UNITED KINGDOM
Astronaut misdials
Anyone can dial a wrong number, but it is not often done from outer space. British astronaut Tim Peake tweeted an apology on Christmas Day from the International Space Station after calling a wrong number. “I’d like to apologize to the lady I just called by mistake saying: ‘Hello, is this planet Earth?’ — not a prank call — just a wrong number,” he wrote. The 43-year-old former army helicopter pilot did not say who he was calling. Since he is Britain’s first publicly funded astronaut and the first Briton to visit the space station, millions of Britons have been following his mission closely. Peake has also used Twitter to send Christmas greetings.
IRAN
Jason Rezaian allowed visit
Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post correspondent who has been incarcerated in Iran since July last year, was permitted an extended visit with his wife and mother on Friday in what appeared to be a Christmas gesture by Iranian authorities. Rezaian, 39, a California native, has been accused of espionage and other hostile acts, charges that he and his supporters say are unfounded. His mother, Mary Rezaian, and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, shared a home-cooked meal with him at Evin Prison in Tehran, according to an account Mary Rezaian relayed to her other son, Ali Rezaian, in the US. “It was the longest meeting with him since she arrived last December,” Ali Rezaian said in an e-mail. Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor, said in a statement that he welcomed the gesture, but said Iran should release Rezaian “and allow him a return to life as a free man who can spend time with his family where and whenever he pleases.”
UNITED KINGDOM
Medics top Justin Bieber
A choir of doctors and nurses beat Justin Bieber to the Christmas No. 1 spot in Britain’s pop music chart on Friday after the heartthrob urged his fans to buy their song. The Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir’s charity single, A Bridge Over You, outsold Bieber’s Love Yourself to snatch the coveted festive top spot. That came after Bieber wrote on Twitter on Wednesday: “So for 1 week it’s ok not to be #1. Let’s do the right thing & help them win. It’s Christmas. @Choir_NHS good luck.” The southeast London-based choir is made up of staff who work for the state-funded National Health Service. Their song is a mash-up of Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel and Coldplay’s Fix You. Harriet Nerva, a junior doctor in the choir, decided to start a social media campaign to get the song to No. 1 after a tough day at work. “A patient with cancer that I had been looking after for quite a number of weeks died,” she told the Guardian newspaper. “I was listening to the song and it dawned on me that a great way of translating how I was feeling and how proud I was to work for the NHS would be getting [the song] to No. 1.”
HAWAII
‘Hokulea’ to cross Atlantic
The Polynesian voyaging canoe that is in the middle of its round-the-world journey has left South Africa for Brazil. Hawaii News Now reports (http://bit.ly/1RKkrxr) that the crew of the Hokulea set sail on Thursday from Cape Town. The crew plans to stop at the island of St Helena, located in a British Overseas Territory in the southern Atlantic Ocean about midway between Africa and South America. This is to be the first time the Hokulea will cross the Atlantic Ocean. The double-hulled canoe left Hawaii last year, and its crew members are sailing without modern navigation equipment.
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
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