NEPAL
Plane crash leaves 18 dead
A passenger plane yesterday crashed on takeoff at about 11:15am in Kathmandu, with the pilot rescued from the flaming wreckage, but all 18 others aboard killed, police said. The Saurya Airlines flight was carrying two crew and 17 of the company’s staff members, police spokesman Dan Bahadur Karki said. “The pilot has been rescued and is being treated,” he said. “Eighteen bodies have been recovered, including one foreigner.” The flight was being conducted for either technical or maintenance purposes, Gyanendra Bhul of the Civil Aviation Authority said, without giving further details.
EUROPEAN UNION
Global heat record broken
Monday was the hottest day on record globally, inching past Sunday, which had just taken the title, preliminary data from a EU monitoring agency showed. The global average surface air temperature rose to 17.15°C — 0.06°C higher than Sunday’s marginal record according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which has been tracking such patterns since 1940. The record had last been set for four consecutive days in a row in early July last year.
UNITED STATES
Secret Service boss quits
The director of the Secret Service on Tuesday resigned in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump. “I take full responsibility for the security lapse,” Kimberly Cheatle, who had served as director since August 2022, said an e-mail to staff. Cheatle’s resignation came a day after she appeared before a congressional committee and was berated for hours by Democrats and Republicans for the security failures. She called the attempt on Trump’s life the Secret Service’s “most significant operational failure” in decades.
STEPPING UP: Diminished US polar science presence mean opportunities for the UK and other countries, although China or Russia might also fill that gap, a researcher said The UK’s flagship polar research vessel is to head to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the US withdraws. The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned British naturalist, would aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker — boasting a helipad, and various laboratories and gadgetry — is pivotal to the UK’s efforts to assess climate change’s impact there. “The saying goes
Floods on Sunday trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles. National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180mm of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro River delta. Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped “inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors.” Santa Barbara Mayor Josep Lluis
Police in China detained dozens of pastors of one of its largest underground churches over the weekend, a church spokesperson and relatives said, in the biggest crackdown on Christians since 2018. The detentions, which come amid renewed China-US tensions after Beijing dramatically expanded rare earth export controls last week, drew condemnation from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called for the immediate release of the pastors. Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), founder of Zion Church, an unofficial “house church” not sanctioned by the Chinese government, was detained at his home in the southern city of Beihai on Friday evening, said
SANCTIONS: Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner called on the EU to tighten sanctions against Rwanda during an event in Brussels The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has accused the EU of “an obvious double standard” for maintaining a minerals deal with Rwanda to supply Europe’s high-tech industries when it deployed a far-wider sanctions regime in response to the war in Ukraine. Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner urged the EU to levy much stronger sanctions against Rwanda, which has fueled the conflict in the eastern DR Congo, describing the bloc’s response to breaches of the DR Congo’s territory as “very timid.” Referencing the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she said: “It is an obvious double standard
RSS