Breaking News, Latest Philippines Headlines, World, Entertainment, Politics, Weather & Video News
by David SALAZAR Agence France-Presse San José del Guaviare, Colombia (AFP) – In just a few minutes, an enormous century-year-old tree is felled by an electric saw in the middle of a protected national park. The giant collapses, sending a shockwave through the Colombian Amazon. Its executioner is a 40-year-old man with a scarf bound around his face. The purpose of the crime: to plant coca, used to make cocaine — the only means of […]
by Nikolay KORZHOV Agence France-Presse BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AFP) – Malik Mutaliyev walks by an abandoned amusement park in wintry Baikonur, a secretive town in Kazakhstan’s inhospitable steppe that appeared alongside the eponymous Baikonur Cosmodrome where the Soviet Union’s space programme rose to glory. “Our town has lived through a lot: Perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, electricity shortages. We’ve been through it all,” says the 67-year-old former chief architect of Baikonur. The settlement located […]
BANGKOK, Thailand (AFP) – A Thai tycoon accused of poaching wildlife in a national park lost his final appeal Wednesday, in a long-running saga that drew public outrage over the elite’s perceived impunity. Construction magnate Premchai Karnasuta was arrested in February 2018 when park officials found guns, animal carcasses — including of a kalij pheasant and a red muntjac — and the pelt of a black leopard at his campsite. Premchai was found not guilty of […]
by Anna MALPAS Agence France-Presse SEALAND (AFP) – It’s a hulking metal-and-concrete platform in the North Sea that has been run as an independent micronation in defiance of the UK government for the last 54 years. But even on Sealand, some seven miles (11 kilometres) off the coast of southeast England, visitors have to show a negative Covid-19 test before being winched up onto the deck. “We have zero Covid cases,” Liam Bates, one of […]
MOSCOW, Russsia (AFP) – Russia has dismantled a notorious facility dubbed the “whale jail” that kept dozens of the mammals in cramped conditions, causing an international outcry. Almost 100 whales were kept in the secretive facility in Srednyaya Bay near the far eastern town of Nakhodka in 2018, before being released after an intense campaign by animal rights and environmentalist groups in 2019. The animals were captured to perform in aquariums. The environmental prosecutor’s office […]
by Briseida MEMA Agence France-Presse SEMAN, Albania (AFP) – Albania’s communist-era bunkers were meant to withstand a nuclear strike, but decades later the fortifications are being devoured by the sea as the country’s coastline is battered by erosion. The shores of the Balkan country are among the most affected in Europe by erosion, according to experts, who blame climate change and uncontrolled urbanisation for the scourge. Along the shores of Seman in central Albania, many […]
by Hui Min NEO Agence France-Presse BERLIN, Germany (AFP) – Crises have a knack for felling leaders. Not Chancellor Angela Merkel. During 16 years in power, the veteran navigated Germany through the 2008 financial turmoil and ensuing eurozone debt crisis, the 2015 refugee influx and then the coronavirus pandemic. While largely admired at home and abroad even in the final days of her reign, the legacy she leaves behind is marked both by light and […]
Legendary Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim, widely credited with revolutionizing American musical theater, died Friday at the age of 91. Rick Miramontez, the publicist for the ongoing Broadway production of Sondheim’s musical “Company,” confirmed to AFP that the musical theater titan had passed away. Sondheim’s attorney F. Richard Pappas said Sondheim — known for works including “West Side Story” and “Sweeney Todd” — died suddenly in his Roxbury, Connecticut home the day after celebrating Thanksgiving […]
by Hervé BAR Agence France-Presse PLANADAS, Colombia (AFP) – As a bird perches on a telegraph pole, two young girls are deep in consultation — is it “Tiranus melancholicus,” or perhaps “Pyrocephalus rubinus?” The answer is “rubinus,” a sparrow with a bright red breast. In the center of Colombia, among the leafy mountains of Planadas, this ornithological debate by indigenous children might seem surprising. With their eyes scanning the mountain, around 30 people, adults and […]
ATHENS, Greece (AFP) – Tens of thousands of people joined protests in Greece’s two largest cities on Wednesday, marking the anniversary of a 1973 student revolt against a US-backed junta, an annual event that often sparks violence. Twenty thousand turned out in the capital Athens, according to police. Most of the marchers were students, unionists and members of leftist parties. A further 14,000 marched in the second city Thessaloniki. Police were deployed in their thousands […]
by Remi BANET Agence France-Presse ISTANBUL, Turkey (AFP) – Just blocks from Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, porter Bayram Yildiz waits his turn in a dark alley to heave a huge bale on his back nearly double his bodyweight. A few others linger beside him, picking up textiles from a lorry and lugging them to local shops before sunrise, their heads bowed and their knees bent. “I am half Hercules and half Rambo,” the muscle-bound 40-year-old joked, […]
by Moises AVILA Agence France-Presse Elieser Rodriguez emerges blackened from the thick smoke of burning pyres slowly transforming the limbs of mangroves into charcoal — a livelihood much maligned by environmental and climate campaigners in Panama. He says he has no other choice for a living. “This is the daily survival of my family, of my children, of my wife,” Rodriguez told AFP in El Espave, a town about 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Panama […]
