Free Republic

Flying Japan Airlines in the near future? Colonel Sanders will be joining you as the airline rolls out Kentucky Fried Chicken meals onboard flights from Tokyo to the U.S. and Europe. Japan Airlines and Kentucky Fried Chicken Japan are collaborating for the seventh installment of the airline's Air Series in-flight meal program - temporary restaurant promotions for in-flight catering. Past featured meals have included traditional Japanese fare from Taimeiken and Yoshinoya. The fast-food meals, which will include a drumstick, boneless chicken breast, coleslaw, lettuce leaves and bread, will be served on flights from December 1 to Feb. 28, 2013. KFC's...

The heart-warming story of a wayward emperor penguin that was rescued in New Zealand may not have a happy ending. Scientists who released the penguin back into the ocean say the signal from a tracking device has stopped and they fear the bird has been eaten. But they still are holding out hope that the device just fell off the penguin who has been dubbed "Happy Feet."

Yummy! A seafood bowl in Hokkaido, Japan contains salmon roe, seaweed, some other things, AND A DANCING SQUID! The creature isn't hoping his perforce is so moving you'll show him mercy. This dancer is dead! When you pour soy sauce on the dead squid, the muscles contract in response to signals from neurons, which transmit signals around the body by means of a series of sequential influxes of sodium across the cell membrane into the neuron. Doesn't that sound delish?

More mysterious animal deaths have surfaced, this time in a volcanic lake in the Philippines. Reports say that 800 tons, or 1.6 million pounds, of fish have turned up dead in a lake near the Taal volcano, which is located south of the capital city of Manila. Officials say the deaths may have been a result of sudden temperature change in the water.

April 8, 2011, 2:53 PM HKT Grab Your Chopsticks and Geiger Counters At Gyotaku, a Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong, business is bad and money is tight. But that didn’t stop owner John Liang from splurging on a new tool last week: a Geiger counter, for 10,000 Hong Kong dollars (about US$1,300). Since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami set off Japan’s nuclear crisis, many diners in Hong Kong have steered clear of sushi restaurants for fear of radiation poisoning from food, particularly fish, that’s come from Japan. As business spirals down, some Hong Kong eateries have chosen to stay...

David Martin was in the mood for raw fish, and he liked the deal offered by a Studio City sushi restaurant: all you can eat for $28. He took a seat at the counter and started ordering. But it turned out that Martin didn't really want sushi, which includes rice; he wanted all-you-can-eat sashimi, which is just fish. He began picking the seafood off the top and leaving the rice. Restaurant owner Jay Oh told Martin that if he wanted the all-you-can-eat price, he'd have to eat the rice too and not just fill up on fish. Martin replied that...

MIAMI — Arturo Ortiz-Soto, the sushi-chef rapist who terrorized South Beach women for two years, is going to prison for 40 years. The 31-year-old former chef pleaded guilty Monday to raping two women and attempting to rape two others. He will be deported to his native Guatemala when he is released from prison. ``You have irreparably changed the lives of your victims by your behavior,'' Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Ellen Sue Venzer told him. ``I do believe this sentence will sufficiently guarantee you do no more harm to our citizens.''

SANTA MONICA, Calif.- A Santa Monica, Calif., sushi restaurant says it is closing its doors voluntarily after serving endangered whale meat. But The Hump restaurant at the Santa Monica Airport also faces federal charges, The Los Angeles Times reported. On its Web site, the restaurant said, "The Hump hopes that by closing its doors, it will help bring awareness to the detrimental effect that illegal whaling has on the preservation of our ocean ecosystems and species." The newspaper report said the restaurant took responsibility once charges were lodged, the charges themselves came only after an undercover sting operation by animal...

Rejection Thursday of a bluefin tuna ban at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) drew sighs of relief from sushi chefs and fishermen across Japan. Japan consumes about three-quarters of the globe's bluefin tuna.

A California sushi chef and the restaurant in which he worked have been charged with illegally serving meat from an endangered Sei whale, the Justice Department said on Thursday. Kiyoshiro Yamamoto, 45, and the parent company of the popular restaurant The Hump in Santa Monica were charged late on Wednesday with violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act which makes it illegal to sell any kind of whale meat. The case stemmed from informants who ordered whale meat at the restaurant in October 2009 and evolved into a sting operation by U.S. wildlife and customs officials who observed whale meat being...

