CHUGOKU A 26-year-old man, diving without any diving equipment some 30 meters off the coast in Yonago, Tottori Prefecture, was surprised by a shark and accidentally stabbed himself in his left arm with a harpoon, inflicting a wound that is expected to take two weeks to heal. (28)

CHUGOKU Okayama Prefectural Police arrested a right-wing group member Thursday on charge of intimidation after the man sent a severed finger to the headquarters of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and gave himself up to the police. (1)

CHUGOKU A missing 16-year-old boy faces arrest in Yamaguchi Prefecture for bashing his grandfather to death, police said. [MSN MAINICHI]

CHUGOKU Local farmers in Okayama have launched an experiment using domestic ducks to rid farms of apple snails, which cause havoc by chewing through rice plants. [MSN MAINICHI]

CHUGOKU The moral questions swirling around Hiroshima and Nagasaki haven’t been solved 62 years after the bombings and probably never will be. Did the bombs that ushered in the terrors of the nuclear age save lives by abruptly ending the war? Or did they butcher hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians to no purpose? [THE JAPAN TIMES]

CHUGOKU A plumbing blunder at Hiroshima University’s Higashi-Hiroshima Campus resulted in water for toilet flushing being sent to drinking taps for more than a decade, it has emerged. [MSN MAINICHI]

CHUGOKU Prime Minister Shinzo Abe does not plan to attend a meeting with atomic-bomb survivors in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, the anniversary of the attack on the city, the city said Wednesday. [KYODO]

CHUGOKU A 58-year-old construction worker of Okayama was found dead with apparent stab wounds in his neck and back near the bank of the Asahigawa river in the city early Monday, police said. [YOMIURI]

CHUGOKU The driver of a large truck was killed Monday after his vehicle struck the rear of a car that had stopped at a traffic light and caused a four-vehicle pileup that injured four others at an intersection on the National Highway Route 2 in Okayama at around 1:10 a.m., police said. [YOMIURI]

CHUGOKU A man arrested for setting fire to a shed here has admitted his involvement in more than 30 other cases that have occurred in Fukuoka Prefecture and western Honshu, investigators said. [MSN MAINICHI]

CHUGOKU The Tivoli Gardens amusement park in Copenhagen will stop licensing its brand to a similar park in Japan, officials said Monday, citing a lack of investment at the attraction in Kurashiki, Okayama. [INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE]

CHUGOKU A bullet train traveling on the Sanyo Shinkansen Line in Yamaguchi Prefecture passed a maintenance worker at a speed of 285 km/h, exceeding the speed limit by 165 km/h, in June, it was learned Sunday. [YOMIURI]

CHUGOKU Death threats have been made against the lawyer of a man accused of a killing a woman and her infant child in Yamaguchi Prefecture in 1999, say police. [MSN MAINICHI]

CHUGOKU An uninhabited island off the coast of east Hiroshima is near complete collapse as an unprecedented number of breeding ispods, called “nanatsuba-kotsubumushi” in Japanese, a type of isppod of the suborder Flabellifera, are making holes in the rock to lay their eggs. The bugs have already caused the higher of the Hoboro Island’s two peaks to completely disappear.

CHUGOKU SOCIETY. A 41-year-old Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force official was arrested in Hiroshima, after being accused of groping two 25-year old female staff members at a Hiroshima bath house.