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.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian