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.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of