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.
CONDITIONS: The Russian president said a deal that was scuppered by ‘elites’ in the US and Europe should be revived, as Ukraine was generally satisfied with it Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday said that he was ready for talks with Ukraine, after having previously rebuffed the idea of negotiations while Kyiv’s offensive into the Kursk region was ongoing. Ukraine last month launched a cross-border incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, sending thousands of troops across the border and seizing several villages. Putin said shortly after there could be no talk of negotiations. Speaking at a question and answer session at Russia’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Putin said that Russia was ready for talks, but on the basis of an aborted deal between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s negotiators reached in Istanbul, Turkey,
In months, Lo Yuet-ping would bid farewell to a centuries-old village he has called home in Hong Kong for more than seven decades. The Cha Kwo Ling village in east Kowloon is filled with small houses built from metal sheets and stones, as well as old granite buildings, contrasting sharply with the high-rise structures that dominate much of the Asian financial hub. Lo, 72, has spent his entire life here and is among an estimated 860 households required to move under a government redevelopment plan. He said he would miss the rich history, unique culture and warm interpersonal kindness that defined life in
AERIAL INCURSIONS: The incidents are a reminder that Russia’s aggressive actions go beyond Ukraine’s borders, Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha said Two NATO members on Sunday said that Russian drones violated their airspace, as one reportedly flew into Romania during nighttime attacks on neighboring Ukraine, while another crashed in eastern Latvia the previous day. A drone entered Romanian territory early on Sunday as Moscow struck “civilian targets and port infrastructure” across the Danube in Ukraine, the Romanian Ministry of National Defense said. It added that Bucharest had deployed F-16 warplanes to monitor its airspace and issued text alerts to residents of two eastern regions. It also said investigations were underway of a potential “impact zone” in an uninhabited area along the Romanian-Ukrainian border. There
A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged on Thursday told his trial that police had saved her life by uncovering the crimes. “The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his surname. Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious
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