Up a tree in camouflage green, bare-chested on horseback and one can only guess at his state of undress as he carves his way through wild water — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has once again starred in a series of macho poses, this time on holiday in Siberia.
While many international counterparts will be hoping to escape the long lenses of the paparazzi at their holiday villas, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown tries hard to look at ease in front of the cameras while doing community service in his Scottish constituency, Putin has positively sought out the photographers and invited them to reinforce his muscleman image.
The latest snaps come after the judo black belt spent part of last weekend in a submarine exploring the bottom of Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake, where he descended 1,400m below the surface to inspect potentially valuable gas crystals.
PHOTO: REUTERS
He resurfaced after the four-hour dive to extol the virtue of Russian submersible technology and question whether any other country could match it.
“I haven’t seen anything like that in my whole life. This is a very special feeling,” Putin told reporters on emerging from the deep-sea craft looking pale and a bit dizzy.
In 2007, while president, he featured in magazines across the world stripped to the waist while on a fishing trip in the Yenisei River and since stepping down from the Kremlin last year to become prime minister, the 56-year-old former KGB spy has kept himself in the public eye and continued to cultivate his manly image.
He has flown in a fighter aircraft and shot a Siberian tiger in the wild, and polls show it has won him many admirers, especially among Russian women.
In past years the Russian press has reported that women have praised Putin’s “vigorous torso” and said they were screaming with delight and showering him with compliments.
Russian gay chat rooms and blogs have also been intrigued by the photos over the years, with some suggesting his bare-chested posturing was a plea for more tolerance of homosexuality in Russia — where gays and lesbians are for the most part forced to remain closeted.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS