World News

BEIJING, June 30 (Reuters) – Li Changguan has been appointed party chief of China’s civil affairs ministry, the ministry’s website showed on Tuesday.

• The profile of Lu Zhiyuan, who had been the minister as well as the party chief of the ministry since late 2023, has been removed from its website.

• Lu’s removal from the posts have not been previously announced.

• The newly appointed party chief, Li, has been a vice minister at the ministry since 2024.

(Reporting by Xiuhao Chen and Ryan Woo; Editing by Sharon Singleton)

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KINSHASA, Congo (AP) — Opposition and civil society groups are protesting Congo’s new ban on public demonstrations and mass gatherings in the capital and other areas far from the country’s deadly Ebola outbreak, alleging that the decision aims to limit freedom of speech.

The decision announced over the weekend came as the outbreak of a type of Ebola with no approved treatment or vaccine continues to grow, with 1,307 people infected and 377 dead across three provinces in eastern Congo. It could be the worst Ebola outbreak yet.

Congo’s ministry of interior on Saturday said gatherings and demonstrations were forbidden in the provinces of Kinshasa, Tshopo, Haut-Uele and Bas-Uele as fears grow about the outbreak spilling into new areas. None of the provinces have any confirmed cases.

Separately, the mayor of ​Goma, eastern Congo’s largest city and now under the control of the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group, also banned public gatherings and demonstrations, including celebrations linked to sport events, on Monday. Congo is in its first World Cup in over half a century.

Congo’s political opposition has denounced the ban as unconstitutional. Prince Epenge, the spokesperson for the Lamuka coalition, has said the ban aims to prevent a planned demonstration in the capital, Kinshasa, early next month. The protest is against proposed constitutional changes that would allow Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi to run for a third term.

Civil society organizations also condemned the ban in a statement on Monday, citing freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

In a televised address on Monday evening, Tshisekedi announced a $319 million response plan to the Ebola outbreak, and called on people to respect health guidelines, report suspected cases and not give in to misinformation. He did not directly address the bans.

“Ebola is neither a rumor nor a source of shame,” Tshisekedi said. “It is a health emergency that demands responsibility, solidarity, and truth.”

Health workers have reported some skepticism and attacks over Ebola from residents in the affected areas of Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu provinces.

Cases also have been confirmed in neighboring Uganda, as well as one in France in a doctor who returned from Congo.

The United Nations ​warned in a report on Tuesday that if the virus spreads into other neighboring countries including Rwanda and Angola, it could cost Africa up to $3.6 billion and result in 328,000 job losses.

More than a month into the outbreak, officials believe it continues to outpace response efforts and no one knows its true scale. They are yet to identify patient zero and struggle to trace contact cases.

The World Health Organization has warned that violence from rebels in eastern Congo is complicating the response to the outbreak. In Ituri, attacks by the Islamic State group-backed Allied Democratic Force have cut off access to many villages and forced people to flee their homes, adding to already overcrowded camps of people displaced by years of conflict.

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Pronczuk reported from Dakar, Senegal. Associated Press writer Janvier Barhahiga in Bukavu, Congo, contributed to this report.

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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — At Kenya ’s largest mental health referral hospital, male patients encounter a different kind of therapy: a personal grooming session provided by two visiting barbers.

As their equipment is unpacked, excitement spreads. Patients eagerly take turns sitting in the barber’s chair, looking forward to a haircut.

Healthcare workers say personal grooming is an important aspect of recovery, as one sign of mental illness can be a loss of interest in personal hygiene and self-care.

Kenya has limited data on the prevalence of mental illness. According to the government’s 2015 Mental Health Policy, an estimated 25% of outpatients and 40% of inpatients in all health facilities experience mental health conditions.

Mental health experts say depression and anxiety are among the most common conditions, while substance use disorders remain a major challenge, particularly among men.

June is observed as Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month. Francis Kabugua, a nursing officer at Mathari National Teaching and Referral Hospital in Nairobi, is encouraging men to speak openly about their struggles instead of turning to alcohol and other substances in an attempt to cope.

“Among the things that you may see a person with depressive disorders is segregating themselves or separating themselves from the members of the family. They start also not providing for the family,” he said.

Sheila Lugaliki founded Uniquely Gifted, a community-based organization that offers the free grooming services. She said her own experience as a patient in a psychiatric ward inspired her to establish the monthly initiative.

She said she hopes the act of providing haircuts restores dignity, boosts confidence and reminds patients that they are valued as opposed to them feeling “neglected.”

“You find someone has been admitted for six months and yet no one has groomed their hair. How they look really does not reflect how they are feeling,” she said.

Psychiatric nurse Titus Enko agreed, saying that personal grooming enhances patients’ self-esteem and contributes to their overall recovery and well-being.

“More often we only think about medication, psychotherapy, and we tend to overlook the other part, which is the personal grooming. Many times, someone neglects themselves and they start not taking a shower or they don’t dress well. And personal grooming is an indication that someone is either doing good or they’re not doing okay,” he said.

As the barbers trimmed patients’ beards, one man summed up the experience in a single word. He said he felt “alive.”

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By Lucien Libert and Lauren Bacquie

PARIS, June 30 (Reuters) – Undertaker Zouhaier Hertelli is receiving panicked calls from families, retirement homes, and even the police desperately trying to find space in refrigerated mortuary storage for people who died during the heatwave that has been gripping France.

There were at least 1,000 excess deaths from last Wednesday to Sunday, France’s public health agency said, adding that the numbers were not final and were bound to increase.

Hertelli’s funeral home in Orly, near Paris, has room to store 32 bodies in its cold storage room and all are occupied, Hertelli said, pointing to the compartments, each with a label with the name of the deceased, the date at which the body arrived at the funeral home and the temperature at which they are stored ahead of a burial or cremation.

“We’re completely full,” he said. “The rush really started on Wednesday, Thursday and the whole weekend, it was non-stop. At the weekend I received 150 calls, and had to say no to the 150 bodies.”

Though temperatures have started to drop from record-high levels, they are still around 30 degrees Celsius in much of the country and are expected to increase again at the weekend, national weather forecaster Meteo-France said, adding that temperatures were set to remain high next week.

“Families are calling us, nursing homes are calling us, police stations are calling us, municipalities are calling us. We’re being contacted by all of our colleagues in the funeral profession,” Hertelli said.

‘STATE OF COMPLETE PANIC’

“They’re at their wits’ end, they’re in a state of complete panic. Imagine your father’s or mother’s body has begun to decompose and we’re unable to take care of it, and we have no solution to offer them.”

Hertelli has asked local authorities permission to use a refrigerated trailer to store more bodies, warning that burials and cremations were often delayed due to the higher-than-usual number of deaths, meaning that some bodies will have to stay in cold storage units longer than usual.

“Today, if you call a crematorium, the waiting time alone is already pushing appointments out to July 10,” he said.

France’s public health authority and doctors have pointed to an increase in the number of deaths in nursing homes but also of elderly people at home. They have appealed to people to keep an eye on elderly, isolated relatives and neighbours.

SOS Medecins doctor Sebastien Chopin said he feared the impact of a possible new heatwave next week on people who have already been weakened by the recent high temperatures.

He and his colleagues in Melun, south of Paris, signed eight death certificates in people’s homes over four days at the height of the heatwave last week, four times as many as over the same four days last year.

(Writing by Ingrid MelanderEditing by Gareth Jones)

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LAHORE, Pakistan (AP) — A roof collapse at a tutoring center under construction in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore on Tuesday killed at least 14 schoolchildren, police and rescue officials said.

Eight other children were also injured and were being treated at a hospital, senior police official Faisal Kamran said, adding that the owner of the tutoring center and another person have been arrested.

Kamran said rescuers were continuing to search through the rubble after receiving reports that more children could be trapped beneath the debris. He said the tutoring center was housed in an aging building and that the roof of an unfinished second floor apparently collapsed because of poor-quality construction.

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari expressed grief over the collapse of the roof of an evening school building in Lahore. In a statement, he offered condolences to the families of the victims, prayed for the speedy recovery of those injured, and said effective safety measures were needed to prevent similar tragedies.

Building collapses are common in Pakistan, where construction standards are often poorly enforced. Many structures are built with substandard materials, and safety regulations are frequently ignored to reduce costs.

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PARIS (AP) — A blast from an explosive device has seriously injured three people at a residential building in Monaco, and the attacker fled to France, local authorities said. French and Ukrainian media reported that a Ukrainian magnate and his family were those injured.

The unusual attack Monday night stunned the elite principality on the Mediterranean Coast. Monaco’s leader Prince Albert II called it ‘’an odious act” and said all the country’s services were mobilized to ensure security.

French and Monaco authorities are searching for the attacker, whose motive is under investigation, Monaco’s most senior government official, Minister of State Christophe Mirmand, told reporters.

The explosion occurred around 9 p.m. at the entryway of a residence near the French border, injuring two adults and a child who were taken to hospitals in France, he said.

The suspect crossed the border into France on foot, and was identified via video surveillance in Monaco and the neighboring French town of Beausoleil, Mirmand said.

A French national police official said French police are searching for the suspect and supporting the investigation, but would not elaborate.

French broadcaster BFM and Ukrainian news site Ukrainska Pravda identified one of the injured as Ukrainian construction tycoon Vadym Iermolaiev. Ukrainska Pravda said he was targeted by Ukrainian sanctions in 2023 for ties to Russia.

