POLAND
Ex-PM denies Putin offer
Former prime minister Donald Tusk has denied that Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that Russia and Poland carve up Ukraine. That claim was made by former minister of foreign affairs Radek Sikorski in an interview with news Web site Politico. It sparked a huge outcry and Sikorski immediately backed away from the claim, saying his memory had failed him. Sikorski had said the offer was made in a meeting of Tusk and Putin in Moscow in 2008. Tusk yesterday said on Radio TOK-FM that Putin never made such an offer to him.
SWEDEN
Sub search suspended
Stockholm yesterday said that it appeared that at least one foreign vessel had likely operated in waters near the capital in recent days, calling such activity “unacceptable.” “Our assessment is that there was at least one [vessel],” Swedish Navy Rear Admiral Anders Grenstad told reporters in Stockholm, hours after the week-long operation for what media outlets speculated was a Russian submarine was called off. “It is the assessment of the defense forces that probably foreign underwater activity has taken place in Stockholm’s inner archipelago,” he said, calling any foreign activity within Swedish territory “unacceptable.” He added: “It may have been a small vessel.”
POLAND
Reporters, son, die in blast
Police in the south say three bodies have been recovered from an apartment building apparently shattered by a gas explosion. Jacek Pytel, a police spokesman in Katowice, yesterday said that rescuers have recovered the bodies of a man, a woman and a child from the rubble. TVN24 identified the victims as their Katowice reporter, Dariusz Kmiecik, his wife, Brygida Frosztega-Kmiecik — who was a state TVP journalist — and their two-year-old son. Five people remain hospitalized, one in serious condition with burns, following the blast in the early hours of Thursday.
MALAYSIA
Man crawls through jungle
A Malaysian man seriously injured in a car accident crawled through jungle for three days before happening upon an isolated village, authorities said yesterday. The man, identified as Nicholas Andrew, showed up at the village on Wednesday last week, after the car he was driving sped off a highway and into a ravine early on Sunday, police chief Som Sak Din Keliaw said. Andrew broke his arm and leg and a passenger was killed, he added. Andrew then crawled along a river until he reached the village. Andrew told local reporters from his hospital bed that after regaining consciousness, he called for his friend, got no response and then decided to “crawl for help.”
PANAMA
Travelers hit with ban
The nation has banned entry of travelers from Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the three west African nations worst hit by the Ebola virus, the health ministry said on Wednesday. The ban applies to anyone traveling from the three countries or people entering Panama who had been there during the past 21 days, the ministry said in a statement. Panama is a major hub for travel and commerce in Latin America and has so far not registered any cases of Ebola. The travel ban would be maintained until the three countries were declared free of the virus, the government said. The Dominican Republic on Tuesday banned entry to foreigners who visited Ebola-affected countries in the past 30 days.
COSTA RICA
Shipping strikers arrested
Police arrested 68 people in the country’s main Atlantic port on Wednesday after a strike over plans to expand the hub threatened to paralyze shipping. Workers at Puerto Limon’s Moin and Limon terminals, which handle about 80 percent of Costa Rica’s foreign trade, went on strike to protest a US$1 billion expansion concession granted to APM Terminals, a unit of AP Moller-Maersk. The stevedores’ union, SINTRAJAP, launched an indefinite strike on Wednesday, leaving three ships stranded and unable to unload cargo after APM Terminals won a Supreme Court decision this month against the union’s efforts to block the concession. Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis ordered the docks to be reopened and about 150 police officers broke the strike, arresting 68 men and women in both terminals.
CUBA
Polish icon wants Cuba free
Former Polish president and freedom icon Lech Walesa has offered to assist Cuba’s opposition in democratizing the communist island, according to an interview published on a Cuban dissident Web site. “Will I get to see a free Cuba before dying?” Walesa asked, who as leader of the Solidarity trade union negotiated a peaceful end to communism at home in 1989. “Tell me what I can do to help you accelerate the democratization process in your country,” the 1983 Nobel peace prize winner told popular dissident Yoani Sanchez during an interview in Warsaw. Sanchez is a well-known figure in the Cuban opposition, but her exposure is limited in Cuba, where Internet access is strictly limited by authorities.
UNITED STATES
Eclipse triggers tweet storm
A partial solar eclipse swept across much of North America on Thursday, triggering floods of blurry pictures of a crescent-shaped sun on Twitter and other social media. The best views were on the west coast, including California, where the moon blanked out nearly half of the solar disc in cloudless mid-afternoon skies. The partial eclipse, which was even bigger farther north in San Francisco and Seattle, turned the “sun into hugelargeous croissant,” tweeted @ProBirdRights, quipping: “I nominate me to go to space now bye.” However, New York and the rest of the US northeast mostly missed it because the sun was setting by the time the moon moved into position, with only a tiny bite visible at sunset. A more dramatic solar eclipse is in store for the US on Aug. 21, 2017. At that time, the moon is to entirely cover the sun across a 90km-wide swath of the US, while the rest of the country should see about 80 percent of the sun covered.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion