PANAMA
Colombia slammed over gap
The national migration service on Friday said that Colombia has failed to help control the flow of mostly US-bound migrants passing through the Darien Gap. Agency director Samira Gozaine said that there had been a failure to reach any agreement with Colombia to promote legal transit of the up to 2,800 migrants a day who unlawfully cross their shared border. “For Panama, this is a crisis, but unfortunately with Colombia we have not been able to reach any kind of understanding,” Gozaine said in a statement.
BANGLADESH
Dengue outbreak spreads
Bangladesh is grappling with a record deadly outbreak of dengue fever, with hospitals struggling to make space for patients as the disease spreads rapidly. At least 293 people have died so far this year and nearly 61,500 have been infected, official figures showed, making this the deadliest year since the first recorded epidemic in 2000. Hospitals, especially in the capital, Dhaka, are struggling to find space for the large number of patients, health officials said.
SWITZERLAND
Dog makes epic journey
An escaped border terrier named Lucky made an epic 160km journey across Switzerland on the eve of the country’s national holiday, media reported on Friday. Her owners had left her in kennels in Bern canton, but the 14-year-old dog broke out on Monday evening. The following morning she turned up in Geneva, 160km away, RTS reported. “There was a hole in the fence” at the kennel, Lucky’s owner Jennifer Wagner told RTS. The dog was found near Lake Geneva, on the morning of Aug. 1, as fireworks began sounding for the national holiday. A Geneva resident spotted the animal on the side of a road and alerted authorities, RTS said. As Lucky was microchipped, police swiftly tracked down her owners, who were in Berlin frantically awaiting news of their pet. “I feel lucky that she is healthy, and did not die, and was not injured,” Wagner told RTS. “It was a big fright for us.” However, Wagner thinks her dog had a little help for her epic journey. She believes someone must have picked up the very friendly dog and driven her to Geneva. “I don’t think it is possible she ran [the whole way]. It is 160 kilometers,” she said. “That is impossible for a dog in such a short time.”
EL SALVADOR
Barbie coffins offered
A funeral home has taken Barbie mania to an extreme, offering pink coffins with Barbie linings. The pink metal coffins are on sale at the Alpha and Omega Funeral Home in the city of Ahuachapan, near the border with Guatemala. Owner Isaac Villegas on Friday said that he had already offered the option of pink coffins before the premiere last month of the Barbie movie, but the craze that swept Latin America convinced him to decorate the cloth linings of the coffins with pictures of the doll. The coffins are also decorated with little white stars. “I said: ‘We have to jump on this trend,’” Villegas said of the coffins, adding that “it has been a success.” He said the funeral home has already launched a promotional campaign around the Barbie boxes. Many people in El Salvador buy a pre-paid package for future burial. Villegas said that families had preferred traditional coffins in colors like black, white or gray, but a year ago, he sold his first pink coffin to family who wanted their relative buried in a happier-colored coffin. Now he has no plans to turn back. “We are going to have more pink coffins, because people are asking for it,” he said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home