Hideki Matsuyama carded the lowest-ever 72-hole score in the history of the PGA Tour on Sunday, shooting an astonishing 35-under to win The Sentry in Kapalua, Hawaii.

Matsuyama’s record total eclipsed Cameron Smith’s 34-under at the same event in 2022 as the Japanese star finished three shots ahead of American Collin Morikawa to claim the 11th title of his career.

He shot a birdie on the final hole of the tournament at The Plantation Course to seal the record, ending the day with an eight-under 65.

“I thought (the record) maybe was 34 or 35, I wasn’t sure, but I kind of thought: ‘If I’m thinking like that, it probably won’t go in,’” Matsuyama told reporters via an interpreter when asked about the final hole. “But it did go in and I’m glad it did.”

With the closing putt, the 2021 Masters champion also set the PGA Tour record for the most holes at birdie or better, his 35th of the tournament. The victory, his third in the last 10 months, earned him $3.6 million in prize money.

For second-placed Morikawa, who trailed Matsuyama by a shot heading into the final round, his total of 32-under somehow wasn’t enough for the title as calm, windless conditions contributed to low scores across the board.

The world No. 4 carded 67 on Sunday, though he may come to regret a front nine that included two birdies and only his second bogey of the tournament on the sixth. Matsuyama, meanwhile, held his nerve with four birdies on the back nine to stay out in front.

“He was matching me yesterday shot for shot and I felt like I was playing lights out,” said Morikawa, who carded an 11-under 62 on Saturday. “Yes, you could leave some shots out there, but you shoot 11-under on any golf course and you’re going to be happy.

He added: “I just knew I had to be on top of everything and I just kind of let a few slip on that front nine. I played a good back nine, but to win on a course like this, conditions like this, you’ve got to have it for 72 (holes) and I had it for 65.”

South Korean Im Sung-jae, who shot a then-joint-record 34 birdies or better on this course last year, was third on 29-under, four shots ahead of Venezuelan Jhonattan Vegas in fourth.

Further down the leaderboard, Australia’s Cam Davis and American Will Zalatoris fell foul of a mix-up on the final round, accidentally hitting each other’s balls on the 15th hole.

They later went back and played their shots from the correct location, but both players were subsequently handed a two-shot penalty, meaning Davis eventually finished tied for 13th and Zalatoris tied for 26th.

It proved a costly error. Without the two-shot penalty, Davis would have finished tied for fifth and taken home an extra $306,625 in prize money, according to Reuters. Zalatoris, meanwhile, would have been tied for 15th and earned almost $120,000 extra.

The man who carried out an attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans early New Year’s morning visited the city twice in the months prior and used Meta smart glasses to film the street and plan out the attack, FBI New Orleans Special Agent in Charge Lyonel Myrthil said Sunday.

The attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, stayed at a rental home in New Orleans from October 30 for a few days, and during that time recorded video as he bicycled through the French Quarter, Myrthil said. He also visited New Orleans on November 10, and investigators were still putting together the details of that trip.

He was wearing a pair of Meta smart glasses while carrying out the attack on New Year’s, but he did not activate them that day. The glasses were found on him after his death.

His planning was revealed in a news conference Sunday in which officials provided a timeline of his movements and released videos of his actions hours before the attack.

Jabbar, a 42-year-old Army veteran who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, drove a pickup truck into scores of Bourbon Street revelers just after 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day and then opened fire, killing 14 and injuring at least 35, according to the FBI. The vehicle ultimately crashed into a cherry picker forklift, and Jabbar was killed in a shootout with police.

The mass killing has raised questions as to how the city secured Bourbon Street and how a heavy-duty truck was able to drive onto one of the most pedestrian-heavy roads in the US.

“The NOPD has a comprehensive security plan in place for the Joan of Arc parade and all parades moving forward,” NOPD said. “We are hardening our targets and strategically placing resources to ensure the event is safe and enjoyable for everyone. While we cannot disclose specific operational details, we want to assure the public that we are fully prepared and working closely with our partners to provide a secure environment.”

All 14 of the victims from the New Year’s attack have now been identified and named. The final victim identified was Latasha Polk, a certified nursing assistant and mother of a 14-year-old, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in the news conference.

