Police last week arrested a man climbing on the Eiffel Tower, leading to visitors being temporarily stranded at the summit — including a reporter for The Associated Press (AP) and a Washington couple who decided during the wait to get married.
Amir Khan had been planning to propose to Kat Warren later Thursday in a Paris garden away from the crowds, with a romantic dinner on the River Seine also on the menu.
However, when the lifts were temporarily shut down because of the climber, stranding the couple and others at the top, Khan decided to spring his surprise.
Photo: AP
Pat Eaton-Robb, an AP journalist from Connecticut who was also stuck up there, got their story.
“I figured we might be here longer than I imagined,” Khan told the AP reporter. “So I didn’t want to miss dinner and she always wanted to be proposed to on or under the Eiffel Tower. So I figured: ‘This is it, this is the moment.’”
The answer?
“Yes,” of course.
“He had a pretty good chance of me saying ‘Yes’ all along,” Warren said, laughing.
Besides, when trapped at the top of a 330m tower, how can anyone say “No?”
Had that happened, “somebody else would be climbing the Eiffel Tower today possibly,” she joked.
The climber was found between the tower’s second and third floors, Societe d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel communications director Alice Beunardeau said.
A specialist team of climbing firefighters led the man down and police arrested him, she said.
Beunardeau said she had been subsequently informed that the man was carrying a banner about American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish.
“I think it was ‘Free Billie Eilish,’” she said. “I’m not certain of that at this moment, but on the face of it, that was the message.”
Eaton-Robb and his wife, Kathleen Eaton-Robb, have had a misadventurous weeklong visit to Paris. On Tuesday, they were also in a crowd that was evacuated from the Palace of Versailles because of a security scare.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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
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