Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese woman who was the world’s oldest person according to Guinness World Records, has died, an Ashiya city official said Saturday. She was 116.

Yoshitsugu Nagata, an official in charge of elderly policies, said Itooka died on December 29 at a care home in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, central Japan.

Itooka, who loved bananas and a yogurt-flavored Japanese drink called Calpis, was born on May 23, 1908. She became the oldest person last year following the death of 117-year-old Maria Branyas, according to the Gerontology Research Group.

When she was told she was at the top of the World Supercentenarian Rankings List, she simply replied, “Thank you.”

When Itooka celebrated her birthday last year, she received flowers, a cake and a card from the mayor.

Born in Osaka, Itooka was a volleyball player in high school, and long had a reputation for a sprightly spirit, Nagata said. She climbed the 3,067-meter (10,062-foot) Mount Ontake twice.

She married at 20, and had two daughters and two sons, according to Guinness.

Itooka managed the office of her husband’s textile factory during World War II. She lived alone in Nara after her husband died in 1979.

She is survived by one son and one daughter, and five grandchildren. A funeral service was held with family and friends, according to Nagata.

According to the Gerontology Research Group, the world’s oldest person is now 116-year-old Brazilian nun Inah Canabarro Lucas, who was born 16 days after Itooka.

The head of Moldova’s breakaway region Transnistria has urged residents to burn firewood for heating and warned that blackouts cannot be avoided, after Moscow stopped supplying gas via Ukraine.

Vadim Krasnoselskyi, the president of the Russian-backed separatist slither on Moldova’s eastern flank, said in a message on Telegram on Friday that “1,500 multi-story apartment buildings have no heating and hot water. Almost 72,000 private households have no gas. One hundred and fifty gas boiler houses have been shut down.”

“Fortunately, our region is rich in wood. There are still reserves,” he added, encouraging residents in rural areas with active stoves to find and burn wood where possible.

The region has been plunged into an energy crisis since New Year’s Day, when Ukraine made good on its promise to halt the transport of Russian gas to Europe through its territory after a key deal with Moscow expired. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed the move as “one of Moscow’s greatest defeats.”

Transnistria – a pro-Russian breakaway territory on the Ukrainian border – split from the rest of Moldova after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It had been receiving Russian gas via Ukraine until the supply was cut off.

“We cannot avoid rolling blackouts. This is required to protect the system. I am sure that everyone is accepting this stage with understanding,” Krasnoselskyi wrote on Telegram on Friday. “The government has developed a schedule, based on which it will be possible to organize everyday life and activity with the least inconvenience.”

Temperatures in the Transnistrian capital Tiraspol were forecast to hover slightly above freezing over the weekend, as a cold snap passes through much of Europe, though the European winter has otherwise been relatively mild so far.

The breakaway region’s parliament urged the Kremlin to reach a new deal with Ukraine over gas last month. Before the expiry of the transit deal with Ukraine, Russia had been supplying Moldova with around 2 billion cubic meters of gas per year, which was pumped through Transnistria, according to Reuters.

Ukraine now faces a loss of some $800 million a year in transit fees from Russia, while Kremlin-owned gas giant Gazprom will lose close to $5 billion in gas sales, the news agency reported.

Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has meanwhile suggested he could cut electricity supplies to Ukraine and reduce aid to Ukrainian refugees in retaliation for the expiry of the gas transit deal, which he described as “sabotage” by Zelensky.

Europe has in general significantly reduced its reliance on Russian energy since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but parts of the former Eastern Bloc still import gas in large quantities.

Mexico opened the possibility Friday of receiving non-Mexican migrants deported by the United States after initially saying they would push President-elect Donald Trump to return other nationalities directly to their countries of origin.

President Claudia Sheinbaum said during her daily press briefing that in cases where the US would not return migrants to their countries “we can collaborate through different mechanisms.”

She did not offer details, but Mexico could limit it to certain nationalities or request compensation from the US to move the deportees from Mexico to their home countries.

“There will be time to speak with the United States government if these deportations really happen, but we will receive them here, we are going to receive them properly and we have a plan,” she said. Sheinbaum had prefaced her comments by saying Mexico is not in favor of them.

Trump has promised to begin massive deportations. Critics have observed that there will be logistical challenges to significantly ramping up from the already high deportation numbers.

The deportations would be immediately felt in northern Mexico’s border cities, which struggle with high levels of organized crime and where non-Mexican migrants would make easy targets for kidnapping and extortion.

That happened during Trump’s first term, when thousands seeking US asylum were forced to wait out the process in Mexico. Many thousands more migrants who crossed into the US were sent back to Mexico under a public health provision held over from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In December, Sheinbaum had said she planned to ask Trump to deport non-Mexicans directly to their home countries.

Mexico, like any other country, is not obligated to accept non-Mexican migrants, but it has agreed to do so in the recent past, especially from countries like Cuba and Venezuela, which often refuse deportation flights from the United States, but may accept them from Mexico.

Mexico temporarily stopped deportations in December 2023 due to a lack of funds and they were substantially reduced during 2024 compared to 2023 and 2022.

Mexico wants to host a meeting of the region’s foreign ministers this month to discuss immigration.

Russia is demanding the United Nations condemn Kyiv following an alleged drone attack that it claims killed a journalist working for a Russian outlet and injured several others.

Russia’s Izvestia newspaper reported Saturday that its freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov died from his injuries after the drone hit the vehicle he was traveling in on the Donetsk-Horlivka highway, in Russian-occupied territory in eastern Ukraine.

Denis Pushilin, the head of the separatist self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), where the incident allegedly took place, said Martemyanov had been returning from a reporting assignment in the city of Horlivka at the time.

Pushilin said two journalists from the state-run Russian news agency RIA Novosti and two from the pro-Russian publication Bloknot Donetsk who were in the car with Martemyanov had also been “lightly injured” in the strike and were receiving medical assistance.

Bloknot Donetsk said its journalists had survived by “jumping out of the moving car” and sustained shrapnel wounds, concussions, and bruises.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova called the incident “a deliberate murder,” and accused Kyiv of trying to “eliminate” its “ideological opponents.”

She demanded the UN and other international organizations condemn Kyiv for the strike. “All those responsible for the crime against Russian journalists will be identified and will face deserved and inevitable punishment,” she added.

Russia would raise the issue at an upcoming UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine, Izvestia quoted Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy as saying.

This is a developing story.

It was not the start to 2025 that Keir Starmer wanted or expected: in the early hours of New Year’s Day, Elon Musk lobbed a series of angry posts and allegations towards the British prime minister, engulfing his government in a very public fight.

In the days since, the world’s richest man has dredged up a painful, years-long scandal over grooming gangs and pushed for the release of Tommy Robinson, an imprisoned far-right agitator with a swelling social media following.

The tech billionaire, who played a prominent role in US President-elect Donald Trump’s election campaign, has posted or reposted on X about child sex abuse cases in the UK more than 50 times this week.

He has called for Starmer and his safeguarding minister to be removed from power, for new elections to take place, and even for King Charles III to unilaterally dissolve parliament – something which hasn’t happened for nearly two centuries and would cause a constitutional crisis.

The topics represent the latest fascination of Musk, but his vexation is not new – as Trump’s inauguration nears, the X owner has intervened with increasing ferocity in European politics and hailed far-right figures on the continent. He has repeatedly condemned the European Union’s institutions and policy decisions, and Italy’s president has warned him to stop meddling in the country’s affairs.

Musk now poses a delicate new challenge for Starmer. The British leader is taking great pains to charm Trump, while also hoping to hold back at home the growing influence of Reform UK, a populist, anti-immigration party that Musk has endorsed.

“He will help us enormously because he’s a hero figure, especially for the youth who really do admire this man,” Reform leader Nigel Farage said of Musk on the GB News channel on Friday. “He’s helping us because he has given us an understanding of how we did it in America. And that’s very useful to us.”

Can Musk be ignored?

Musk’s tussles with Starmer’s Labour government did not begin this week.

He had previously called Britain a “police state” over its crackdown on far-right rioters, who sparked violent clashes on the country’s streets during the summer. He has long derided Starmer on his platform, and more recently hailed Reform UK, which since its founding in 2018 has capitalized on public frustration with the country’s two major parties and now rivals each of them in opinion polling.

