TRANSNISTRIA
Heating, hot water cut
The breakaway Moldovan region yesterday cut heating and hot water supplies to households, Russia’s RIA news agency reported, after Russia stopped supplying gas via Ukraine. Transnistria is a pro-Russian entity that split from the rest of Moldova after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It was receiving Russian gas via Ukraine, but that supply route was halted with the expiry of a transit deal between the two warring countries. RIA quoted local energy company Tirasteploenergo as saying the heating cuts took effect at 7am, but some facilities such as hospitals were exempt.
Photo: AP
UNITED STATES
Works enter public domain
Thousands of artistic works yesterday entered the public domain as copyright law expires after 95 years for books, films and other works of art, while sound recordings from 1924 also became copyright-free. By entering the public domain, the pieces can be copied, shared, reproduced or adapted by anyone without paying the rights owner. This year’s crop includes internationally recognized figures such as the comic character Tintin, who made his debut in a Belgian newspaper in 1929, and Popeye the Sailor, created by cartoonist Elzie Crisler Segar. Every December, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain publishes a list of the cultural works that lose their copyright in the new year. Among the literary works that entered the public domain were the novels The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, while films include Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and The Black Watch, the first sound film by Oscar-winning director John Ford.
UNITED STATES
Pearl Harbor medic dies
Harry Chandler, a navy medic who helped pull injured sailors from the oily waters of Pearl Harbor after the 1941 Japanese attack on the naval base, has died. He was 103. Chandler died on Monday at a senior living center in Tequesta, Florida, said Ron Mahaffee, the husband of his granddaughter Kelli Fahey. Chandler had congestive heart failure, but Mahaffee said doctors and nurses noted his advanced age when giving a cause of death. The third Pearl Harbor survivor to die in the past few weeks, Chandler was a hospital corpsman 3rd class on Dec. 7, 1941, when waves of Japanese fighter planes dropped bombs and fired machine guns on battleships in the harbor. He told reporters in 2023 that he saw the planes approach as he was raising the flag that morning at a mobile hospital in Aiea Heights, which is in the hills overlooking the base. “I thought they were planes coming in from the States until I saw the bombs dropping,” Chandler said. His unit rode trucks down to attend injured people. He said in a Pacific Historic Parks oral history interview that he boarded a boat to help pluck wounded sailors from the water. An avid golfer, he shot five hole-in-ones during his lifetime, his grandson-in-law said. Chandler had one biological daughter and adopted two daughters from his second marriage, to Anna Chandler, who died in 2004. He is survived by two daughters, nine grandchildren, 17 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren. Military historian J. Michael Wenger has estimated that there were about 87,000 military personnel on the island of Oahu the day of the attack. With Chandler’s death only 15 are still living, according to a tally maintained by Kathleen Farley, the California state chair of the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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