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June 29 (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy mocked Russia’s military drive on Monday, saying the Kremlin over the course of more than four years had set and put off 15 deadlines to capture the eastern Donbas region.

Zelenskiy’s comments amounted to a response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rejection a day earlier of what the Kremlin leader said was a Ukrainian proposal to abandon long-range strikes and scale down the fighting.

He said Putin’s comments showed he was out of touch with the feelings of Russians who faced queues at petrol stations, linked to a Ukrainian campaign of strikes on oil industry targets.

“Even an oil-producing state, a ‘gas station’ as Russia has often been called, is now facing fuel shortages,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.

“This is a direct consequence of the war. One of many consequences. It is also one example of how Ukraine responds — with precision, not through terrorism.”

Zelenskiy explained at considerable length what he said had been 15 deadlines set — and later put back — by the Kremlin over the course of four years to capture four regions in eastern Ukraine — Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

“Russia’s political leadership remains obsessed with Donbas,” he said. “If Russia does not end the war, it will have to postpone that deadline once again.”

In the weeks following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces initially tried to advance on the capital Kyiv, but when they failed to complete that advance they withdrew and focused efforts on capturing Donbas.

Russia has captured all of the Luhansk region and large chunks of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Although Moscow’s forces are slowly moving westward through Donetsk region, Ukrainian officials say the advance has slowed considerably while Ukraine steps up its campaign of medium and long-range drone strikes.

In a televised interview on Sunday, Putin said Russian forces would press ahead with their battlefield aim of fully capturing the four Ukrainian regions.

He acknowledged that Russians were subject to fuel shortages but rejected what he said was a new Ukrainian proposal to rein in hostilities as a ploy to relieve pressure on Kyiv’s military.

Zelenskiy, who this month wrote an open letter to Putin calling for a one-on-one meeting, made no comment on what the Russian president portrayed as a new proposal.

Zelenskiy said Ukraine had already put forward proposals to move towards an end of the war “and Russia rejects them every time”.

He said Russians who had yet to be subject to mobilisation “and are currently arguing in fuel queues should think carefully about what awaits them”.

(Reporting by Ron Popeski and Oleksandr Kozhukhar; Editing by Sonali Paul)

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PARIS, June 29 (Reuters) – Police in Monaco and neigbouring France were hunting for a man suspected of detonating a makeshift bomb in the centre of the Mediterranean principality on Monday and wounding several people, a local official said.

Two of the victims suffered life-threatening injuries, Christophe Mirmand, minister of state of Monaco, told BFM TV.

French emergency services deployed to the scene to provide back up and a joint police operation was underway to track down the fugitive, France’s interior ministry said.

“No event of this nature has ever happened in the Principality before,” Mirmand told the French news channel.

The blast occurred shortly before 9 p.m. (1900 GMT) in the centre of Monaco, a tax-free microstate on the French Riviera known as a haven for billionaires and their luxury yachts.

French newspaper Le Figaro said video surveillance images showed a man dropping a backpack at the entrance of a residential building shortly before the explosion. 

BFM TV described the explosive device as a “parcel bomb”, citing the principality’s prosecutor general.

Eric Ciotti, the right-wing mayor of nearby Nice, across the border in France, said on X: “The attack committed this evening is a tragedy for Monaco.”

(Reporting by Layli Foroudi; Editing by Richard Lough and Sanjeev Miglani)

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SRINAGAR, India (AP) — Every morning, long, narrow wooden boats called shikaras move elegantly across expansive Dal Lake in a postcard-perfect scene framed by the Himalayan mountains.

But all is not perfect in one of South Asia’s best-known lakes. Pollution from local buildings, invasive plant species that threaten biodiversity and declining water levels, in part due to climate-driven heat, are threatening the long-term existence of Dal Lake and hundreds of other lakes in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

It takes constant effort by workers employed by the local government to keep Dal Lake’s weeds at bay, and they must take precautions to avoid skin irritation from the polluted water. Yet it could be worse for the lake, which is located in Kashmir’s most populous city, Srinagar. It’s one of the few lakes in the region to receive sustained restoration work.

“We are afraid to touch the water with bare hands. Whenever we need to clean something by hand, we wear gloves, because without them our hands quickly develop allergies,” Ghulam Rasool, a weed cleaner employed by the local government, said on a recent afternoon.

Rasool said that sometimes it feels impossible to keep the lake clean.

“Sewage drains flow directly into the lake, and water streams coming from the mountains are bringing waste such as diapers and other garbage,” he said.

A combination of climate-driven changes, pollution and unplanned development is accelerating a decline in Indian lakes, with consequences rippling from fragile ecosystems to fishing communities and the tourism economy.

An Indian government report last year found that of the region’s 697 natural lakes, 315 have disappeared and 203 have shrunk since 1967. Hundreds recorded in earlier decades have been reduced to shallow marshes, seasonal wetlands or, in some cases, replaced by farmland and other development.