Her family believes that “Latasha would’ve wanted the city to turn out in celebration, but tinged with grief but not in fear,” Landry said.

Random person moved IED, FBI says

Jabbar entered Louisiana at about 2:30 p.m. December 31 and unloaded his rented Ford F150 truck at an Airbnb at about 10 p.m., the FBI said.

About 15 minutes after midnight, Jabbar set fire to the rental home and left in the truck, said Joshua Jackson, the special agent in charge of the New Orleans field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

“We believe he did this and his hope was to burn the entire house down and hide evidence of his crimes,” Jackson said. He also theorized that the fire could have been a “distraction” to divert police and fire resources.

The blaze failed to engulf the home, and the fire department put out the fire just after 5 a.m.

After leaving the rental home, Jabbar placed two improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, on Bourbon Street, and a transmitter to detonate the IEDs was found in his vehicle, the FBI said. Bomb-making materials were also found at the Airbnb and at his home in Houston.

He placed one IED in a rolling cooler and a second IED in a bucket cooler and left both on Bourbon Street, Myrthil said. He left the rolling cooler at Bourbon and St. Peter Street at 1:53 a.m., but “someone on Bourbon Street, who we have no reason to believe was involved, dragged the cooler a block” away on Bourbon and Orleans, he said.

Investigators found the cooler at that second position after the attack. The second IED, in the bucket cooler, was placed at 2:20 a.m. at the intersection of Bourbon and Toulouse streets.

Officials have said Jabbar acted alone.

Two guns were recovered in the attack, a semi-automatic pistol and semi-automatic rifle, Jackson said. Jabbar purchased the rifle in a private sale November 19 in Arlington, Texas, from a person who did not know Jabbar and had no awareness of the attack, Jackson said. These types of transactions are legal in Texas.

Finally, investigators are looking into Jabbar’s trips to Egypt and Canada and other visits to Atlanta and Tampa, according to Myrthil. He traveled to Cairo from June 22 to July 3, 2023, and visited Ontario from July 10 to July 13, 2023, he said. FBI agents are digging into what he did on those trips and whether they tie into the attack.

Mayor calls for review of city’s security plan

New Orleans has been installing new, removable stainless-steel bollards along several blocks, but those were not expected to be ready until the Super Bowl next month.

At Sunday’s news conference, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell announced a plan to ask a tactical expert to review the city’s security plans “to determine whether or not these bollards are sufficient.”

“If they’re not, how, and what, and where do they need to be placed,” she said. “This is a work in progress, and we’re committed to doing everything necessary to ensure public safety measures.”

The potential threat of a ramming attack has been well known at least since the mass ramming attack in Nice, France, on Bastille Day in 2016.

In New Orleans, a private security consulting firm warned in a 2019 report that the risk of terrorism in the French Quarter – specifically mass shootings and vehicular attacks – remained “highly possible while moderately probable.”

“The current bollard system on Bourbon Street does not appear to work,” the report said.

The city previously installed some wedge barricades on Bourbon Street but did not have them raised and in position on New Year’s Eve, and officials said they did not work properly. New Orleans also owns some other temporary barriers, known as Archer barriers, but Police Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said she “didn’t know about them” prior to the attack.

On the night of the attack, a police vehicle was positioned sideways to try to block off Bourbon Street, but the attacker drove onto the sidewalk to evade it and then sped down the street.

“We did indeed have a plan,” Kirkpatrick said. “But the terrorist defeated it.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

It was early in the largest investigation in Justice Department history, and Trump was at his lowest point, abandoned by many Republican lawmakers who were still seething over the riot he helped inspire.

For months, the FBI and a team of prosecutors looked for potential links between Trump’s inner circle and the Proud Boys, whose leader was ultimately found guilty of seditious conspiracy and is serving 22 years in prison, the longest sentence of any January 6 defendant.

Investigators spent much of that summer poring over call records of Proud Boys members and conducting scores of interviews. They homed in on a period in late 2020, when an informant alleged an interaction between Trump or his inner circle and the Proud Boys occurred.

Prosecutors inside the Justice Department also dug through reams of opaque financial records, searching for any direct links between Trump and the organizations that brought “Stop the Steal” rallygoers to Washington for his speech ahead of the Capitol attack. From there, they examined the so-called war room setup at the Willard hotel in Washington, where Steve Bannon and other Trump supporters strategized how to thwart the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

In the end, no direct criminal links to Trump emerged. The suspected Proud Boys meeting, the Willard hotel room and the rally fundraising were all dead ends.

While federal investigators continued to pursue Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, mostly done in plain sight, they always faced long odds and a ticking political clock. The countdown compressed as Trump went from party pariah to inevitable Republican nominee, and expired once he won reelection.

As the president-elect prepares to retake the White House, inside the Justice Department, officials are taking stock of the failed effort to prosecute what many of them believe was a viable criminal case against Trump for obstructing the peaceful transfer of power four years ago.

With special counsel Jack Smith expected to release a final report on the investigation in the coming days, critics of Attorney General Merrick Garland, including some inside the Justice Department, have tended to zero in on decisions made during 2021, describing it as a lost year.

In interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the investigation, essentially two camps emerged — those who believe the early pursuit of provocative leads ultimately wasted time, and those who say the DOJ had no choice but to exhaust all investigative avenues.

For the prosecutors and investigators involved, 2021 was a year of chasing ghosts. Top officials believed multiple investigative leads that seemed to tie Trump directly to the violence would help make the case against him. Some saw pursuing the more explosive lines of inquiry as an essential first step.

Some top officials at the Justice Department always thought that an unprecedented prosecution of a former president would take about five years given the constitutional questions it would raise, ranging from immunity to separation of powers, according to people briefed on the investigation.

But critics have argued they didn’t have the luxury of taking that long, with some saying their failure to take proper account of the political calendar doomed the case from the outset.

Top DOJ officials bristle at the notion that the department sat on its hands in 2021 and somehow missed its chance to prosecute Trump.

One US law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said criticism of the first year misses the reality that investigators didn’t just blindly go after Trump, but rather followed the evidence as Garland has repeatedly said they would.

“The Justice Department does not make investigative steps public,” the official said. “Many times, when people assume nothing is going on, it’s because as a general practice we don’t make the investigative steps public.”

The official said critics miss the point that it’s not the Justice Department’s job to stop Trump. “It’s not our job to influence elections,” the official added.

Still, it wasn’t until August 2023, two and a half years after the events of January 6, that special counsel Jack Smith filed a criminal indictment of Trump for his actions related to what happened that day. The indictment alleged Trump conspired to defraud the United States and obstruct an official proceeding by spreading false election fraud claims and by trying to subvert the Electoral College process by plotting to submit fake electors.

According to two former DOJ officials familiar with the investigation, the charges included in the indictment could have been brought a year earlier.

Trump’s goal was always to delay any prosecution, wielding claims of executive privilege and eventually absolute immunity, and take his chances with US voters.

It’s a strategy that ultimately prevailed, thanks in part to the Supreme Court, which ate up seven months of the calendar — first by rejecting Smith’s request in December 2023 to fast-track a ruling on Trump’s claims of immunity, and then by waiting until July to grant Trump broad immunity against any prosecution regarding official acts he took as president.

An unprecedented prosecution

From the earliest days inside the Justice Department, there was a debate about whether there was enough evidence to pursue charges against Trump. Garland himself told DOJ officials that investigators needed to show what evidence could sustain any prosecutions, including against the former president, according to current and former officials briefed on the investigation.

The decision was complicated by the sprawling set of criminal investigations that included more than 1,500 rioters who stormed the Capitol that day, ranging from some who were part of right-wing extremist groups that coordinated their attack to others who entered the Capitol amid the pro-Trump throngs.

The effort by some investigators focused on Trump’s role moved in fits and starts nearly from the beginning. The so-called lost year of the Trump investigation underscored the investigative and legal hurdles, and the difficult odds the Justice Department always faced.

While Trump’s actions in public leading up to January 6 and during his speech at the Ellipse — when he encouraged rallygoers to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” — seemed to many observers to be clear incitement of a riot, federal law requires more direct evidence of connections to the riot to sustain more serious charges.

One former prosecutor involved in the early investigation said the Justice Department’s time-tested strategy of working from the bottom up to find potential wrongdoing by people at the top met its biggest test in its January 6 probe of Trump.

In its early stages, the investigation was mainly run by prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section within the US attorney’s office in DC. Those prosecutors included J.P. Cooney, a veteran public corruption prosecutor who prosecuted Trump allies in the first Trump term and Democratic former Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey in 2015.

Cooney strongly pushed the idea of looking into financial connections between the Trump team and the riot on January 6.

To access certain evidence, prosecutors had to confront the limits of executive privilege, since some of Trump’s aides in the White House and the Justice Department were involved in his election-denying efforts. The legal battles that ensued would take months to resolve.

By June 2021, Garland and his No. 2, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, decided Cooney’s team needed more help. That fall they brought in an aggressive, experienced prosecutor from Maryland named Thomas Windom to join the investigative team in Washington. Windom, working under Garland’s supervision, emerged as a key leader in the prosecution and narrowed the investigation’s focus squarely on Trump.

But those moves were all happening behind closed doors. It wasn’t until January 2022 that the public got its first indication Garland was even interested in moving forward with a potential case against Trump, as the Justice Department was bringing cases against hundreds of rioters.

“The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last,” Garland said in a speech marking the first anniversary of the riot. “The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”

Windom would eventually issue grand jury subpoenas to dozens of people close to the once and future president, including those who helped orchestrate the fake electors plot, as well as those involved in planning for protests or rallies on January 6.

‘You can’t take politics out of politics’

No matter how much Garland and top leaders at the Justice Department tried to disassociate the investigation from politics, they were never able to operate in a vacuum. By 2022, they weren’t even the only group in Washington investigating January 6. In June of that year, the House select committee investigating the riot began holding a series of high-profile hearings tailored for TV.

Tensions between prosecutors at the Justice Department and members of the House committee emerged from the start. Since federal investigators are strictly prohibited from sharing any information, the department repeatedly denied the committee’s requests for help or evidence in its investigations.

With the House committee’s January 6 hearings playing out in public, prosecutors spent much of 2022 in secret court hearings trying to pierce the constitutional privileges, executive and congressional, that shielded evidence they needed before they could make a decision on possible charges against Trump.

With the congressional midterm elections looming that fall, top Democrats grumbled publicly that Garland may have already missed his moment.

“You can’t take politics out of politics,” added House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, one of Biden’s closest allies in Congress.

In some ways, federal prosecutors benefited from the committee’s work, which isn’t subject to the same strict rules barring the release of information to the public. The extensive testimony and evidence that the committee laid out in its public hearings, plus its final report, ended up boosting the prosecution by giving Windom’s team evidence it did not yet have.

Hints of Windom’s investigative steps started seeping into public view by September 2022, when a grand jury was empaneled in Washington, DC. For months, witnesses and prosecutors were seen walking into DC’s federal courthouse, which sits along the same route many Trump supporters took as they marched from his speech at the Ellipse to the Capitol on January 6.

Numerous figures in Trump’s inner circle, including former Vice President Mike Pence, were subpoenaed to give secret testimony. Pence was among a handful of crucial witnesses who ended up testifying to the federal grand jury after refusing a subpoena from the House select committee.

The stakes were raised in August 2022, when the FBI seized boxes containing classified documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. The move laid open to the public a second investigation underway into Trump, this one concerning his retention of classified government documents.

By the time Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign in November 2022, Garland had no choice but to appoint a special counsel to handle the dual investigations. On November 18, Garland named Jack Smith as special counsel, tapping a respected prosecutor who was trying war crimes cases at The Hague to oversee the two Trump investigations.

When the January 6 House select committee released its final report that December, it also sent to the Justice Department criminal referrals for Trump and some of his allies, including lawyer John Eastman, suggesting all of them should be federally prosecuted. The referrals didn’t move the needle for Justice Department officials who viewed their burden of proof as much higher than a congressional investigation. But it added to public pressure on the department.

A year in limbo

The investigation played out behind the closed doors of a grand jury room into the summer of 2023, when the grand jury handed up a sweeping indictment charging Trump with four federal charges for conspiracy and obstructing an official proceeding.

Bringing an indictment set off a series of extraordinary legal battles that would delay the case so dramatically that it would never go to trial.

Trump pleaded not guilty, and his team of lawyers argued in court that the charges were unconstitutional and should be thrown out, focusing their challenges on the issue of presidential immunity.

Tanya Chutkan, the federal trial judge assigned to the case in DC, quickly rejected those immunity claims. But the case was nonetheless bogged down in a slow appeals process grinding its way toward the Supreme Court. Smith requested an expedited ruling from the high court on questions of whether Trump enjoyed immunity for actions taken while president, but in December 2023, the request was denied.

With the 2024 presidential campaign underway, the investigation sat stagnant for months, as prosecutors waited for the Supreme Court to decide how much, if any, immunity Trump enjoyed from actions he took as president. Through the first half of the year, Trump cruised through the Republican primaries to the inevitable GOP nomination.

Finally, in July 2024, the Supreme Court held that Trump enjoyed “absolute” immunity from prosecution for actions taken within his core constitutional powers and a more limited immunity for other official actions.

The ruling was a devastating blow to the case. But it wasn’t fatal. Prosecutors believed the core of the charges still held. But they were running out of time.

By the end of the summer, with Trump appearing close to victory at the polls, the Smith team began planning for the possibility that the fate of their prosecution efforts would be decided by voters.

People in Smith’s office have been gaming out legal options and bracing for retribution if Trump returned to the White House. Even before the election, the office had dwindled to a skeleton crew, as prosecutors left for other jobs. Those who were left girded for the future, taking harassment briefings, especially related to online doxing, cybersecurity and stalking.

Trump’s victory on November 5 dealt the final blow.

Smith consulted with top Justice Department officials, who affirmed that long-standing policy shielding a president from prosecution would apply to a president-elect.

But Smith didn’t have the power to end a case; a judge must dismiss the charges.

In a federal court filing, Smith conceded the case had to be dismissed before the president-elect’s inauguration but indicated he wanted to keep the door open for potential charges to be brought in the future, arguing Trump’s immunity is temporary.

Judge Chutkan had made clear she believed the prosecution of Trump was a legitimate pursuit in the interests of accountability and justice. Still, she dismissed the charges, though she did so “without prejudice.” In literal terms, that means the case could be revived at some point, though the five-year statute of limitations would expire during Trump’s term.

In practical terms, this pursuit of Trump is over.

President Joe Biden on Monday announced an executive action that will permanently ban future offshore oil and gas development in parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in a way that could be especially difficult for the incoming Trump administration to undo.

Biden’s executive action will ban new oil and gas leasing across 625 million acres of US ocean. The ban will prevent oil companies from leasing waters for new drilling along the entire East Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California, and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea.

“My decision reflects what coastal communities, businesses, and beachgoers have known for a long time: that drilling off these coasts could cause irreversible damage to places we hold dear and is unnecessary to meet our nation’s energy needs,” Biden said in a statement. “It is not worth the risks.”

The law does not give presidents explicit authority to revoke the action and place federal waters back into development, meaning President-elect Donald Trump would have to get Congress to change it before he could reverse Biden’s move.

As Biden’s presidency draws to a close, environmental and climate groups have advocated for him to withdraw areas off the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, as well as other parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans — giving the areas permanent protections from future drilling. The move would guard against future oil spills and against adding more planet-warming pollution from fossil fuels to the atmosphere.

“President Biden’s new protections add to this bipartisan history, including President Trump’s previous withdrawals in the southeastern United States in 2020,” said Oceana Campaign Director Joseph Gordon in a statement. “Our treasured coastal communities are now safeguarded for future generations.”

Despite a friendly posture towards the oil and gas industry, Trump also moved to ban offshore drilling while president. After proposing a major expansion in offshore drilling early in his first term, Trump in 2020 extended a ban on future oil drilling in the Eastern Gulf and expanded it to include the Atlantic coasts of three states: Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Still, Trump’s incoming press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, lambasted the decision, writing in a post on X, “This is a disgraceful decision designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

The oil industry lashed out against the executive action, too.

“President Biden’s decision to ban new offshore oil and natural gas development across approximately 625 million acres of US coastal and offshore waters is significant and catastrophic,” Ron Neal, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America Offshore Committee, said in a statement. “It represents a major attack on the oil and natural gas industry.”

Neal said the ban would severely limit the industry’s potential for future oil and gas exploration in new areas, hurting the industry’s long-term ability to survive.

But Biden noted in his statement that protecting coastlines from offshore drilling has bipartisan support.

“From California to Florida, Republican and Democratic Governors, Members of Congress, and coastal communities alike have worked and called for greater protection of our ocean and coastlines from harms that offshore oil and natural gas drilling can bring,” Biden said.

He argued that after the devastating 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the ban he imposed will help protect similar ecological disasters from happening again.

“Every president this century has recognized that some areas of the ocean are just too risky or too sensitive to drill,” Earthjustice vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans Drew Caputo said in a statement Friday.

Biden’s move was first reported by Bloomberg.

Little economic impact

It’s “not particularly consequential for US exploration and production going forward,” Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service, said on Friday. Kloza noted there are plenty of existing offshore rigs pumping oil in the Gulf of Mexico and added that offshore projects typically take 6-8 years to come online.

“I don’t see it as having any real impact on US supply, exports, imports,” Kloza said.

Biden agreed, arguing in his statement that preserving the environment and the coastlines will help local economies flourish.

“We do not need to choose between protecting the environment and growing our economy, or between keeping our ocean healthy, our coastlines resilient, and the food they produce secure and keeping energy prices low,” Biden said. “Those are false choices.”

Still, the American Petroleum Institute blasted Biden’s decision.

“American voters sent a clear message in support of domestic energy development, and yet the current administration is using its final days in office to cement a record of doing everything possible to restrict it,” API CEO Mike Sommers said in a statement. “We urge policymakers to use every tool at their disposal to reverse this politically motivated decision and restore a pro-American energy approach to federal leasing.”

Biden will establish the Chuckwalla National Monument in Southern California near Joshua Tree National Park and the Sáttítla National Monument in Northern California, the source said. Native tribes have been actively pushing the administration to protect the land from energy development.

Biden has so far conserved or expanded 10 national monuments as president.

Tokyo (AP) — Shigemi Fukahori, a survivor of the 1945 Nagasaki atomic bombing, who devoted his life to advocating for peace and campaigning against nuclear weapons, has died. He was 93.

Fukahori died at a hospital in Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, on Jan. 3, the Urakami Catholic Church, where he prayed almost daily until last year, said on Sunday. Local media reported he died of old age.

The church, located about 500 meters from ground zero and near the Nagasaki Peace Park, is widely seen as a symbol of hope and peace, as its bell tower and some statues survived the nuclear bombing.

Fukahori was only 14 when the U.S. dropped the bomb on Nagasaki on Aug. 9, 1945, killing tens of thousands of people, including his family. That came three days after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, which killed 140,000 people. Japan surrendered days later, ending World War II and the country’s nearly half-century of aggression across Asia.

Fukahori, who worked at a shipyard about 3 kilometers (2 miles) from where the bomb dropped, couldn’t talk about what happened for years, not only because of the painful memories but also how powerless he felt then.

About 15 years ago, he became more outspoken after encountering, during a visit to Spain, a man who experienced the bombing of Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War when he was also 14 years old. The shared experience helped Fukahori open up.

“On the day the bomb dropped, I heard a voice asking for help. When I walked over and held out my hand, the person’s skin melted. I still remember how that felt,” Fukahori told Japan’s national broadcaster NHK in 2019.

He often addressed students, hoping they take on what he called “the baton of peace,” in reference to his advocacy.

When Pope Francis visited Nagasaki in 2019, Fukahori was the one who handed him a wreath of white flowers. The following year, Fukahori represented the bomb victims at a ceremony, making his “pledge for peace,” saying: “I am determined to send our message to make Nagasaki the final place where an atomic bomb is ever dropped.”

Funeral services were planned on Monday at Urakami Church, where his daughter will represent the family.