Melbourne, Australia
AP
 — 

German tourist Carolina Wilga was found alive in Australia’s remote Outback on Friday, 12 days after she went missing and a day after her abandoned van was discovered, police said.

The last known sighting of the 26-year-old backpacker, and the last day family and friends heard from her, was June 29. She was seen at a general store in the wheat farming town of Beacon, 320 kilometers (200 miles) northeast of the Western Australia state capital Perth. Beacon had a population of 123 during the 2021 census.

A member of the public found Wilga wandering on a forest trail late Friday, Western Australia Police Force Insp. Martin Glynn said.

She was in a “fragile” state but had no serious injuries and was flown to a hospital in Perth for treatment, Glynn told reporters.

“I think once we do hear her story, it will be a remarkable story,” Glynn said, adding it was a “great result” for the backpacker’s family and those involved in the search.

“You know, she’s obviously coped in some amazing conditions,” he said. “There’s a very hostile environment out there, both from flora and fauna. It’s a really, really challenging environment to cope in.”

The reserve where Wilga was lost covers more than 300,000 hectares (740,000 acres). The Thursday-Friday overnight temperature was 2.6 degrees Celsius (36.7 Fahrenheit) in the area with no rain.

The crew of a police helicopter spotted her van Thursday in wilderness in the Karroun Hill Nature Reserve, 36 kilometers (22 miles) north of Beacon, Glynn said.

“Very difficult country. Huge area. So it’s a miracle they’ve actually spotted the car, to be honest,” Glynn told reporters before she was found.

Ground searchers on Friday scoured a heavily wooded radius of 300 meters (1,000 feet) beyond the van. Police assume Wilga’s van, a 1995 Mitsubishi Delica Star Wagon, became stuck in mud on the day she left Beacon, Glynn said.

The van, which has solar panels and reserves of drinking water, had recovery boards under its rear wheels that are used to give vehicles traction when they are stuck.

Police believed Wilga became lost and was not the victim of crime.

Australian serial killer Ivan Milat, who died in prison in 2019, notoriously kidnapped and murdered seven backpackers from 1989 to 1992, including three Germans, two Britons and two Australians.

CNN
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Kyiv was burning as Dr. Borys Todurov sped through the city in an ambulance, undeterred by the deep thuds of explosions and the terrifying sounds of Russian drones flying overhead.

He was determined to deliver his precious cargo: a human heart.

Todurov’s patient – a child – was seriously ill in a hospital. He had hours to act.

The child has been living with a heart disease for several years, but her condition deteriorated earlier this week and Todurov knew a new heart was her only chance.

So when one became available from a child donor on the opposite side of the city, he didn’t wait for the Russians to stop attacking.

Russia has ramped up its aerial attacks against Ukraine in recent weeks. It fired more than 400 drones and 18 missiles, including eight ballistic and six cruise missiles overnight into Thursday.

As the Ukrainian authorities called on people to hide in bomb shelters and basements, Todurov and his staff made the 10-mile drive from the Okhmatdyt children’s hospital in western Kyiv to the city’s Heart Institute on the eastern bank of the river while missiles and drones were flying around.

While the Ukrainian Air Force managed to shoot down or disable the vast majority of the drones and missiles, two people were killed and dozens more injured in the attack on Thursday.

Thursday’s mass attack on Kyiv was just the latest in a deadly string of Russian assaults. Just the day before, Moscow launched more than 700 drones – a new record – against Ukraine on a single night.

Todurov, the director of the Heart Institute, and his team worked non-stop throughout the two nights of attacks.

After performing a heart surgery at the institute on Wednesday, he traveled across the city to Okhmatdyt where he removed the heart from the body of the donor.

He then personally escorted the organ across the city.

Crossing the Dnipro by a bridge is extremely dangerous during an attack on Kyiv, because vehicles are exposed and Ukrainian air defences target Russian drones and missiles when they are above the river to minimise the impact from falling debris.

A video taken during the frantic drive shows a large fire burning near the road as Todurov drives on. “We’re carrying a heart,” he says calmly.

The Russian attack on the capital was still underway when Todurov got into the operating theater at the Heart Institute, heading a large medical team and transplanting the heart into the body of his patient.

In a stunning moment captured on camera and shared with CNN, the new heart is seen beating inside the patient’s chest, just hours after it was driven through Kyiv as Russian drones and missiles rained down on the city.

“The heart is working, and the pressure is stable. We hope that … (the patient) will recover and live a long and full life,” the doctor said.

The Ukrainian Transplant Coordination Centre said in a statement that the donor was a four-year-old girl who was declared brain-dead by a medical council after suffering serious injuries.

The girl’s mother, herself a medical worker, agreed to have her daughter’s organs donated.

And so, just as Todurov was transplanting the girl’s heart into his patient’s body at the Heart Institute, her kidneys were being transplanted to a 14-year-old boy and her liver to a 16-year-old girl, the center said. The two other patients were at the Okhmatdyt hospital, so no transport was required to get the organs to them.

