CHILE
Haitians apply for visa
Haitians living in the country on Monday began a process that would facilitate the reunification of family members, thanks to a new humanitarian visa. Haitians can apply for the 12-month visa if they already have family living in the Andean nation. The measure was announced in April as the country looked to grapple with an influx of migrants, mostly from crisis-hit Venezuela and Haiti. It is to issue 10,000 such humanitarian visas a year. The country has actually tightened the rules for Haitians, canceling a previous tourist visa-on-arrival and imposing a new system that requires them to apply for a 30-day visa in their capital, Port-au-Prince.
AUSTRALIA
Senator causes uproar
A senator has been accused of “slut-shaming” a fellow parliamentarian after telling her to “stop shagging men” in a grubby dispute that yesterday saw the prime minister demand an apology. Senator David Leyonhjelm last week made the derogatory remarks about fellow Senator Sarah Hanson-Young during a heated debate in parliament’s upper house about legalizing pepper spray to protect women. He reportedly told her to “fuck off” when she confronted him over the incident. Leyonhjelm, who does not dispute what happened, repeated his comments and aired other rumors about Hanson-Young in a weekend television interview while refusing to apologize.
INTERNET
Bug unblocks contacts
Facebook on Monday said it is notifying more than 800,000 users that a software bug temporarily unblocked people at the social network and its Messenger service. The glitch active between May 29 and June 5 has been fixed, said Facebook, which has been striving to regain trust in the aftermath of a Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal. “We know that the ability to block someone is important,” Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a blog post. “We’d like to apologize and explain what happened.”
UNITED STATES
Attorney general accused
Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill has been investigated after four women claimed that he touched them inappropriately at a bar earlier this year. The Indianapolis Star obtained an eight-page memo written by the law firm Taft Stettinius & Hollister, which conducted its investigation at the request of legislative leaders. The memo states that a lawmaker and three legislative staffers said Hill inappropriately touched them during a party on the final night of Indiana’s legislative session. Hill, a Republican, denied the allegations.
UNITED STATES
Hunter sparks outrage
Images of a Kentucky hunter posing with the body of a black giraffe she killed in South Africa have triggered an online backlash after going viral on social media. Thousands of Twitter users expressed outrage at Tess Thompson Talley, 37, for killing the giraffe on a hunting trip last summer. “Prayers for my once in a lifetime dream hunt came true today! Spotted this rare black giraffe bull and stalked him for quite awhile,” Talley wrote in a since-deleted post on Facebook, according to USA Today. The post said the animal was more than 18 years old, weighed 1,814kg and yielded 907kg of meat. The pictures went viral only recently after being reposted on Twitter last month by the Web site Africalandpost.
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