The recipe calls for 536 sheets of edible seaweed, 100+ pounds of rice, 167 pounds of surimi, 67 pounds of cukes and an equal amount of avocados. The finished product? A 330-foot long California sushi roll to best the world record one made in Maui in 2001. That beast of traditional cuisine was 300-feet long. More than 350 UC Berkeley students on 58 teams will build the ginormous roll on Sunday. The teams, with names like Smashin' Sushi, AvoCALdoes and Roll Me California Style, are made up of students from sororities, fraternities and other campus groups. After a learning lesson...

One summer day in August 2006, Anthony Franz went to a Chicago area hospital carrying a 9-foot worm. He did not find it in his garden. Anthony Franz case is one of a growing few in urban cities across the world and in the United States discovering (or rediscovering) that some of the most popular fish can host tape worms. Franz is one of the few, but growing number of tapeworm victims in cities across the world who are discovering (or rediscovering) that some of the most popular fish can host parasites. Although still rare, a study this June showed...

Two men carrying a knife and an electronic stun gun stormed the Planet Sushi restaurant in the city's Latin Quarter on Sunday night, demanding money from the till. But the team of Japanese staff turned on the men, stabbing one to death with a fish knife used for preparing sushi dishes, while the other was pinned to the ground outside the restaurant.

The "naked sushi" trend — you know, the one "Sex and the City" Samantha latched onto in the hit movie as a way of tantalizing her boyfriend — has been bait for geisha partygoers in Japan for centuries. Now, it's catching on in Florida, according to The St. Petersburg Times. A club in Clearwater has attracted open-mouthed patrons after adopting the tradition, which involves serving raw fish delicacies straight off the body of a barely clothed woman.

An armored fish was about to become a mom some 380 million years ago. Though the primitive fish perished, its fossilized remains remarkably reveal an embryo and umbilical cord inside the soon-to-be mother's body. The discovery marks the oldest evidence of an animal giving live birth, pushing the known record of such reproduction back by some 200 million years. It also supports the idea that internal fertilization in vertebrates (animals with backbones) originated in a group of primitive fish. "When I first saw the embryo inside the mother fish, my jaw dropped," said researcher John Long, a paleontologist at Museum...

Two foods once thought healthy — sushi and diet soda — pose grave health threats, according to two studies released yesterday. The city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is launching a campaign against sushi, encouraging women who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or planning to have children in the near future to stop eating raw fish and cut down on their intake of even cooked fish with high levels of mercury. The campaign was prompted by a citywide survey that showed that women of childbearing age in New York had three times the level of mercury in their blood stream as...

Sue Wilkinson, 53, a university professor, was married for 17 years before the relationship ended in divorce. She has now been with her female partner, Celia Kitzinger for the same length of time. The couple married in 2003 in Canada, where same-sex unions are legal. Last year they lost a High Court battle to have their marriage recognised in Britain. Ms Wilkinson, Professor of Feminist and Health Studies at Loughborough University, said: “I was never unsure about my sexuality throughout my teens or 20s. I was a happy heterosexual and had no doubts. Then I changed, through political activity and...

December 22, 2006—Like pulling a shadow from the darkness, researchers in Japan have captured and filmed a live giant squid—likely for the first time—shedding new light on the famously elusive creatures. Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan's National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo (see Japan map). His team snared the animal using a line baited with small squid and shot video of the russet-colored giant as it was hauled to the surface. The squid, a young female, "put up quite a fight"...

LONDON (Reuters) - Police investigating the death of a former Russian spy from suspected radiation poisoning have found levels of radiation in a London sushi bar where he ate just before he became sick, health officials said on Friday. "The police reported that they had found some radiation there (in the Sushi bar). We are assessing the level of that and the potential risk to people that might cause," Pat Troop, head of the independent Health Protection Agency, told the BBC.

Excerpt - Scotland Yard is investigating the attempted murder of a top Russian defector poisoned by political enemies in London. Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB colonel who fled the current Russian regime to claim asylum in Britain, is under armed police guard in hospital. Sources have confirmed that the Russian was taken suddenly and dangerously ill on November 1 while investigating the recent murder of dissident Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Mr Litvinenko was poisoned following a clandestine meeting with an associate at a sushi bar in London's Piccadilly. ~ snip ~