CHINA
Landslide buries workers
More than a dozen workers remained missing yesterday after a landslide in Sichuan Province’s Ganluo County buried a section of railway that was under repair, according to state media. The 17 missing people were carrying out maintenance work on the track on Wednesday when the hill above them gave way, China Daily reported. The landslide happened very quickly, a witness told the newspaper. “I spotted a strange movement on the mountain slope after a truck passed, and I shouted, telling everyone to run away,” said Chen Kun, an official from the China Railway Chengdu Group. “The rocks and mud fell within two or three seconds ... while we were running, we could feel rocks chasing us,” Chen told China Daily.
DENMARK
Danes baffled by Trump
About two weeks before US President Donald Trump heads to Copenhagen for his first state visit there, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has asked his White House counsel to explore the idea of purchasing Greenland, which forms a key part of Denmark. The report has left Danes bewildered. Trump’s idea “must be an April Fool’s Day joke,” albeit out of season, tweeted Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who was prime minister until June and now heads the opposition. Another prominent opposition member said the report indicates that Trump is “insane.”
UNITED STATES
Ohio shooter was inebriated
The gunman who killed nine people outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, had cocaine, Xanax and alcohol in his system at the time of the shooting rampage, the county coroner said on Thursday. Dayton police announced the findings at a news conference and on Twitter and said that two victims of the massacre were struck by gunfire from law enforcement officers responding to the scene. “While it weighs heavily on us that our response caused harm to these victims, we are comforted that none of our rounds caused the death of any of these innocent people,” Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said on Twitter.
UNITED STATES
Truck drives into protesters
Rhode Island’s attorney general and state police launched investigations on Thursday after a truck drove through a group protesting federal immigration policies at a detention center, which has since placed an employee on leave. At least two people were injured, one seriously, on Wednesday night outside the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, which is used by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Jewish youth movement Never Again Action said that Jerry Belair, 64, of Warren, suffered a broken leg and internal bleeding. It did not identify the other person.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove