If you stroll through the real or virtual aisles of a Japanese store, you might find Kit Kats in flavors like salt lemon, caramel pudding, whole grain biscuit, melon, and milk tea. Good luck finding those at Target or Walmart in the US.

Kit Kat aficionados know that to find the most interesting varieties, you have to shop outside of the US or go to specialty stores that carry imported goods. Why? Because Kit Kat is distributed by different companies in the United States and internationally. In the US, Kit Kat is sold by Hershey. In the rest of the world, Nestlé’s in charge.

Kit Kat is the biggest brand in Nestlé’s global confectionary business, according to Chris O’Donnell, who leads Kit Kat for Nestlé globally. “It’s [a] key priority for us,” he said. “We see huge growth potential [for] Kit Kat.” Hershey’s top brand, on the other hand, is Reese’s.

Nestlé has 13 Kit Kat manufacturing sites across the world, O’Donnell said, and uses different recipes for different areas. When Kit Kat develops new flavors, most of them limited-time offers, it’s looking to appeal to local tastes.

In Japan, seasonal flavors have been especially successful.

Globally, most consumers are interested in “crowd-pleasing flavors,” like caramel, O’Donnell said. But in Japan, they “have a very wide appreciation for a much broader flavor profile.”

In 2000, Nestlé launched a strawberry Kit Kat in the country. It was a hit, and since then, the Japanese team has regularly developed seasonal flavors — like chestnut and sweet potato — in addition to regional flavors, like wasabi and roasted tea, only available in certain areas. These offerings are often bought as travel gifts or souvenirs, creating a market unto itself. Over the past few decades, Kit Kat Japan has launched hundreds of flavors.

A comet discovered just weeks ago by an amateur astronomer could soon be visible to the naked eye.

Comet C/2023 P1 Nishimura was found by Japanese astrophotographer Hideo Nishimura, on 11 August. Nishimura was taking long-exposure photographs of the sky, with a digital camera.

The comet may get bright enough to see unaided by early September – although at the peak of its brightness, it will be very close to the Sun, meaning it may be obscured by glare.

Because it’s so newly discovered, the exact trajectory and visibility of the comet is still uncertain, with estimates changing day by day based on new observations.

It is expected to be visible in the pre-dawn sky up until around 7 September, getting brighter each day, in the constellation of Cancer. But, as it gets closer to the Sun’s glare each day, by mid-September it will be difficult to see.

The comet should reach perihelion (the closest point to the Sun) on 17 September, at which point it will be roughly 0.22 AU from the Sun: that is, just over a fifth of the distance between Earth and the Sun.

This will place it well inside Mercury’s orbit, and it might be so close that the comet breaks up under the Sun’s heat.

If it doesn’t break up, people may be able to spot it in the evening in late September, too.

Fresh off its success at the moon, India is now headed for the sun.

The nation launched its first-ever solar observatory today (Sept. 2), sending the Aditya-L1 probe skyward atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 2:20 a.m. EDT (0620 GMT; 11:50 a.m. local India time).

After a series of checkouts, it will use its onboard propulsion system to head toward Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1 (L1), a gravitationally stable spot about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet in the direction of the sun.

That destination explains the latter part of the mission's name. And the first part is simple enough: "Aditya" translates to "sun" in Sanskrit.

The 3,260-pound (1,480 kilograms) observatory will arrive at L1 about four months from now, if all goes according to plan. But the long trek will be worth it, according to the ISRO.

"A satellite placed in the halo orbit around the L1 point has the major advantage of continuously viewing the sun without any occultation/eclipses," ISRO officials wrote in an Aditya-L1 mission description. "This will provide a greater advantage of observing the solar activities and its effect on space weather in real time."

To some people in Coffee County, deep in southern Georgia and far from interstates, the alleged crimes were merely the latest chapter in a local history of failing to secure the rights and votes of residents. And they worry it’s a history that will repeat.

Prosecutors allege that former county Republican Party chair Cathy Latham and former elections supervisor Misty Hampton helped to facilitate employees from a firm hired by Trump attorneys to access and copy sensitive voter data and election software. Surveillance video captured Latham waving the visitors inside, and Hampton in the office as they allegedly accessed the data. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Coley-Pearson, named a “human rights hero” by the American Bar Association, follows in the footsteps of her mother, who was a political activist in Coffee County in the 1970s, the decade after segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox had picked the county to host many of his speeches. Gladys Coley is commemorated with others in a memorial plaque for fighting for civil rights in Douglas and across the county.

