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.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
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