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May 18—Eugene Hiltibran was 19 when he was killed in the Korean War during a battle near the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.

The remains of the Army corporal, who grew up in Cable, a small town outside Urbana, were not directly recovered following the 17-day battle in 1950 that involved heavy artillery.

But thanks to painstaking DNA analysis, Hiltibran was identified through human remains turned over to the United States in 2018 by the North Korea government and he will be interred on Memorial Day weekend in Champaign County.

Hiltibran, a member of Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, is the second soldier from this area to be identified recently by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Hawaii.

US Army Pfc. Chauncey (William) J. Sharp, of Osborn — one of two villages that formed Fairborn in 1950, with Fairfield, was identified and his remains will be interred Saturday at Dayton National Cemetery.

More than 7,500 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War.

In July 2018, North Korea turned over 55 boxes they said contained the remains of American service members killed during the Korean War. The remains arrived days later at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, for identification, according to a release from the DPAA.

Hiltibran was accounted for by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency April 20, 2020 after his remains identified using circumstantial evidence, as well as, anthropological and mitochondrial DNA analysis, the DPPA said.

Hiltibran’s name is recorded on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, along with others who are still missing from the Korean War. A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for, the DPAA said.

Hiltibran will be laid to rest on May 28 at Oak Dale Cemetery in Champaign County. Funeral services will be performed by Walter and Lewis Funeral Home in Urbana at 10 am at Brownridge Hall, home of Urbana’s post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The service will include the passing of awards along to living relatives of Hiltibran in his honor.

“We want to do as much as we can,” said local VFW Spriggs-Wing Post quartermaster Fred Williams.

Burial at Oak Dale Cemetery will follow the funeral, according to funeral director Cassie Wheeler. Visitation for the Champaign County man will be held the day before from 4-7 pm at the funeral home.

Boeing 737-800 plunged inexplicably from its cruising altitude into the ground in March, killing all 132 people on board.

US investigators believe someone in the cockpit deliberately crashed a China Eastern flight that suddenly plunged to the ground in southern China in March, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

The Boeing 737-800 was on its way from Kunming to Guangzhou on March 21 when it dropped from its cruising altitude of 29,000 feet into a mountainside, killing all 132 people on board. It was mainland China’s worst aviation disaster in nearly 30 years.

The flight data recorders recovered from the crash site were sent to the United States for analysis and show that someone – possibly a pilot or someone who had forced their way into the cockpit – input orders to send the aircraft into a nosedive.

“The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” a person familiar with the preliminary assessment by experts on the US National Transportation Safety Board told the Journal.

The pilots did not respond to repeated calls from air traffic controllers and nearby planes during the rapid descent, authorities have said. One source told the Reuters news agency that investigators were looking at whether the crash was a “voluntary” act.

Screenshots of the Wall Street Journal story appeared to have been censored on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, and messaging app Wechat on Wednesday morning.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China said on April 11, in response to internet rumors of a deliberate crash, that the speculation had “gravely misled the public” and “interfered with the accident investigation work”.

Boeing and the NTSB declined to comment to news agencies and referred inquiries to Chinese regulators. China Eastern did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

According to a report from Boeing, investigators found no evidence of “anything abnormal,” China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) said in April.

In a statement, the CAAC said staff had met safety requirements before takeoff, the plane was not carrying dangerous goods and did not appear to have run into bad weather, although the agency said a full investigation could take two or more years.

Deliberate crashes are exceptionally rare.

Experts noted the latest hypothesis left open whether the action stemmed from one pilot acting alone or was the result of a struggle or intrusion, but sources stressed nothing had been confirmed.

In March 2015, a Germanwings co-pilot deliberately flew an Airbus A320 into a French mountainside, killing all 150 on board.

World’s No 3 economy shrinks at an annualized rate of 1 percent in January-March from the previous quarter.

Japan’s economy shrank for the first time in two quarters in the initial three months of the year as COVID-19 curbs hit the service sector, and the Ukraine war and surging commodity prices created new headaches for consumers and businesses.

The decline presents a challenge to Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s drive to achieve growth and wealth distribution under his “new capitalism” agenda, stoking fears of stagflation – a mix of tepid growth and rising inflation.

The world’s third-largest economy shrank at an annualized rate of 1 percent in January-March from the previous quarter, gross domestic product (GDP) figures showed, versus a 1.8 percent contraction seen by economists. It translated into a quarterly drop of 0.2 percent, the Cabinet Office data showed, versus market forecasts for a 0.4 percent drop.

Private consumption, which makes up more than half of the economy, slightly fell, versus a 0.5 percent fall expected by economists, the data showed.

The weak reading may pressure Kishida to spend even more with upper house elections penciled in for July 10, following the 2.7 trillion yen ($20.86bn) in extra budget spending compiled on Tuesday.

Many analysts expect Japan’s economy to rebound in coming quarters, but the war in Ukraine and a slowdown in the Chinese economy dim the recovery prospects.

Despite easing coronavirus curbs, doubts remain about the V-shaped recovery, while surging energy and food prices boosted by the weak yen could cap domestic demand.

Japan’s export-reliant economy got little help from external demand, with net exports knocking 0.4 percentage point off GDP growth, as the weak yen and surging global commodity prices inflated imports.

That compared with a negative contribution of 0.3 percentage point seen by economists.

Capital spending rose 0.5 percent versus an expected 0.7 percent increase, following a 0.4 percent increase in the previous quarter.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Wednesday reported 232,880 new cases of fever and another six deaths as leader Kim Jong Un accused officials of “immaturity” and “slackness” in handling the escalating COVID-19 outbreak ravaging across the unvaccinated nation .

The country’s anti-virus headquarters said 62 people have died and more than 1.7 million have fallen ill amid a rapid spread of fever since late April. It said more than a million people recovered but at least 691,170 remain in quarantine.

Outside experts say most of the illnesses would be COVID-19, although North Korea has been able to confirm only a small number of COVID-19 cases since acknowledging an omicron outbreak last week, likely because of insufficient capabilities.

A failure to control the outbreak could have dire consequences in North Korea, considering its broken health care system and its rejection of internationally offered vaccines that has left a population of 26 million unimmunized.

The outbreak is almost certainly greater than the fever tally, considering the lack of tests and resources to monitor the sick, and there’s also suspicion that North Korea is underreporting deaths to soften the blow for Kim, who already was navigating the toughest moment of his decade in power. The pandemic has further damaged an economy already broken by mismanagement and US-led sanctions over Kim’s nuclear weapons and missiles development.

The North’s official Korean Central News Agency said Kim during a ruling party Politburo meeting on Tuesday criticized over their early pandemic response, which he said underscored “immaturity in the state capacity for coping with the crisis” and blamed the vulnerability on their “non- positive attitude, slackness and non-activity.”

He urged officials to strengthen virus controls at workplaces and make “redoubled efforts” to improve the supply of daily necessities and stabilize living conditions, the KCNA said Wednesday.

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Kim’s comments came days after he ripped officials over how they were handling the distribution of medicine released from state reserves and mobilized his army to help transport the supplies to pharmacies in capital Pyongyang, which were made open 24 hours to deal with the crisis.

Before acknowledging COVID-19 infections last Thursday, North Korea had insisted of a perfect record in keeping out the virus that had reached nearly ever corner of the world, a claim that was widely doubted. But its extremely strict border closure, large-scale quarantines and propaganda that stressed anti-virus controls as a matter of “national existence” may have staved off a huge outbreak until now.

It’s unclear whether the North’s admission of a COVID-19 outbreak communicates a willingness to accept outside help. Kim’s government had shunned millions of vaccine shots offered by the UN-backed COVAX distribution program, likely because of international monitoring requirements attached to them.

It has so far ignored rival South Korea’s offer to provide vaccines, medicine and health personnel, but experts say the North may be more willing to accept help from its main ally China. South Korea’s government said it couldn’t confirm media reports that North Korea flew multiple planes to bring back emergency supplies from China on Tuesday.

North Korean officials during Tuesday’s meeting continued to express confidence that the country could overcome the crisis on its own, with the Politburo members discussing ways for “continuously maintaining the good chance in the overall epidemic prevention front,” KCNA said.

While Kim was seen wearing masks for the first time following North Korea’s admission of COVID-19 infections last week, state media photos of Tuesday’s meeting showed Kim and Politburo members engaging in barefaced discussions, in a possible expression of confidence.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — With just two weeks left in a two-month cease-fire in Yemen, the UN envoy to the war-torn country said Tuesday that talks with the government and Houthi rebels are going on right now and he hopes the truce will be extended.

But Hans Grundberg was wary of making any prediction, saying that our agreement on an extension would depend on the talks that he and his office are having with the warring parties.

“During past six weeks we have seen these considerable positive impact on the daily lives of many Yemenis,” he told reporters after a closed briefing to the UN Security Council. “First, and most importantly, the truce is holding in military terms.”

The two-month truce is the first nationwide cease-fire in six years in Yemen’s civil war, which erupted in 2014. That year, the Iranian-backed Houthis seized the capital, Sanaa, and forced the internationally recognized government into exile. A Saudi-led coalition entered the war in early 2015 to try to restore the government to power.

The conflict created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world while becoming a regional proxy war in recent years. More than 150,000 people have been killed, including over 14,500 civilians.

Since the truce, Grundberg said, “fighting has sharply reduced with no aerial attacks emanating from Yemen across its borders and no confirmed airstrikes inside Yemen.”

“Front lines across Yemen have quietened down significantly, and there are reports of increasing humanitarian access, including in some frontline locations that had previously been extremely difficult to access,” he said during the virtual news conference.

“However, we continue to see concerning reports of continued fighting involving incidents of civil liability despite overall southern reduction,” the UN envoy said, singling out violence in southern Dhale province and the city of Taiz, which is partially held by forces loyal to the government and has been blocked by the Houthis for years.

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Among other welcome developments, Grundberg said, the first commercial flight in almost six years took off from Sanaa airport for Jordan’s capital, Amman, on Monday and another flight brought Yemenis back. A second flight to Amman is scheduled for Wednesday.

“This has brought relief to so many Yemenis who have waited too long to travel, many of them for pressing medical reasons, and to pursue business and educational opportunities, or to reunite with loved ones after years of separation,” Grundberg said. “We are working with all involved to ensure the regularization of flights to and from Sanaa airport for the duration of the truce and to find durable mechanisms to keep it open.”

He said the Yemeni government’s clearance of 11 fuel ships to enter the country’s main port, Hodeida, means more fuel deliveries than during the six months before the truce. Yemen is dependent on imported food and basic supplies, but he said that since the truce the fuel crisis that had threatened civilians’ access to basic goods and services in Sanaa and surrounding regions “largely subsided.”

Grundberg said a priority now is to implement the truce agreement’s commitment to open roads in Taiz and other areas of Yemen, which would greatly ease travel and improve daily life including going to work.

“We have gotten positive responses from the parties in order to move forward with that,” he said.

The government has appointed its delegation to a UN meeting on opening roads and Grundberg said as soon as the Houthis appoint their delegation the UN will organize the discussion in Amman.

“The promise of the truce to civilians was one of more security, better access to basic goods and services, and improved freedom of movement within, to and from Yemen,” Grundberg said. “Yemenis can’t afford to go back to the pre-truce state of perpetual military escalation and political stalemate.”

The UN special representative said he is not only working to extend the truce but to initiate talks on many issues so that the government, Houthis and other Yemenis can tackle critical issues and reach a political settlement to the war.

Prosecutors in the United States have charged the suspect in a deadly weekend shooting at a California church with one count of first-degree murder and five counts of attempted murder.

Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said on Tuesday that David Chou, 68, of Las Vegas faces an added charge for “lying in wait”, as well as four counts of possessing destructive devices with intent to kill or harm.

“We typically think of the person who hides in the bushes,” Spitzer said. “This case is about the person concealing themselves in plain view.”

Authorities have said Chou, a US citizen who grew up in Taiwan, was motivated by hatred of Taiwanese people when he opened fire during a Sunday luncheon for members of Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in the community of Laguna Woods.

The FBI has opened a federal hate crimes investigation.

If convicted by a jury, Chou would face either life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty, Spitzer said.

“While there’s very strong evidence right now that this was motivated by hate, we want to make sure we have put together all the evidence that confirms that theory in the case,” Spitzer said, when asked whether he would be filing a charge for a hate crime.

Authorities say Chou drove to Orange County on Saturday and the next day attended the lunch at Geneva Presbyterian Church, which the Taiwanese-American congregation used for events.

Though he knew no one there, he spent about an hour mingling with about 40 attendees and then executed his plot, authorities have said.

Chou had chained the doors and put superglue in the keyholes, authorities said. He had two 9mm handguns – legally purchased years ago in Las Vegas – and bags that contained four Molotov-cocktail-type incendiary devices and extra ammunition, among other things.

He began shooting, and in the ensuing chaos, a local physician, Dr John Cheng, 52, tackled Chou, allowing other parishioners to subdue him and tie him up with extension cords, authorities said.

Cheng died, and five other people were wounded – an 86-year-old woman as well as four men, ages 66, 75, 82 and 92 – the sheriff’s department said.

Authorities on Monday said two of the wounded were in good condition, two were in stable condition and the status of the fifth patient was undetermined.

Laguna Woods, where the shooting occurred, is a scenic coastal area whose population mainly consists of retirees and is near a gated community.

“That population in general created a vulnerable environment for him to carry out what I think was his ultimate goal, which was to execute in cold blood as many people in that room as possible,” Spitzer said.

