Oslo — Electric car sales in Norway took a 94% share of the market in August — a new world record — statistics showed Monday, as sales in the rest of Europe stagnate.  

Boosted by the Tesla Model Y, which accounted for 18.8% of sales, and to a lesser extent Hyundai’s Kona and Nissan’s Leaf, electric vehicles made up 94.3% of new car registrations, the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.  

Norwegians bought 10,480 new EVs in August, bringing the total to 68,435 since the start of the year.  

Elsewhere in Europe high prices and insufficient infrastructure have hampered sales of EVs, whereas sales of hybrid models, which combine fossil fuel engines with electric batteries, have increased.  

The Scandinavian country, a major oil and gas producer, has set a target to sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2025, 10 years ahead of the EU goal.  

The country offers generous tax benefits which make electric models competitively priced.  

“No country in the world comes close to Norway in the electric car race,” OFV director Oyvind Solberg Thorsen said in a statement.  

“If this trend continues, we will soon be on our way to achieving our goal of 100% zero-emission cars by 2025,” he said.  

By comparison, electric cars represented 12.1% of new car sales in the EU in July, behind petrol cars at 33.4%, full hybrids at 32% and diesel cars at 12.6%, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association. 
…

your ad here

…

your ad here

…

your ad here

Paris — Paralympic triathlon competitions in Paris scheduled for Sunday were postponed for a day because of concerns about water quality in the Seine River after heavy rainfall, organizers said.

The 11 para triathlon events are now scheduled for Monday, the Paris 2024 organizing committee and World Triathlon said in a joint statement.

Rainstorms hit the French capital Friday and Saturday. Heavy rains cause wastewater and runoff to flow into the river, leading to a rise in bacteria levels including E. Coli.

“It rained a lot Friday and then it also rained Saturday. So the international federation and the organizing committee … out of a principle of precaution decided to delay all of the events for a day,” Paris Deputy Mayor Pierre Rabadan told reporters.

While organizers awaited new test results, Rabadan said “the trend is actually positive to being able to have the competition tomorrow morning.”

Late Sunday night, organizers confirmed the races would go ahead Monday, saying in a statement that new water testing results and monitoring ”indicate that water quality continues to improve and will be within the World Triathlon thresholds on race day.”

This was the second scheduled change for the para triathlon events. They had initially been scheduled to take place over two days, Sunday and Monday, but were moved to Sunday because of rain forecasts.

The disruption is another hiccup for the city’s efforts to clean up the river for future public swimming, one of Paris’ most ambitious promises ahead of hosting the Olympics and Paralympics this summer. The men’s individual triathlon event during the Paris Olympics was delayed and several test swims were canceled because of high E. coli levels after rainstorms.

Lazreg Benel-Hadj, vice president of the French Swimming Federation, said that while some of the 53 athletes who took part in Olympic swimming competitions in the Seine fell ill afterward, none of those illnesses “was linked to the water in the Seine.”

Rabadan reiterated that athletic events in the river would continue past the Paralympics.

“Yes, for sure, we will continue,” he said. “We’ll continue to have competition in the river. So many reasons for that. First one because athletes are happy with that, and second one because the quality of water will permit it in the future. So we will keep going on that way. And that’s a massive legacy of the games.”
…

your ad here

Vatican City — If any evidence were needed to underscore that Pope Francis’ upcoming trip to Asia and Oceania is the longest and most challenging of his pontificate, it’s that he’s bringing along his secretaries to help him navigate the four-country program while keeping up with work back home.

Francis will clock 32,814 kilometers by air during his Sept. 2-13 visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, far surpassing any of his previous 44 foreign trips and notching one of the longest papal trips ever, both in terms of days on the road and distances traveled.

That’s no small feat for a pope who turns 88 in December, uses a wheelchair, lost part of a lung to a respiratory infection as a young man and had to cancel his last foreign trip (to Dubai in November) on doctors’ orders.

But Francis is pushing ahead with this trip, originally planned for 2020 but postponed because of COVID-19. He’s bringing along his medical team of a doctor and two nurses and taking the usual health precautions on the ground. But in a novelty, he’s adding his personal secretaries into the traditional Vatican delegation of cardinals, bishops and security.

The long trip recalls the globetrotting travels of St. John Paul II, who visited all four destinations during his quarter-century pontificate, though East Timor was an occupied part of Indonesia at the time of his landmark 1989 trip.

By retracing John Paul’s steps, Francis is reinforcing the importance that Asia has for the Catholic Church, since it’s one of the few places where the church is growing in terms of baptized faithful and religious vocations. 