He has prodded other European politicians too; in the past week the German government has accused Musk of attempting to influence the country’s February election, through his support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The group been accused of resurrecting Nazi-era ideology and slogans, and its youth arm has been designated by German authorities as an extremist organization.

Now, Musk’s growing infatuation with Tommy Robinson has positioned the billionaire as an idol for Britain’s online far-right community. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was jailed for 18 months in October after he admitted to being in contempt of court by repeating false accusations about a Syrian refugee.

For most in Westminster, Musk’s anger – like much online trolling – remains little more than a sideshow.

But privately, some Labour MPs are asking themselves an obvious question: why us? Unlike in Germany, there is no impending parliamentary election through which Musk can exert his influence. An election is not due to be held in Britain for more than four years, and Labour’s government is relatively unpopular but, in parliamentary terms at least, rock solid.

And for Starmer, Musk can’t be entirely ignored. The prime minister has so far resisted taking Musk’s bait – the billionaire has accused him of failing to act against grooming gangs while director of public prosecutions – but MPs will eventually want to see him take a stronger stand, to protect his ministers from torrents of online abuse. (Musk has repeatedly this week called for Starmer’s safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, to be imprisoned – on Saturday calling her “pure evil” and “a wicked creature” – for prioritizing a local inquiry in Oldham over a national inquiry, a policy approach which is not a crime.)

At the same time, the United States is Britain’s closest and most important ally – and Musk seems to be, for now at least, the closest and most important ally of its incoming leader.

Labour is desperate to build trust with the Trump administration; the government being shunned by the president-elect would only work in Farage’s favor, and there is huge economic incentive in working with Trump on, for instance, exemptions from his tariff regime.

The comments of Starmer’s ministers reflect that dilemma. In a tip-toeing remark, health secretary Wes Streeting told reporters on Friday: “Some of the criticisms that Elon Musk has made I think are misjudged and certainly misinformed, but we’re willing to work with Elon Musk, who I think has got a big role to play with his social media platform to help us and other countries to tackle this serious issue.”

A delicate dance for Britain’s right

It remains unclear how much influence Musk will have on Trump’s decision-making – particularly on foreign policy, which is firmly outside his official remit as a co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency.

But his remarks are already having some impact in Britain – exposing the fault lines in a deeply divided and unusually malleable political landscape.

Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, reactively called on X for a “long overdue… full national inquiry into the rape gangs scandal.”

But her authority on the issue, as with so many others, is limited by her own involvement in an ousted but deeply disliked Conservative government. That government had, indeed, commissioned a years-long inquiry into child sexual abuse, which concluded in 2022. But the probe’s leader subsequently criticized the former government’s response to her findings, which included a key recommendation that reporting of child sex abuse should be mandatory.

The long hangover of the Conservative era has allowed Farage to position his movement, with some success, as the “real” opposition in Britain, and Musk’s growing interest in Reform represents an opportunity for Farage to further his standing.

The populist leader predictably condemned Badenoch’s comments and has attached himself to most of Musk’s remarks. He talks openly about hoping for financial backing from Musk, ahead of a round of local elections in May in which Reform is on pace to perform well.

But there are dangers for Britain’s populist rabble-rouser, too. Echoing Musk’s support for Robinson was a bridge too far for Farage, who told GB News: “(Musk) sees Robinson as one of these people that fought against the grooming gangs. But of course the truth is Tommy Robinson’s in prison not for that, but for contempt of court.”

“We’re a political party aiming to win the next general election. He’s not what we need,” Farage said of Robinson.

For leading politicians across Britain’s ideological divide, Musk brings a heady mix of opportunity and risk.

His tendency to fawn over far-right figures won’t find much popular support in a country that, unlike some European nations, has not seen the emergence of a serious, extreme right-wing political movement – a fact Farage will remember even as he pushes for the US magnate’s financial backing.

But in government, outwardly shunning Musk is not yet an option. The delicate nature of Starmer’s relationship with Trump may depend on keeping the billionaire at arm’s length – for as long as that remains possible.