The coordination center said that two of the three recipients were in critical condition and had they not received the transplants, they would have just days or weeks to live.

“May the little donor rest in peace. Our condolences to her family and gratitude for their difficult but important decision,” the center said.

CNN
 — 

As scattered details of the apparent suicide of Russia’s former transport minister Roman Starovoit trickled in via state media on Monday, one stood out. Near his body, the Kommersant newspaper reported, investigators found a Glock pistol that Starovoit had been given as an award.

In October 2023, in his previous job as governor of Russia’s Kursk region, Starovoit was pictured in a local news article being presented with a velvet-boxed firearm from the region’s interior ministry for his role in maintaining security there.

Fast forward 21 months and his death came amid reports he may have been doing the exact opposite. Two sources told Reuters he was suspected of being involved in a scheme to embezzle millions of dollars earmarked for border defenses. Defenses that would undoubtedly have come in useful when Ukrainian troops launched a surprise invasion there last August.

There’s no way of knowing if it was the same pistol, and it’s not clear yet if the corruption case had anything to do with his firing (no official reason was given) or his death. But the image it creates of a state-sponsored self-destruction, of a once rising star in Vladimir Putin’s political elite dead near his Tesla, with the spoils of his former loyalty, is especially poignant in today’s Russia.

More than three years into Putin’s unprovoked war on Ukraine, the Kremlin’s political vice is tightening again. Fealty to the regime is no guarantee of safety, and there are fewer places to hide from increasingly brutal consequences.

For Russians with long memories, old fears are rising.

“There’s a smell of Stalinism from this story,” wrote exiled Russian dissident Ilya Yashin on X.

And that stench is permeating beyond the halls of the transport ministry.

With Putin now settled into the second year of his fifth presidential term, the Kremlin has in recent weeks been moving to shut down any remaining threats.

In mid-June Russia’s supreme court banned the opposition “Civic Initiative” party, which had unsuccessfully attempted to field the only anti-war candidate – Boris Nadezhdin – in the 2024 presidential race. The court accused it of failing to take part in elections for seven years.

“It’s a tragic farce situation,” party leader Andrey Nechaev told supporters on Telegram last month. “First they ban us from participating in elections for fabricated reasons, then they accuse us of not participating in them,” he said.

Independent election monitoring, already on its last legs in Russia, may now also be a thing of the past. On Tuesday, Golos, Russia’s only remaining independent election watchdog, announced it was closing down.

The decision, it said, came after its co-chair Grigory Melkonyants was sentenced to five years in prison in late May, after a court found him guilty of running activities for European election monitoring network ENEMO, deemed by Russia to be an “undesirable organization.”

Golos denies the charge, but said the verdict put all its participants at risk of criminal prosecution.

The Golos case, opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza argues in a Washington Post op-ed, smacks of another Putin trademark: holding long-term grievances and meting out delayed retribution.

Kara-Murza believes that Golos’ original sin was not in 2024, but in documenting widespread parliamentary election violations in 2011, the year Putin announced he would return to the presidency after a brief hiatus as prime minister. The protests that followed were the biggest since the fall of the Soviet Union.

“It was a real scare for Putin, his moment of greatest weakness,” writes Kara-Murza. “And he never forgave those who, as he put it, attempted a ‘color revolution’ in Russia. This is the real reason for Grigory Melkonyants’s prison sentence.”

And it’s not just politics where the pressure is rising.

On Saturday, Konstantin Strukov, the head of Yuzhuralzoloto, one of Russia’s largest gold mining companies, was arrested while trying to leave the country on his private jet, according to Kommersant.

A few days earlier, Russia’s prosecutor general had launched a legal bid to nationalize the company, alleging Strukov had used a regional government position to acquire control of the company, among other violations.

If the post-Soviet years saw a wholesale redistribution of property away from the Russian state through rapid privatization, the Ukraine war years are characterized by the reverse.

Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, calls it “the biggest redistribution of wealth in Russia in three decades.”  And the purpose, she says, is “to increase loyalty to Putin.”

And there’s no attempt to mask the scent of Soviet-style control here. In March, Russia’s prosecutor general reported to Putin that companies worth 2.4 trillion rubles (over $30bn) had been transferred to the state, part of an effort “to not allow the use of private enterprises against state interests.”

Roman Starovoit’s death had echoes and notable differences to that of Gorbachev’s interior minister-turned-coup plotter Boris Pugo, who killed himself in August 1991 when his rebellion collapsed and he faced arrest. In the chaos of the early 90s, details leaked out freely about his death, his wife’s attempted suicide and even the notes they left.

The almost airtight information zone of Putin’s presidency makes it much harder to discern what exactly happened to mister Starovoit, and why.

But for Russians, it’s a graphic reminder that wealth and power carry increasing risks, as the Kremlin closes ranks for what it sees as a long-term confrontation with the West.