Here is a look at the trip and some of the issues that are likely to come up, with the Vatican’s relations with China ever-present in the background in a region where Beijing wields enormous influence.

Indonesia

Francis loves gestures of interfaith fraternity and harmony, and there could be no better symbol of religious tolerance at the start of his trip than the underground “Tunnel of Friendship” linking Indonesia’s main Istiqlal mosque to the country’s Catholic cathedral.

Francis will visit the underpass in central Jakarta with the grand imam, Nasaruddin Umar, before both partake in an interfaith gathering and sign a joint declaration.

Francis has made improving Christian-Muslim relations a priority, and has often used his foreign travels to promote his agenda of committing religious leaders to work for peace and tolerance, and renounce violence in God’s name.

Papua New Guinea

Francis was elected pope in 2013 largely on the strength of an extemporaneous speech he delivered to his fellow cardinals in which he said the Catholic Church needed to go to the “peripheries” to reach those who need God’s comfort the most. When Francis travels deep into the jungles of Papua New Guinea, he will be fulfilling one of the marching orders he set out for the future pope on the eve of his own election.

Few places are as remote and poverty wracked as Vanimo, a northern coastal town on the main island of New Guinea. There Francis will meet with missionaries from his native Argentina who are working to bring Christianity to a largely tribal people who still practice pagan traditions alongside the Catholic faith.

East Timor

When John Paul visited East Timor in 1989, he sought to console its overwhelmingly Catholic population who had suffered under Indonesia’s brutal and bloody occupation for 15 years.

“For many years now, you have experienced destruction and death as a result of conflict; You have known what it means to be the victims of hatred and struggle,” John Paul told the faithful during a seaside Mass.

East Timor emerged as an independent country in 2002, but still bears the trauma and scars of an occupation that left as many as 200,000 people dead — nearly a quarter of the population.

Francis will literally walk in John Paul’s footsteps when he celebrates Mass in Tasi-Toli, near Dili, the same seaside esplanade as that 1989 liturgy, which some see as a key date in the Timorese independence movement.

Another legacy that will confront Francis is that of the clergy sexual abuse scandal: Revered independence hero and Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo was secretly sanctioned by the Vatican in 2020 for sexually abusing young boys.

There is no word on whether Francis will refer to Belo, who is still revered in East Timor but has been barred by the Vatican from ever returning.

Singapore

Francis has used several of his foreign trips to send messages to China, be they direct telegrams of greetings when he flies through Chinese airspace or more indirect gestures of esteem, friendship and fraternity to the Chinese people when nearby.

Francis’ visit to Singapore, where three-quarters of the population is ethnically Chinese and Mandarin is an official language, will give him yet another opportunity to reach out to Beijing as the Vatican seeks improved ties for the sake of China’s estimated 12 million Catholics.

“It’s a faithful people, who lived through a lot and remained faithful,” Francis told the Chinese province of his Jesuit order in a recent interview.

The trip comes a month before the Vatican is set to renew a landmark 2018 agreement governing bishop nominations.

Just last week, the Vatican reported its “satisfaction” that China had officially recognized Tianjin Bishop Melchior Shi Hongzhen, who as far as the Vatican is concerned had taken over as bishop in 2019. The Holy See said China’s official recognition of him under civil law now was “a positive fruit of the dialogue established over the years between the Holy See and the Chinese government.”

But by arriving in Singapore, a regional economic powerhouse which maintains good relations with both China and the United States, Francis is also stepping into a protracted maritime dispute as China has grown increasingly assertive with its presence in the South China Sea.
…

your ad here

Rome — Crew members on Mike Lynch’s yacht have spoken of the moments when a storm sank the vessel off Sicily and their efforts to help save passengers, after a disaster that killed the British tech tycoon and six other people.

Matthew Griffiths, who was on watch duty on the night of the disaster two weeks ago, told investigators that the crew members did everything they could to save those on board the Bayesian, according to comments reported by Italian news agency Ansa on Saturday.

Griffiths, the boat’s captain James Cutfield, and ship engineer Tim Parker Eaton have been placed under investigation by the Italian authorities for potential manslaughter and shipwreck. Being investigated does not imply guilt and does not mean formal charges will follow.

“I woke up the captain when the wind was at 20 knots (23 mph/37 kph). He gave orders to wake everyone else,” Ansa quoted Griffiths as saying.

“The ship tilted and we were thrown into the water. Then we managed to get back up and tried to rescue those we could,” he added, describing the events of the early hours of Aug. 19, when the Bayesian had been anchored off the Sicilian port of Porticello.

