BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AP) — Six more bodies of Rohingya refugees have been found at sea off Indonesia after a boat with more than 150 people aboard capsized last week, local authorities said Monday.
The bodies of the six women were found off the coast of Aceh province, search and rescue officials said in a statement. Five bodies were found over the weekend.
The United Nations refugee agency confirmed with survivors that the women had been on their boat, staff member Faisal Rahman said.
The agency has said the boat carrying Rohingya Muslims left a refugee camp in Bangladesh but capsized on Wednesday. Fishermen and search and rescue workers rescued 75 people on Thursday after they huddled overnight on the boat’s overturned hull.
U.N. agencies on Friday said at least 70 were feared missing or dead.
About 1 million of the predominately Muslim Rohingya live in Bangladesh as refugees from Myanmar. They include about 740,000 who fled a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in 2017 by Myanmar’s security forces, who were accused of committing mass rapes and killings.
The Rohingya minority in Myanmar faces widespread discrimination. Most are denied citizenship.
Indonesia, like Thailand and Malaysia, is not a signatory to the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention and is not obligated to accept them. However, the country generally provides temporary shelter to refugees in distress.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Multiple explosions were heard in Kyiv on Monday morning as a Russian attack hit the Ukrainian capital for the third time in five days, part of an apparent escalation of aerial bombardment of cities by the Kremlin’s forces as the war stretches into its third year with the front line largely stationary.
City authorities said a residential building was damaged in one district of the city. Debris from interceptions fell on various districts of the city during the daylight attack.
Kyiv Mayor Vitalii Klitschko said two women were injured.
Emergency services were on their way to the sites, officials said. Further details were not immediately available.
The attack came three days after a concert hall attack in Russia that killed more than 130 people.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to tie the attack to Ukraine, even though an affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility.
Putin could use the Moscow attack to shore up support for the war and as a pretext to escalate attacks on Ukraine, analysts said.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
A man in a shallow 12-foot fishing boat that ended up taking on water was found alive over the weekend after having spent nearly two days on the ocean off Florida, officials said.
Charles Gregory, 25, was brought ashore Saturday near St. Augustine and checked out by medical personnel, who found nothing concerning, the Coast Guard said in a statement.
Gregory offered a shaka, or “hang loose” hand sign, to a news crew as he was wheeled on a stretcher along a dock.
The Coast Guard found Charles Gregory off St. Augustine, Fla., on Saturday.Coast Guard District 7
The Coast Guard said the man had launched from Lighthouse Park Boat Ramp in St. Augustine on Thursday. His father, Raymond Gregory, told NBC affiliate WTLV of Jacksonville that his son was at sea for 38 hours.
“There’s a God up there,” he said as his son arrived at Vilano Beach Fishing Pier in St. Augustine.
The station reported that Charles Gregory had cracked lips. The effect of the sun on his unprotected skin was apparent as he arrived by Coast Guard boat at the fishing pier.
Officials said his flat-bottom jon boat, designed for fishing and waterfowl hunting in calm waters like lakes and bays, was swept to sea after its launch.
“Not the kind of vessel you want to be on in an offshore environment,” said Nick Barrow, the Coast Guard’s Jacksonville-area rescue coordinator, told WTLV.
Coast Guard Petty Officer First Class Lecongie Wortherly said the boat capsized after it was swept to sea, dumping Gregory’s phone and safety gear into the vast Atlantic and disabling its small motor.
“He lost all his survivor equipment,” he told WTLV.
EMS technicians prepare to transfer Charles Gregory to a hospital in Augustine, Fla., on Saturday.Coast Guard Station Mayport
Gregory righted his watercraft, but he was ultimately faced with its partial submergence, leaving him vulnerable to sharks and other marine life, Wortherly said.
The search included an HC-130 Hercules airplane crew, a Jayhawk helicopter crew and rescuers on three Coast Guard boats, the Coast Guard said. But as the mission wore on into Saturday, hope was harder to grasp.
“The odds were starting to be against us in this case, despite all of our search effort,” Barrow said.
A concentrated effort by the HC-130 crew to cover as much of the ocean as possible, documented by a map showing neat, long lines and tight turns over the sea, resulted in success.
Gregory was found sitting in the low-riding boat 12 miles offshore, according to Coast Guard statements and video. He waved to acknowledge his saviors.
Raymond Gregory faulted himself for briefly losing hope.
“Don’t give up on the big guy,” he said, referring to God.
Dennis Romero
Dennis Romero is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.
Man rescued after being adrift at sea for nearly 2 days – CBS News
Watch CBS News
The Coast Guard rescued 25-year-old Charles Gregory, who spent around 35 hours adrift at sea off the coast of St. Augustine, Florida, after a wave damaged his fishing boat.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
Former President Donald Trump hit the campaign trail days after his latest indictment. – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Days after his latest federal indictment, former President Donald Trump hit the campaign trail in Alabama to continue his campaign for presidency, calling the indictments a badge of honor. Trump scored the backing of the entire Republican U.S. House delegation in this deep south state. Christina Ruffini is reporting from Washington, D.C.
Be the first to know
Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A man rammed a car onto a sidewalk Thursday in the South Korean city of Seongnam, then stepped out of the vehicle and began stabbing people at a shopping mall, leaving at least 14 people wounded.
Just hours after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Friday called for “ultra-strong” law enforcement measures in response to that attack, police found themselves chasing the suspect in another stabbing incident at a high school in Daejeon city.
Cho Byeong-tae, an official at the Daejeon metropolitan police department, said the attack at Songchon High School left at least one teacher hurt. He did not identify the victim or provide details about the victim’s health.
At least five people were hurt by the car and nine others were stabbed during Thursday’s attack in Seongnam that occurred in a crowded leisure district near a subway, according to Yoon Sung-hyun, an official from the southern Gyeonggi provincial police department.
Authorities arrested a 22-year-old suspect at the scene and were questioning him. Police did not identify the man or offer any immediate information about a potential motive.
According to Park Gyeong-won, an official at Gyeonggi’s Bundang district police station, the suspect during police interviews talked incoherently and said he was being stalked by an unspecified source. The suspect’s family told police he had a history of mental illness.
While the suspect had purchased the two knives he used in the stabbings from a different shopping mall on Wednesday, there isn’t clear evidence he planned the attacks in advance, Park said. The attack was South Korea’s second mass stabbing attack in a month, Last month, a knife-wielding man stabbed at least four pedestrians on a street in the capital, Seoul, killing one person.
Yoon called for closer monitoring of social media to detect threats, deploying more law enforcement officers for prevention and equipping them with better suppression gear, according to Seoul’s presidential office.
An official at Gyeonggi’s provincial fire department, Ha Dong-geun, said at least two of those who were wounded after the suspect drove the car onto the sidewalk were hospitalized in critical condition. Among the nine who were stabbed, eight were being treated for injuries seen as serious.
Photos from the scene showed forensic units examining the halls of the AK Plaza, where the stabbings took place. A white Kia hatchback with a broken front window and ruptured front tire could be seen on a sidewalk near the subway station.
South Korea’s Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper published a video on its website that it said was sent by a witness. The footage showed a man wearing sunglasses and a black hoodie walking up the mall’s escalator with an object in his hand.
A witness named Hwang Hee-woon told YTN television that he “heard a sound from the first floor that seemed like a scream, so customers and shop workers were gathering on the rails of the second-floor near the escalator to see what was happening below.”
“Suddenly, someone told us the person who committed the crime was coming up to the second floor, so we ran away in panic,” he said. He ended up hiding inside a refrigerated storage room with some mall employees.
The National Police Agency held an online meeting Thursday with regional police chiefs to discuss ways to deal with stabbings and other attacks against random targets. Officials discussed increasing nighttime patrols in leisure districts and other crowded areas and strengthening security camera surveillance, according to the agency.
(Bloomberg) — Two days is all President Xi Jinping has spent outside his country this year, as mounting domestic problems from a faltering economy to rare political scandals demand the Chinese leader’s attention at home.
Most Read from Bloomberg
Xi’s border hop to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin in March has been his sole trip abroad, representing the shortest amount of time he’s spent overseas in the first half of a year since taking power, excluding the pandemic.
That’s a major shift from his pre-Covid schedule, when Xi traveled more often and for longer than his US counterpart. The Chinese leader made an average of 14 overseas trips annually between 2013 and 2019, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of government readouts of Xi’s diplomatic meetings.
By comparison, US President Donald Trump averaged 12 during his time in office, according to data compiled by the Eurasia Group.
Now, Xi is making foreign dignitaries come to him. He’s met representatives from 36 nations including France, Eritrea and the US in Beijing so far this year. Before the pandemic, Xi hosted an average of 48 dignitaries annually in the same period, meaning his overall in-person dialogue is in decline.
And, unlike in the pandemic, he’s not supplementing meetings with video calls: The Chinese leader has had just one this year with the Czech Republic.
His reduction in face-time with global leaders could handicap Beijing’s ability to compete with Washington for global influence. That comes at a time when international perceptions of China are souring over its foreign policy, according to a survey released last month by the Pew Research Center.
Wen-Ti Sung, non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, said it could be that Xi has more pressing priorities right now than diplomacy. China’s economy is fending off deflation, his protege Foreign Minister Qin Gang has been removed and he’s ousted top leaders of the nation’s nuclear missile force amid rumors of a corruption probe.
“China simply has more urgent domestic priorities,” said Sung, noting that Xi’s centralization of power means his presence is increasingly required to deal with such problems. “As the opportunity cost of his absence rises, Xi will naturally become even more selective about going on extended visits abroad and he will go abroad less frequently.”
Xi was expected to resume a busy global schedule once pandemic controls that kept him inside China for nearly 1,000 days — the longest Covid isolation of any Group of Twenty leader — were lifted at the beginning of this year.
By the end of 2022, he’d already started traveling to countries including Uzbekistan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, even though China’s borders remained closed. Since then, however, he’s barely set foot outside his nation.
Scheduling could be partly to blame. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a two-day Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting by video in July, whereas last year’s summit saw Xi travel to Kazakhstan — his first trip outside China since January 2020.
Other major international summits, such as the G-20 and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, fall in the second half of this year.
The Chinese leader is expected to attend a summit of emerging economy leaders in Johannesburg this month. While Putin will participate in that event virtually, to excuse South Africa from having to execute an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for him, Modi has confirmed his in-person presence.
The White House’s reported plan to blacklist Hong Kong’s John Lee from the APEC leaders’ summit in San Francisco this November, however, could deter Xi from attending. Lee is sanctioned for his role in diminishing Hong Kong’s autonomy under a security law imposed by Xi. The Chinese leader’s absence would remove an opportunity for his first state visit to the US since Joe Biden became president in 2021.
China’s worsening global image has made it harder for democratic leaders to host Xi, according to Neil Thomas, a fellow for Chinese politics at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. Xi’s handling of the pandemic, alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang and refusal to condemn Putin’s war in Ukraine have all damaged ties with the West.
“Elected leaders in the West are more likely to attract criticism than win praise for meeting with Xi,” he added. “It’s bad politically to meet with Xi.”
Before the pandemic, European guests accounted for at least 14% of Xi’s annual visiting delegations, hitting 20% in 2019. This year, that figure is at just 8%.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is highly unlikely to travel to China before the UK’s next general election, Bloomberg News reported in June, as he faces increasingly skeptical views of China at home.
Xi’s next major opportunity to host a group of world leaders will come in October at the Belt and Road Initiative summit. That event attracted nearly 39 heads of states in 2019, 10 more than the first summit in 2017.
But it’s still unclear who will attend. European nations including France, Germany, Greece and the Czech Republic plan to the forum, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. Italy, the only Group of Seven nation to have signed on to the pact, is planning to exit the controversial agreement.
While Xi called for “meticulous efforts” to prepare for the forum last month, he’s unlikely to pay too much attention to the guest list.
“The priority of his third term is security and securing his ruling internally,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore. “Xi’s probably quite confident about his status as world No. 2, so he’d expect others to come to China to visit him.”
–With assistance from Jill Disis.
(Updates with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance of BRICS summit in 13th paragraph.)
Lizzo broke her silence Thursday morning saying she is “hurt” and “not the villain” after NBC News reported that three of her former dancers accused her of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment in a lawsuit this week.
“These last few days have been gut wrenchingly difficult and overwhelmingly disappointing. My work ethic, morals and respectfulness have been questioned. My character has been criticized,” the 35-year-old singer shared on Instagram.
“Usually I choose not to respond to false allegations but these are as unbelievable as they sound and too outrageous to not be addressed,” she added.
She dismissed the allegations in the lawsuit calling the accounts “sensationalized stories” and said the former employees “have already publicly admitted that they were told their behavior on tour was inappropriate and unprofessional.”
Lizzo stated in creating her music and performances, “sometimes I have to make hard decisions but it’s never my intention to make anyone feel uncomfortable or like they aren’t valued as an important part of the team.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Iran has announced that Wednesday and Thursday will be public holidays because of “unprecedented heat” and told the elderly and people with health conditions to stay indoors, Iranian state media reported.
Many cities in southern Iran have already suffered from days of exceptional heat.
State media reported temperatures had this week exceeded 51 degrees Celsius (123 Fahrenheit) in the southern city of Ahvaz.
Government spokesman Ali Bahadori-Jahromi was quoted by state media as saying Wednesday and Thursday would be holidays, while the health ministry said hospitals would be on high alert.
Temperatures are expected to be 39 degrees Celsius (102.2) in Tehran on Wednesday.
Heatwaves have affected large parts of the globe in recent weeks. Scientists have linked them to human-induced climate change.
