed under the Basic Law, security law, Bill of Rights and Chinese constitution. Opinion pieces aim to constructively point out errors or defects in the government, law or policies, or aim to suggest ideas or alterations via legal means without an intention of hatred, discontent or hostility against the authorities or other communities.
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