Lakes in Kashmir have always been centers of activity, including Dal Lake’s famous floating markets where locals sell everything from vegetables to souvenirs. However, recent decades have seen the lakes’ boundaries shrink due to unpredictable rainfall, increased sediment from rivers and encroachment by farmland and houses. Small islands of farmland or long wooden bridges leading to illegal homes are becoming an increasingly common sight.

Farmland and homes creeping into what was once lake land is apparent in an aerial view of Dal Lake. Cattle graze freely on newly formed farmland even as the traditional fishers try to make their daily quota nearby.

Untreated sewage flowing into the lakes results in the growth of weeds, which feed off nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients in the waste. Plastics and other garbage dirty the lake. Dozens of weed cleaners try to clear Dal Lake every day, and small mounds of cleared weeds can be seen at various spots across the lake. Excavators and other heavy machinery are also used to pull weeds and garbage from the lake.

While acknowledging that more funds and work are needed, local government officials said they are trying their best. A government-run lake authority started in 1997 includes civil engineers, scientists, forest officials and local police officials.

While more than 75% of Srinagar’s population is connected to sewage treatment systems, sewage from the unconnected houses is a major contributor to lake pollution, said Muzamil Ahmad Rafiqui, superintending engineer for Kashmir’s Lake Conservation and Management Authority.

Some of the world’s warmest years have meant that the Himalayan region is warming faster than the global average. Earlier snowmelt, reduced snowfall and more intense rainfall events are disrupting the timing and volume of water that feeds rivers and lakes.

Sher Muhammad, a glaciologist with the Kathmandu-headquartered International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, said the shifting, unpredictable patterns mean lakes now face periods of sudden inflow followed by prolonged stress during drier months.

The melting of the region’s glaciers has also increased the amount of sediment carried downstream into the lakes. While the melting of glaciers can spur an initial boost in water flow, over time it will reduce the natural water storage that sustains rivers and lakes during dry periods, experts said.

Climate change has been devastating for Kashmir, said Irfan Rashid, an environmental scientist at the Srinagar-based University of Kashmir. “It has impacted every sector of our economy,” he said. Rashid said hydropower-generating capacity, tourism and highly valued apple and saffron farms have all been hit by erratic, extreme weather in recent years.

Fishers at Wular Lake, about 65 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Srinagar, said the lake has become shallower, its surface fragmented by new patches of vegetation. Parts of its catchment area have been taken over by tree plantations. Navigation has become harder, and fewer fish remain.

Abdul Rasheed, a 45-year-old fisherman, said he used to earn around 1,000 rupees ($11) a day. Now it’s only 100 to 200 rupees ($1 to $2) for an entire night of fishing.

“There are a lot of changes since my childhood,” said Rasheed.

As is the case with many other lakes in Kashmir, agricultural and residential development has encroached on the lake, while untreated sewage and farm runoff have hurt its water quality. Indeed, the surface in several areas is a green gunk. The most recent detailed study of Wular Lake, conducted by the conservation group Wetlands International in 2007, found that the lake had shrunk by 45% over the preceding century. The report also emphasized that the degradation of the lake increases flood risks in the Kashmir valley because it was traditionally the biggest buffer for overflows from the Jhelum River.

Many fishers at Wular Lake said they don’t believe future generations will be able to live off fishing.

Bashir Ahmed, a 55-year-old who has fished in the lake for decades, said in the past a young person with no fishing experience could return home with 4 kilograms (nearly 9 pounds) of fish.

“Now even a skilled fisherman comes home with no more than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds),” he said.

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Arasu reported from Bengaluru, India, and can be followed on X at @sibi123. Follow Dar Yasin on Instagram at @daryasinap

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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By Kanishka Singh

WASHINGTON, June 29 (Reuters) – A Maryland man was sentenced by a judge on Monday to 15 months in federal prison for making online threats, particularly toward Black and Muslim communities, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Here are some details:

• U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson sentenced Raymond Pumphrey, 47, to 15 months, followed by three years of supervised release, the DOJ said in a statement.

• According to his guilty plea, Pumphrey made a series of threatening posts on YouTube and other social media sites to spread hateful rhetoric, especially against Black and Muslim communities, the DOJ said.

• He advocated for and threatened to participate in the killing of Black people in many large U.S. cities, according to the DOJ.

• He further threatened to kill multiple politicians and members of their families, it added.

• Rights advocates have over the years warned about online racism against Black Americans due to factors like white supremacy and gaps in online content moderation.

• They have also noted rising Islamophobia over the years, attributing it to the September 11, 2001 attacks; and more recently to anti-immigration policies, white supremacy and the fallout of Israel’s war ​in Gaza.

• U.S. political experts have separately warned about political violence amid rising polarization in the country.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)

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