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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema