Entertainment weekly | Entertainment News | Entertainment Celebrity | Entertainment Artist

Tamae Watanabe reached Everest’s 8,850-meter-high (29,035-foot-high) summit from the northern side of the mountain in Tibet on Saturday morning with four other team members, said Ang Tshering of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association in Nepal.

Watanabe had climbed Everest in 2002 at the age of 63 to become the oldest woman to scale the mountain. She had retained the title until she topped herself a decade later.

Tshering said Watanabe and the other team members are in good condition and are on their way back to the base of the mountain.

Watanabe and her team left the last high altitude camp located at 8,300 meters (27,225 feet) Friday night and climbed all night before reaching the summit Saturday morning.

Weather conditions have improved on the mountains this week.

Teams have begun reaching the summit even from the Nepalese side in the southern of the mountain, according to Nepal’s mountaineering department.

The first teams from the Nepalese side reached the summit on Friday, and many more reached the summit on Saturday morning.

Weather conditions on the mountain have been challenging this year, prompting several expeditions to cancel their plans to try to reach the summit.

May is considered the best month to climb Everest, when climbers get about two windows of good weather for their bid for the summit.

The oldest person to climb Everest is a Nepalese man, Min Bahadur Sherchan, who climbed Everest in 2008 at the age of 76.

Tamae Watanabe reached Everest’s 8,850-meter-high (29,035-foot-high) summit from the northern side of the mountain in Tibet on Saturday morning with four other team members, said Ang Tshering of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association in Nepal.

Watanabe had climbed Everest in 2002 at the age of 63 to become the oldest woman to scale the mountain. She had retained the title until she topped herself a decade later.

Tshering said Watanabe and the other team members are in good condition and are on their way back to the base of the mountain.

Watanabe and her team left the last high altitude camp located at 8,300 meters (27,225 feet) Friday night and climbed all night before reaching the summit Saturday morning.

Weather conditions have improved on the mountains this week.

Teams have begun reaching the summit even from the Nepalese side in the southern of the mountain, according to Nepal’s mountaineering department.

The first teams from the Nepalese side reached the summit on Friday, and many more reached the summit on Saturday morning.

Weather conditions on the mountain have been challenging this year, prompting several expeditions to cancel their plans to try to reach the summit.

May is considered the best month to climb Everest, when climbers get about two windows of good weather for their bid for the summit.

The oldest person to climb Everest is a Nepalese man, Min Bahadur Sherchan, who climbed Everest in 2008 at the age of 76.

The court rejected the bail pleas on grounds the two men might try to escape, said a public prosecutor in the southern state of Kerala, where the men are detained. “The judge accepted the prosecution’s apprehension that the accused may escape from the country and tamper with the evidence,” D. Mohanraj, a prosecutor handling the case, told Reuters. A lawyer for the defense said they would appeal.

India says the case of marines Massimiliano Latorre and Salvatore Girone is a matter for the courts and cannot be influenced by political or diplomatic pressure. Italy wants the men tried at home and says the government should intervene.

The row has strained ties and Italy called back its ambassador for consultations shortly after murder charges were formalized on Friday to express “profound displeasure” with the Indian government’s handling of the case.

“We are sending a strong signal to avoid damaging our relationship,” said Italy’s deputy foreign minister, Staffan de Mistura, on his third mission to India to push for the sailors to be released into Italian custody.

The ambassador was recalled after three telephone calls by Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti to his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh, a visit by Italy’s defense minister and his own missions to India, de Mistura told Reuters from Kerala.

An official at India’s foreign ministry, who asked not to be identified, said it was unusual that a person of de Mistura’s rank would spend so much time on a case of this nature.

“It does not bother us, but he needs to understand that it is not a U.N. job in Iraq or Afghanistan, where hands-on diplomacy might help,” the official said.

“It doesn’t work here like that, he needs to understand we are slow, things move through a glacial process, but that’s how it is, diplomatic pressure won’t work.”

Pirate Attacks

The two sailors were stationed on a merchant ship passing the southern Indian coast and were tasked with protecting it from pirate attacks. They fired warning shots at the fishing boat on Feb. 15, believing it to be a pirate vessel, they said.

Investigators say the fishing boat was unarmed and the shots killed the two fishermen, who were part of a larger crew.

Italy says the incident occurred in international waters and that jurisdiction over the marines should lie with Rome. In April, it paid 0,000 to each of the victims families as compensation. In return, the families dropped their cases against the marines, but the state’s case continues.

Latorre and Girone are expected to be moved from prison to a juvenile detention facility in the next few days. The next hearing in the case is due on May 25, Kerala’s deputy public prosecutor said on Friday.

The marines were charged with murder soon after the incident in February. Under Indian law, initial charges are formalized by police after investigation and before a trial can begin.

One of the murder charges carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, but another can be punished by death, though the central government would have to approve that. India has not used the death penalty for several years.

The freed Chinese, whose number was not disclosed, were among a group of 29 fishermen working on three different boats who were reportedly captured at sea on May 8 by gunmen believed to be North Koreans.

“Some of the detained vessels and crew have already returned to port,” the state-controlled Xinhua News Agency said late Friday, without elaborating.

The foreign ministry was not immediately available for comment, and one of the owners of the boats that had been seized said he also had no information.

“I also saw the news online, but we haven’t met any of the fishermen,” the owner, Zhang Dechang, told AFP by telephone from the northeastern province of Liaoning, near China’s border with North Korea.

“I called some of their relatives, and they didn’t know either what the situation is. We still have to wait.”

Chinese state media previously reported that the men were fishing off the country’s northeast coast, in the waters between China and North Korea, when they were snatched.

The Xinhua report said Chinese embassy staff in the North Korean capital Pyongyang were negotiating the release of the rest of the fishermen.

The fishermen remaining in North Korean hands were “safe and sound” and had enough to eat and access to medical help, according to Xinhua.

Chinese fishermen regularly run into difficulties with the authorities of other countries as they fish in areas that are claimed by both China and its neighbors.

However, so far there has been no indication that the North Korean gunmen who seized the sailors were security forces from the isolated country — which counts China as its sole major ally.

The city of Noda, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) from central Tokyo, said it had stopped supplies to a major part of the city. Most of the neighboring city of Kashiwa also has no tap water supply.

Water supplies have been cut to a total of 210,000 households in Chiba prefecture, where the two cities are located, according to Jiji Press news agency.

Television footage showed residents queuing up with plastic containers to get water from trucks sent by the cities. Authorities have not determined the cause of the contamination although reports said industrial wastewater was suspected.

Authorities in Chiba and Saitama prefectures, which both neighbor Tokyo, found water taken from the Tone River or one of its branches was contaminated with higher than allowed levels of formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde is a colorless chemical with a pungent odor, classified as a human carcinogen by the Lyon-based International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Chiba stopped taking water from a branch of the Tone River after detecting elevated levels of formaldehyde.

The worst reading was seen in Saitama, which temporarily stopped taking water at a filtration plant that on Friday detected contamination of 0.200 milligrams of formaldehyde per liter (1.06 quarts), more than two times the 0.080 milligram national limit.

Water intake was resumed in Saitama Saturday as the level significantly dropped below the limit, according to prefecture officials.

“The water poses no health risks,” local waterworks official Akiyoshi Fujimura said, noting none of it had been supplied to households and that the threshold itself was set on the assumption of consumption over a long period.

“We had hardly detected formaldehyde in check-ups before … We have to find the cause,” he told AFP by phone, adding wastewater from a factory could be responsible.