Coley-Pearson is well-known for helping people who may need a ride to the polls. Not everyone around town appreciates her efforts, however. In a Facebook Live video posted a couple days before the alleged breach, Latham complained about Coley-Pearson’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Georgia’s runoff elections to the US Senate.

“Olivia Pearson’s up to her normal – handing out hamburgers and hot dogs … to people who voted and stuff,” Latham said, running her fingers through her cropped blonde hair in apparent exasperation. “So, all kinds of things happening in Coffee County just to get people to come vote. Yeah, it’s not a really good situation down here.”

Coley-Pearson had tangled with local officials over voter access several times. Georgia law allows people who are disabled or illiterate to get assistance in voting, and Coley-Pearson helped with that in the 2012 election. At the time, it seemed uneventful.

But Coffee County officials complained to the Georgia secretary of state’s office that she helped people who didn’t qualify for assistance. It led to a years-long investigation, and though the state didn’t prosecute her, she was charged locally with two felonies. After one trial ended in a hung jury, she was found not guilty in the second in 2018.

The professor of artificial intelligence was a rising star at Iran’s elite Sharif University of Technology. He gained wider fame for his vocal support of the women-led uprising that rocked Iran last year. At one point, he refused to teach until Sharif students arrested in the government’s crackdown against protesters were released.

But speaking up came with a cost — last week, Ali Sharifi Zarchi lost his job, becoming one of at least 15 academics expelled from Iranian universities in the past few weeks because they supported the uprising.

The purging of academics like Mr. Sharifi Zarchi is part of a wide and intensifying crackdown by the government before the anniversary of the start of the uprising this month. In the past few weeks, Iran has arrested women’s rights activists, students, ethnic minorities, an outspoken cleric, journalists, singers and family members of protesters killed by security agents.

Security agents have been contacting relatives of the victims and demanding they remain silent, a group of the families said in a statement posted on Instagram, pledging, “We will resist until the end.” Amnesty International released a report last week documenting 22 cases of government harassment of families of killed protesters, including damaging the graves of their loved ones.

“The threshold of what constitutes an offense that gets one arrested has gone to an unexpected level,” said Tara Sepehri Far, an Iran researcher for Human Rights Watch. “They are trying to make sure at all costs that nothing happens around the anniversary. It shows how nervous they are about the growing frustration and discontent.”

The uprising erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the country’s feared morality police and accused of failing to wear her hijab in accordance with the law. She died in police custody on Sept. 16. Her death set off nationwide protests for nearly six months and a movement, led by women and young girls, for wholesale democratic change in Iran.

Alternate: https://archive.ph/jMKDq

Two French-Moroccan men have reportedly been shot and killed after they accidentally crossed Morocco’s maritime border with Algeria on water scooters, according to Moroccan media reports.

The incident took place on Tuesday after five men lost their bearings while exploring the sea on jet skis. France confirmed on Friday one of its citizens had been killed.

Mohamed Kissi told Moroccan news website 360.ma that he, his brother Bilal, and two friends were on vacation and riding jetskis off the waters of the Moroccan town of Saidia as the sun began to set.

“We were low on gas for the water scooters and were drifting. In the darkness we found ourselves in Algerian waters,” Kissi was quoted as saying.

A speedboat with the word “Algeria” emblazoned on the side carrying naval forces approached the group.

After a brief exchange, Kissi said Algerian forces fired on the group, and his brother Bilal and their friend Abdelali Mechouer were killed. Their other friend, Smail Snabe, was wounded and detained by Algerian forces.

Rates of severe disease may be staying at relatively low levels, but experts agree that there are probably more infections than the current surveillance systems can capture.

“There is more transmission out there than what the surveillance data indicates,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “And we should be paying attention to it, because we are starting to see an increase.”

Weekly hospital admissions have nearly doubled over the past month, including a 19% bump in the most recent week, CDC data shows. And a sample of laboratories participating in a federal surveillance program show that test positivity rates have tripled in the past two months.

There are some hopeful signs: Biobot data shows that wastewater levels may be starting to flatten, and relatively low hospitalization rates suggest that there may be a lower risk of severe disease for many.

Pennsylvania plans to end on Dec. 31 its longstanding contract with the nonprofit Real Alternatives, the first organization in the nation to secure significant state and federal subsidies to support anti-abortion counseling centers. Under the program, Real Alternatives distributed the state and federal funds to dozens of Pennsylvania centers, including Catholic Charities, anti-abortion counseling centers and maternity homes, which provide support and housing for pregnant women.

Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said in a statement his administration would not “continue that pattern” of subsidizing the organization, saying he was steadfast in defending abortion access.

Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars across the U.S. have been sent to such organizations, which are typically religiously affiliated. Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion last year, Republican-led states have sent more tax dollars to what are sometimes called “crisis pregnancy centers,” while Democratic-leaning states apply more scrutiny to them.

Henderson police arrested Nikoubin, a Texas-area university student who immigrated to the U.S. from Iran when she was 12, shortly after the stabbing on March 5, 2022, at Sunset Station. Nikoubin and the victim met online on the dating website Plenty of Fish, Henderson police wrote in an arrest report. The duo then agreed to meet at the hotel, booking a room together, police said.

While in the room, the pair began engaging in sexual activity, when Nikoubin put a blindfold on the man police said. Nikoubin then turned off the lights, and several seconds later, cut the man’s neck, documents said.

“While checking in at the hotel lobby, I saw a woman and heard her say, ‘I bet she is gonna slit his throat during sex,’” Nikoubin writes in the book. “I’m sure this didn’t actually happen, but it’s what I was seeing and hearing at the time. Looking back now, I know I was hallucinating.”

Photos shown to a grand jury showed two puncture wounds to the young man’s neck. Nikoubin writes she felt like actress Salma Hayek in the 1996 movie “Dusk Till Dawn.”

“I started to dance like Selma [sic] Hayek from Dusk Till Dawn,” the book said. “I felt powerful. She was so pretty. I felt as though that’s who I was watching. I was transforming into Selma [sic] with the Gravedigger song playing on repeat in my head.”

While speaking to officers at the hotel, Nikoubin said she wanted to get revenge for a drone strike, which killed Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Soleimani was a popular Iranian military officer and right-hand man to the country’s supreme leader. Former President Donald Trump called for Soleimani’s assassination to kill “the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world” to protect “American diplomats and military personnel” worldwide.

“I was a character in the TV show ‘Homeland’ now,” Nikoubin writes. “I wasn’t in my mind. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think anything was real. It was all a movie. I was Carrie from ‘Homeland.’”

In an urgent appeal to wealthy Republicans who had assembled in Milwaukee ahead of the first GOP presidential primary debate, top brass for the super PAC backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told donors they needed an injection of $50 million over the next four months, according to leaked audio obtained by CNN.

“We just need your help getting $50 million more by the end of the year, and $100 million more by the end of March,” Never Back Down CEO Chris Jankowski told donors hours before DeSantis stepped on the stage Aug. 23, according to the audio. “I’m not worried about the second 50. We need the first 50.”

The New York City police department plans to pilot the unmanned aircrafts in response to complaints about large gatherings, including private events, over Labor Day weekend, officials announced Thursday.

“If a caller states there’s a large crowd, a large party in a backyard, we’re going to be utilizing our assets to go up and go check on the party,” Kaz Daughtry, the assistant NYPD Commissioner, said at a press conference.

The plan drew immediate backlash from privacy and civil liberties advocates, raising questions about whether such drone use violated existing laws for police surveillance.

“It’s a troubling announcement and it flies in the face of the POST Act,” said Daniel Schwarz, a privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, referring to a 2020 city law that requires the NYPD to disclose its surveillance tactics. “Deploying drones in this way is a sci-fi inspired scenario.”

New satellite images obtained by The War Zone show that at least two Il-76 Candid heavy cargo aircraft were destroyed and two others damaged in a drone attack on Kresty Air Base in Pskov Oblast during the overnight hours of Aug. 29. We also obtained a infrared camera image that shows one of the aircraft the moment it was attacked.

The post-attack images from Planet Labs show the charred remains of two Candids and two that appear to display damage to the top of their fuselages at the midpoint of the aircraft where the wings are attached.