Around the World briefs
By Associated Press
A Soyuz craft with two Russians
and 1 American docks at the International Space Station
MOSCOW | A Soyuz spacecraft carrying two Russians and an American docked at the International Space Station on Wednesday, a little more than three hours after its launch.
The capsule atop a towering rocket set off from a Russian launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, and docked with the space station after two orbits of the Earth, a fast trip compared with some that have lasted for days.
The crew already aboard the station were performing a lengthy series of system checks before those in the capsule can enter.
The mission commander is Alexei Ovchinin, with Russian compatriot Ivan Vagner and American Donald Pettit in the crew.
The launch took place without obvious problems and the Soyuz entered orbit eight minutes after liftoff, a relief for Russian space authorities after an automated safety system halted a launch in March because of a voltage drop in the power system.
On the space station, Pettit, Vagner and Ovchinin will join NASA’s Tracy Dyson, Mike Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, and Russians Nikolai Chub, Alexander Grebenkin and Oleg Kononenko.
Wilmore and Williams have remained on the station long past their scheduled return to Earth. They arrived in June as the first crew of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule. But their trip to the orbiting laboratory was marred by thruster troubles and helium leaks, and NASA decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.
The two astronauts will ride home with SpaceX next year.
The ancient jar smashed by a
4-year-old is back on display at
an Israeli museum after repair
TEL AVIV, Israel | A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,” said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
Jewelry seized from Polish inmates
of Nazi German concentration
camps is returned to families
WARSAW, Poland | Stanislawa Wasilewska was 42 when she was captured by Nazi German troops on Aug. 31, 1944, in Warsaw and sent to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, Germany. From there, she was sent to the Neuengamme forced labor camp, where she was given prisoner number 7257 and had her valuables seized.
Eighty years later, Germany’s Arolsen Archives returned Wasilewska’s jewelry to her grandson and great-granddaughter at an emotional ceremony in Warsaw late Tuesday during which families of 12 Polish inmates of World War II Nazi German concentration camps were given back their confiscated belongings.
Some relatives had tears in their eyes as they received the mementoes of their long-gone, often unknown family members. More such ceremonies are planned.
Wasilewska’s family was given back her two amber crucifixes, part of a golden bracelet and a gold wristwatch engraved with the initials KW and the date 7-3-1938, probably marking her wedding to Konstanty Wasilewski.
“This is an important moment in our lives, because this is a story that we did not fully know about and it came to light,” Wasilewska’s great-granddaughter, Malgorzata Koryś, 35, told The Associated Press.
When Nazi Germany was defeated in 1945, Wasilewska was taken by the Red Cross from Neuengamme to Sweden, but later returned to Poland. She is buried in her native Grodzisk Mazowiecki, near Warsaw.
From another family, Adam Wierzbicki, 29, was given two rings which belonged to Zofia Strusińska and a golden chain and tooth filling of Józefa Skórka, two married sisters of his great-grandfather, Stanislaw Wierzbicki. Captured together on Aug. 4, like Wasilewska, the sisters also went through Ravensbrück and Neuengamme before the Red Cross took them to Sweden.
A family story has it that a Swedish man fell in love with one of the sisters and wanted them both to stay, promising to take care of them, but they decided to go back to Poland, Wierzbicki said.
The return of their jewelry is “important for sentimental reasons but also for historical reasons,” Wierzbicki told the AP.
The items were returned by the Arolsen Archives, the international center on Nazi persecution, which holds information on about 17.5 million people. It stores some 2,000 items which were seized by the Nazis from concentration camp inmates from more than 30 countries, and are intended to be returned to their relatives.
When the prisoners were sent to concentration camps, their valuables — wedding rings, watches, gold chains, earrings and other items — were confiscated and put in envelopes marked with their owners’ names. That allowed for the items’ return to the families, 80 years later.
It was an uplifting moment when the archives volunteers contacted him, Wierzbicki said, but there was also the thought that “history will catch up with you. It was like my aunts were looking at me from the past.”
The archives launched its restitution campaign, “Warsaw Uprising: 100 Untold Stories,” to mark 80 years since the city rose up against the Nazi invaders on Aug. 1, 1944, with the goal of reaching the families of 100 victims and reviving the memory of them through their belongings.
Archive director Floriane Azoulay said they are only custodians of the belongings, which should be returned to the families.
“Every object that we return is personal,” Azoulay said. “And it’s the last personal thing a person had on them before they became a prisoner, before they became a number. So it is a very important object for a family.”
Volunteer Manuela Golc has found more than 100 Polish families and each time it’s an emotional moment.
“It is often the case that we pass on information that the family was not aware of at all,” Golc said. “So this conversation on the phone … is also very difficult. But in the end we are very happy that the memento is returning to the family.”
If she was unable to trace a family online or through official records, she traveled to cemeteries, leaving notes waterproofed against the rain for the families on the graves of people whose data matched those in the archives, asking them to get in touch.
The Warsaw Uprising was launched by the underground resistance Home Army with the goal of taking control of the capital city ahead of the advancing Soviet troops. It fell after 63 days of heroic struggle that cost the lives of some 200,000 fighters and civilians. In revenge, the Germans expelled the surviving residents and reduced Warsaw to ruins.
During German occupation in 1939-45, Poland lost some 6 million residents, half of them Jewish, and suffered huge material losses.
New president of UN General Assembly calls for unity to
tackle borderless issues
UNITED NATIONS | Cameroon’s former prime minister took over the presidency of the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, issuing “a clarion call” to the world’s divided nations to come together and take action to address global challenges from climate change and poverty to conflicts and armed violence.
Philemon Yang told the 193-member world body there are doubts that nations can join forces to tackle these and other pressing issues. But he said: “We must demonstrate that international cooperation remains the most effective tool at our disposal for addressing the profound and borderless issues we confront.”
Yang, a former diplomat who was prime minister of his West African nation from 2009 to 2019, said the cornerstone of his one-year presidency “will be built on the principles of unity in diversity.”
He said peace and security will continue to be “of paramount importance” during his presidency.
“This is why, I will urge the assembly to intensify its determination to prioritize the resolution of conflicts, including the intractable ones in the Gaza Strip, Haiti, and Ukraine, as well as find durable solutions to the situation in the Great Lakes region and elsewhere in Africa,” Yang said.
Outgoing General Assembly President Dennis Francis urged the United Nations, which was established on the ashes of World War II, to rise to meet its mandate — to maintain international peace and security.
“It is no understatement to say that the magnitude of manmade human suffering we are witnessing around the world is simply staggering,” the former diplomat and ambassador from Trinidad and Tobago said, pointing to Gaza and other conflicts.
But Francis also warned that millions of people live in abject poverty and hopelessness today, and “On our current trajectory, millions more will face poverty and hunger by 2030.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also focused on the need for nations to work together.
He said the 78th session of the General Assembly, which ended Tuesday morning, was “a tumultuous year” of continued poverty, inequality, injustice, division, violence and conflict — and it was also the hottest year on record.
“But this session also closes at a time of growing hope and inspiration in what we can achieve if we work as one,” the U.N. chief said.
At Tuesday afternoon’s opening of the 79th assembly session, Guterres told diplomats: “Step by step, solution by solution, we can rebuild trust and faith in one another, and in what we can accomplish through collaboration and solidarity.”
Yang will preside at the upcoming gathering of world leaders at the General Assembly, first at the Summit of the Future on Sept. 22-23 called by the secretary-general to spur multilateral action on global issues — and reform global institutions founded after World War II including the United Nations.
Immediately after the summit ends, world leaders will hold their annual global meeting from Sept. 24-30, with public speeches in the assembly and lots of private meetings where a lot of the world’s business often gets done.
—From AP reports
