The Norwegian Arctic islands of Svalbard are discouraging last-minute visitors for a rare solar eclipse this week, warning that hotels are full, it will be freezing cold and polar bears are on the prowl.
Christin Kristoffersen, mayor of Svalbard’s main settlement Longyearbyen, said an expected 1,500 visitors for the eclipse, on top of about 2,500 residents, meant the usually welcoming archipelago had reached a maximum safe limit.
“Safety comes first, even before the eclipse,” Kristoffersen said. “We need to take care of people. It’s terribly cold in March and we have the challenge with polar bears.”
A bear killed a British teenager on Svalbard in 2011, the most recent fatality. On average, three bears a year are shot by people in self-defense on Svalbard.
A total eclipse, when the moon blocks the sun and its shadow falls on the Earth, will sweep across the Atlantic on Friday, but from land it will only be visible from Svalbard and the Faroe Islands.
A partial eclipse will be seen in north Africa, Europe and north Asia. In London, for instance, 84 percent of the sun will be covered by the moon.
Hotels in both Svalbard and the Faroe Islands have been booked for years, although the Faroe Islands still has some places to stay, including private homes.
In the best of cases, with clear skies, the northern lights may also be visible during the morning eclipse.
Skies on Friday are likely to be partly cloudy with a temperature of minus-17?C in Longyearbyen and 3?C in Torshavn, the capital of the Faroes, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute said.
The Faroes, a self-governing nation within Denmark, expects 8,000 visitors to swell its population of about 50,000, said Torstein Christiansen, tourism and business manager of Visit Torshavn.
It will be the first total eclipse on the islands since 1954, with the next expected in 2245.
Faroese camping sites, which usually only open in May, will open early for hardy visitors.
“And we don’t have polar bears,” Christiansen said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
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
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing