INDIA
Rains in north kill 37 people
At least 37 people have been killed this week as monsoon rains triggered house collapses and flooded wide swaths of land in the north, officials said yesterday. Weather officials have predicted more rains in the next 48 hours in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. The deaths have occurred since Thursday night, government spokesman Awanish Awasthi said. Most of the victims died on Friday in Agra, the northern city where the white marble Taj Mahal is located, including four members of a family whose house collapsed, he said. Rains also damaged an outer boundary wall of the 16th-century Fatehpur Sikri Fort, west of Agra. Authorities closed schools yesterday in the area as the weather department issued an alert for more rain.
AFGHANISTAN
First Taliban-US talks held
The Taliban has held the first direct talks with a US official in a preliminary discussion about plans for peace negotiations, a senior official of the insurgent group said. This week’s meeting with Alice Wells, the US’ top diplomat for South Asia, was an attempt to jump-start talks on ending Washington’s longest military engagement, the official told reporters early yesterday. US officials neither confirmed nor denied that a meeting took place. The Taliban have long demanded direct talks with Washington. “The discussion was preliminary, initial — and both discussed a future meeting and contacts,” the official said on condition of anonymity. It was not clear when the next meeting would be held or with whom, but he was certain that one would be held.
ICELAND
Costs end minke whale hunts
The controversial hunt for minke whales has come to end after declining profits led to the local industry closing, the International Fund for Animal Welfare said on Friday. Only six minke whales were caught last month and none this month — usually the peak month for hunting — out of a quota of 262, the association said in a statement. It was the smallest number since Iceland resumed whaling in 2003, with 17 animals caught last summer and 46 in 2016. Gunnar Jonsson, head of whaling company IP-Utgerd Ltd, said that hunting has stopped. “We need to go much farther from the coast than before, so we need more staff, which increases costs,” he told the Morgunbladid newspaper. Iceland, along with Norway, openly defies the International Whaling Commission’s 1986 ban on whale hunting. The practice has drawn fire from numerous corners, including the EU and the US, which in 2014 threatened Iceland with economic sanctions.
UNITED STATES
Police led on tractor chase
A man accused of stealing a tractor before leading Denver police on a slow-speed chase through the city is also charged with biting and choking a police dog and stealing two other cars. Denver District Attorney Beth McCann on Thursday filed 23 charges against 37-year-old Thomas Busch connected to the incident on Friday last week, including 10 felony-level charges. It is not clear if Busch has an attorney. The charges include three counts of aggravated motor vehicle theft, three counts of failure to report an accident and one count of cruelty to a certified police working dog. Busch stole a car and then a tow truck before taking the tractor from a city water department facility, authorities said. A police squad car eventually rammed the tractor’s front end in downtown Denver, stopping it, they added.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion