SOUTH AFRICA
Tutu completes treatment
Retired archbishop Desmond Tutu has completed treatment for an infection, but is to remain in the hospital for observation, his foundation said on Sunday. Tutu was off the intravenously administered intensive antibiotics treatment, but would stay a few more days in the hospital, the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation statement said. Tutu’s daughter, Mpho Tutu, said her father was in good spirits when she went to visit him. Tutu was “filled with gratitude for the care he was receiving and for the love and prayers of friends around the world,” she said in the statement. The 83-year-old Nobel laureate was admitted to a Cape Town hospital on Tuesday last week where he received treatment for a “stubborn infection. Tutu’s treatment was not related to his prostate cancer, which he has had for 18 years and is currently dormant, his daughter said.
COLOMBIA
FARC releases officer
An army officer who was held by rebels for 11 days has been turned over to the International Committee of the Red Cross. President Juan Manual Santos confirmed on Sunday that 2nd Lieutanant Cristian Moscoso Rivera was freed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) group at a meeting point in the jungles southwest of the nation. Santos tweeted that 26-year-old Moscoso was in good health. Moscoso was captured on July 7, when the rebels attacked a military unit guarding an oil shipment traveling through Puerto Caicedo. One soldier was killed and two others injured.
UKRAINE
HIV drugs run short: envoy
About 8,000 people with HIV in war-torn eastern Ukraine face a critical shortage of medicine and their supply will run out in the middle of next month unless a blockade is lifted, a UN AIDS envoy said. Speaking to reporters ahead of the International AIDS Society conference, which opened on Sunday, Michel Kazatchkine called on key nations to intervene as soon as possible. “I am calling on the United States, Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia to do something,” the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia said. He said 8,000 patients are “caught in the political crossfire between the Ukrainian government and Russian-supported fighters” because they need both antiretroviral treatments and opioids, which are now blocked at border check points. The looming crisis is centered in the mostly Russian-speaking Lugansk and Donetsk regions.
GERMANY
Costumes, beer celebrated
Rosenheim was awash with lederhosen and dirndl dresses as about 9,000 lovers of traditional Bavarian costumes descended on the southern German town for the biggest annual festival of its kind in the region. With temperatures soaring to 33oC the men paraded in the traditional embroidered leather shorts with woollen jackets and long socks while the women, despite the heat, turned out in the full dirndl look of corsets, bodices, lace shirts and aprons. “It’s certainly hot, but in the mountains too it can be hot, we’re used to it,” said Marie-Luise Koller, a retiree who has been taking part in the festival for 50 years and for whom the traditional Bavarian peasant dress is like a second skin. “We start wearing it as children, for important festivities,” she said. The participants paraded for two hours through the streets of central Rosenheim, then settled down in huge tents decked out in the blue and white colors of Bavaria to enjoy another great regional tradition: beer drinking.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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