“We were walking on the walls (of the boat). We saved who we could, Cutfield also saved the little girl and her mother,” he said, referring to passenger Charlotte Golunski and her one-year-old daughter. In all there were 15 survivors of the wreck.

Cutfield exercised his right to remain silent when questioned by prosecutors on Tuesday, his lawyers said, saying he was “worn out” and that they needed more time to build a defense case.

Before this, Cutfield gave a similar description to Griffiths’ to investigators, according to comments reported on Sunday by Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera.

Cutfield said the boat tilted by 45 degrees and stayed in that position for some time, then it suddenly fell completely to the right, the newspaper reported.

Parker Eaton had not previously commented on the investigation. On Sunday, Il Corriere quoted him as saying that all doors and hatches were closed when the storm hit the boat, except one giving access to the engine room.

That door was located on the side opposite to the tilting and so could not be a factor causing the sinking, he said.

Prosecutor Raffaele Cammarano said last week that the vessel was most likely hit by a “downburst,” a very strong downward wind.

The sinking has puzzled naval marine experts, who said a vessel like the Bayesian, built by Italian high-end yacht manufacturer Perini, should have withstood the storm and, in any case, should not have sunk as quickly as it did.

Prosecutors in the town of Termini Imerese, near Palermo, have said their investigation will take time, with the wreck yet to be salvaged from the sea.
…

your ad here

…

your ad here

Koumac, France — An alliance of parties seeking independence for New Caledonia has nominated as chief a prominent opposition leader currently jailed in France over a wave of deadly rioting in the French Pacific territory.

Christian Tein, who considers himself a “political prisoner,” was one of seven pro-independence activists transferred to mainland France in June — a move that sparked renewed violence that has roiled the archipelago and left 11 people dead.

His appointment on Saturday to lead the Socialist Kanak National Liberation Front (FLNKS) risks complicating efforts to end the crisis, sparked in May by a Paris plan for voting reforms that indigenous Kanaks fear will thwart their ambitions for independence by leaving them a permanent minority.

Laurie Humuni of the RDO party, one of four in the FLNKS alliance, said Saturday that Tein’s nomination was a recognition of his CCAT party’s leading role in mobilizing the independence movement.

It was not clear if the two other alliance members, the UPM and Palika, supported the move — they had refused to participate in the latest FLNKS meeting and indicated they would not support any of its proposals.

The alliance also said it was willing to renew talks to end the protests, but only if local anti-independence parties are excluded.

“We will have to remove some blockades to allow the population access to essential services, but that does not mean we are abandoning our struggle,” Humuni told AFP.

On Thursday, France said it had agreed to terms with Pacific leaders seeking a fact-finding mission to New Caledonia in a bid to resolve the dispute, though a date for the mission has not yet been set.

President Emmanuel Macron’s government has sent thousands of troops and police to restore order in the archipelago, almost 17,000 kilometers (10,600 miles) from Paris, and the electoral reforms were suspended in June.
…

your ad here

Warsaw — Poland on Sunday marked 85 years since the outbreak of World War II during annual commemoration ceremony held at dawn to remember Nazi Germany’s first attacks that triggered the deadly conflict.

Nearly six million Poles died in the conflict that killed more than 50 million people overall, including the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, half of them Polish.

The remembrance ceremony on Sunday was traditionally held in Westerplatte, on Poland’s Baltic coast, where a Nazi German battleship had opened fire on a Polish fort 85 years ago to the day.

Speaking at Westerplatte, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the lessons of World War II were “not an abstraction” and drew parallels with the war in neighboring Ukraine.

“This war is coming again from the east,” he said.

He urged NATO member states to be “fully devoted to defense… against the aggression that we are witnessing today on the battlefields of Ukraine.”

Adolf Hitler’s attacks on Poland led Britain and France to declare war on Nazi Germany. On September 17, the Soviet Union in turn invaded Poland.

After the Nazis tore up their pact with Moscow, two alliances battled it out: the Axis powers led by Germany, Italy and Japan and the victorious Allied forces led by Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Polish President Andrzej Duda took part in commemorations in the western Polish city of Wielun where Germany’s first bombs fell 85 years ago.

Duda said “sorry” from Germany was not enough and called for reparations, adding: “This issue is not settled.”

Although it has been 85 years since the war started, there are still unresolved matters according to Poland.

Poland’s current pro-EU government led by Tusk has urged Germany to provide financial compensation over losses the country sustained at the hands of Nazi troops.

It echoed an earlier similar push by the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party that lost power in October election.

During his visit to commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising, a doomed revolt against occupying forces, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke of plans to establish a memorial to the Polish victims of the Nazis.

“Many other efforts are underway, including for the remaining survivors of the German occupation. Our two governments are liaising closely on this,” he said.

Steinmeier did not, however, provide any further details on the possible compensation measures.

According to Polish media, discussions between Warsaw and Berlin on financial compensation to the living victims of the Nazi Germany are underway, with Poland estimating up to 70,000 people would be eligible.
…

your ad here

BERLIN — Two state elections in eastern Germany on Sunday offer the far-right Alternative for Germany the chance to become the strongest party for the first time and could produce painful results for the unpopular national government. A new party founded by a prominent leftist also hopes to make an immediate impact.

About 3.3 million people are eligible to vote in Saxony and nearly 1.7 million in Thuringia. Sunday’s elections are being watched nervously in Berlin: While the three parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition were weak there already, they risk dropping under the 5% support threshold needed to stay in the state legislatures at all.

A third election follows September 22 in another eastern state, Brandenburg, currently led by Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats. Germany’s next national election is due in a little over a year.

Alice Weidel, a national co-leader of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has described Sunday’s votes as “an important milestone for the national parliamentary election next year.” The party secured its first mayoral and county government posts last year, and now says it wants to govern at state level, too.

But with polls putting AfD’s support around 30% in both states, it would most likely need a coalition partner to govern, and it’s highly unlikely anyone else would agree to put it in power. Even so, its strength could make forming new state governments extremely difficult.

AfD is at its strongest in the formerly communist east, and the domestic intelligence agency has the party’s branches in both Saxony and Thuringia under official surveillance as “proven right-wing extremist” groups. Its leader in Thuringia, Björn Höcke, has been convicted of knowingly using a Nazi slogan at political events, but is appealing.

Germany’s main opposition conservative party hopes to keep AfD at bay in Saxony and Thuringia after winning the European Parliament election in June.

The Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, has led Saxony since German reunification in 1990 and is banking on incumbent governor Michael Kretschmer to push it past AfD. In Thuringia, surveys show it trailing AfD, but candidate Mario Voigt hopes to cobble together a governing coalition.

Depending how badly the parties in the national government perform, that could be very tricky. Two of those parties, Scholz’s Social Democrats and the environmentalist Greens, are the junior partners in both states’ outgoing governments.

Thuringia’s politics are particularly complicated because the Left Party of Governor Bodo Ramelow has slumped into electoral insignificance nationally. Sahra Wagenknecht, long one of its best-known figures, left last year to form a new party — the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, or BSW — which is now outperforming it.

The CDU has long refused to work with the Left Party, descended from East Germany’s ruling communists. It hasn’t ruled out working with Wagenknecht’s BSW, but that would be far from an obvious combination.

High ratings for both AfD and BSW have been fed by discontent with a national government notorious for infighting. Both are strongest in the less prosperous east.

AfD has tapped into high anti-immigration sentiment in the region. It remains to be seen whether and how last week’s knife attack in the western city of Solingen in which a suspected extremist from Syria is accused of killing three people, prompting the government to announce new restrictions on knives and new measures to ease deportations, will affect Sunday’s elections.

Wagenknecht’s BSW combines left-wing economic policy with an immigration-skeptic agenda. The CDU also has stepped up pressure on the national government for a tougher stance on immigration.

Germany’s stance toward Russia’s war in Ukraine is also an issue. Berlin is Ukraine’s second-biggest weapons supplier after the United States; those weapons deliveries are something both AfD and BSW oppose. Wagenknecht also has assailed a recent decision by the German government and the U.S. to begin deployments of long-range missiles to Germany in 2026.
…

your ad here

PATERZELL, Germany — How do you teach a bird how, and where, to fly?

The distinctive northern bald ibis, hunted essentially to extinction by the 17th century, was revived by breeding and rewilding efforts over the last two decades. But the birds — known for their distinctive black-and-iridescent green plumage, bald red head and long curved beak — don’t instinctively know which direction to fly to migrate without the guidance of wild-born elders. So a team of scientists and conservationists stepped in as foster parents and flight instructors.

“We have to teach them the migration route,” said biologist Johannes Fritz.

The northern bald ibis once soared over North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and much of Europe, including southern Germany’s Bavaria. The migratory birds were also considered a delicacy, and the bird, known as the Waldrapp in German, disappeared from Europe, though a few colonies elsewhere survived.

The efforts of Fritz and the Waldrappteam, a conservation and research group based in Austria, brought the Central European population from zero to almost 300 since the start of their project in 2002.

The feat moved the species from a “critically endangered” classification to “endangered” and, Fritz says, is the first attempt to reintroduce a continentally extinct migratory bird species.

But while northern bald ibises still display the natural urge to migrate, they don’t know which direction to fly without the guidance of wild-born elders. The Waldrappteam’s early reintroduction attempts were largely unsuccessful because, without teaching the birds the migration route, most disappeared soon after release. Instead of returning to suitable wintering grounds such as Tuscany, Italy, they flew in different directions and ultimately died.

So the Waldrappteam stepped in as foster parents and flight instructors for the Central European population, which was made up of descendants from multiple zoo colonies and released into the wild in the hopes of creating a migratory group. This year marks the 17th journey with human-led migration guides, and the second time they’ve been forced to pilot a new route to Spain due to climate change.

To prepare them for travel, the chicks are removed from their breeding colonies when they are just a few days old. They are taken to an aviary that’s overseen by the foster parents in the hopes of “imprinting” — when the birds will bond with those humans to ultimately trust them along the migration route.

Barbara Steininger, a Waldrapp team foster mother, said she acts like “their bird mom.”

“We feed them, we clean them, we clean their nests. We take good care of them and see that they are healthy birds,” she said. “But also we interact with them.”

Steininger and the other foster parents sit on the back of a microlight aircraft, waving and shouting encouragement through a bullhorn as it flies through the air.

It’s a bizarre scene: The aircraft looks like a flying go-kart with a giant fan on the back and a yellow parachute keeping it aloft. Still, three dozen birds follow the contraption, piloted by Fritz, as it sails over alpine meadows and foothills.

Fritz was inspired by “Father Goose” Bill Lishman, a naturalist who taught Canadian geese to fly alongside his ultra-light plane beginning in 1988. He later guided endangered whooping cranes through safe routes and founded the nonprofit “Operation Migration.” Lishman’s work prompted the 1996 movie “Fly Away Home” but features a young girl as the geese’s “mother.”

Like Lishman, Fritz and his team’s efforts have worked. The first bird independently migrated back to Bavaria in 2011 from Tuscany. More have flown the route that’s upward of 550 kilometers (342 miles) each year, and the team hopes the Central European population will be more than 350 birds by 2028 and become self-sustaining.

But the effects of climate change mean the Waldrapp are migrating later in the season now, which forces them to cross the Alps in colder, more dangerous weather — without the aid of warm currents of air, known as thermals, that rise upward and help the birds soar without expending extra energy.

In response, the Waldrappteam piloted a new route in 2023, from Bavaria to Andalusia in southern Spain.

This year, the route is roughly 2,800 kilometers (1,740 miles) — some 300 kilometers (186 miles) longer than last year’s path. Earlier this month from an airfield in Paterzell, in upper Bavaria, the team guided 36 birds along one stage through bright blue skies and a tailwind that increased their speed.

The entire journey to Spain could take up to 50 days and end in early October. But Fritz says the effort is bigger than just the northern bald ibises: It’s about paving the way for other threatened migratory species to fly.
…

your ad here

…

your ad here

Moscow, Russia — A helicopter with 22 people aboard, most of them tourists, has gone missing in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula in the far east, regional authorities said Saturday.

“Today at about 1615 (0415 GMT) communication was lost with a Mi-8 helicopter … which had 22 people on board, 19 passengers and three crew members,” Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov said in a video posted on Telegram.

Rescue teams in helicopters have been searching into the night for the missing aircraft, focusing on a river valley that the helicopter was due to fly along, Russian authorities said.

The Mi-8 is a Soviet-designed military helicopter that is widely used for transport in Russia.

The missing helicopter had picked up passengers near the Vachkazhets ancient volcano in a scenic area of the peninsula known for its wild landscapes, pristine rivers, geysers and active volcanoes.

Kamchatka, which is nine hours ahead of Moscow, is a popular tourist destination.

A source in the emergency services told TASS news agency that the helicopter disappeared from radar almost immediately after taking off and the crew did not report any problems.

The local weather service said there was poor visibility in the airport area.

Accidents involving planes and helicopters are frequent in Russia’s far eastern region, which is sparsely populated and where there is often harsh weather.

The emergencies ministry said the search and rescue operation was being hampered by thick fog in the area.

In August 2021, a Mi-8 helicopter with 16 people on board, including 13 tourists, crashed into a lake in Kamchatka due to poor visibility, killing eight.

In July the same year, a plane crashed as it tried to land on the peninsula, with 22 passengers and 6 crew aboard, all of whom were killed.
…

your ad here