Taiwan’s Central News Agency says it interviewed Louis M Huang, director general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles, who confirmed that Chou was born in Taiwan in 1953.

Chou’s family apparently was among many forcibly removed from mainland China to Taiwan sometime after 1948, according to Spitzer.

Tensions between China and Taiwan are at the highest in the decades, with Beijing stepping up its military manoeuvers by flying fighter jets near the self-governing island. China claims the island as its own.

Taiwan’s chief representative in the US, Bi-khim Hsiao, offered his condolences on Twitter.

Chinese Embassy Spokesperson Liu Pengyu told The Associated Press news agency via email that the Chinese government has “consistently condemned incidents of violence. We express our condolences to the victims and sincere sympathy to the bereaved families and the injured.”

Chou had ties to an organization opposed to Taiwan’s independence from China, according to Taiwanese media. Evidence of Chou’s hatred towards Taiwan was found in handwritten notes in his car, law enforcement officials have said.

Shocked and saddened by the fatal shooting at the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church in California. I join the families of the victims and Taiwanese American communities in grief and pray for the speedy recovery of the wounded survivors. 🙏

— Bi-khim Hsiao 蕭美琴 (@bikhim) May 16, 2022

(Adds politburo meeting on COVID response, other details)

SEOUL, May 18 (Reuters) – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un slammed his country’s response to its first officially confirmed COVID-19 outbreak as “immature,” accusing government officials of inadequacies and inertia as fever cases swept the country, state media reported on Wednesday.

North Korea reported 232,880 more people with fever symptoms, and six more deaths after the country’s first admission of the COVID outbreak last week. It did not say how many people had tested positive for COVID-19.

Presiding over a politburo meeting of the ruling workers’ Party on Tuesday, Kim said the “immaturity in the state capacity for coping with the crisis” increased the “complexity and hardships” in fighting the pandemic when “time is the life”, according to the KCNA.

Since its first acknowledgment of the COVID-19 outbreak, the North has reported 1.72 million patients with fever symptoms, including 62 deaths as of Tuesday evening.

Amid concerns over the isolated country’s lack of vaccines and adequate medical infrastructure, the KCNA said health officials have developed a COVID-19 treatment guide aimed at preventing drug overdoses and other mistreatments that have led to many of the reported deaths.

The guide includes individualized treatments for different types of patients, but state media did not elaborate on which drugs are involved in the treatment plans. (Reporting by Soo-hyang Choi and Josh Smith Editing by Chris Reese and Jonathan Oatis)

The US is currently preparing a $40bn package for Ukraine, expected to win final passage in the Senate as soon as Wednesday.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen issued a call for large-scale economic assistance to Ukraine, warning that the amounts of help pledged to date won’t even meet short-term needs as the nation struggles with the devastation wrought by Russia’s invasion.

“Eventually, Ukraine will need massive support and private investment for reconstruction and recovery, akin to the task of rebuilding in Europe after 1945,” Yellen said in a speech on Brussels Tuesday. “What’s clear is that the bilateral and multilateral support announced so far will not be sufficient to address Ukraine’s needs, even in the short term.”

The US, which assembled the Marshall Plan to help much of Europe recover after World War II, is currently preparing a $40 billion package for Ukraine, expected to win final passage in the Senate as soon as Wednesday.

“I sincerely ask all our partners to join us in increasing their financial support to Ukraine,” Yellen said. “Our joint efforts are critical to help ensure Ukraine’s prevails over Putin’s democracy aggression,” she said, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Yellen also on Tuesday met with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who later tweeted that the discussion included a European Commission aid proposal for Ukraine that’s expected to be unveiled Wednesday.

Good meeting with @SecYellen

We discussed:

Support to Ukraine in the short & long-term with @EU_Commission‘s Reconstruction package tomorrow

🇪🇺🇺🇸 exemplary cooperation on sanctions against Russia. We will keep on coordinating closely

The good agreement on Global Minimum Tax. pic.twitter.com/0Y11Cn18P2

— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) May 17, 2022

The US Treasury chief spoke ahead of attending a meeting of finance chiefs from the Group of Seven advanced in Bonn, Germany, later in the week. She was delivering an annual lecture at the Brussels Economic Forum named after Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, an Italian policy maker who championed European integration and helped to conceive the euro.

Russia, China

Yellen highlighted the power of US-European cooperation in preventing Russia from trying to “play off some of us against others.” She also said that if Putin continues the war, Washington will work with European and other partners “to push Russia further towards economic, financial, and strategic isolation.”

The Treasury secretary issued a similar call to European partners to coordinate with the US with regard to addressing Chinese economic policies that have “disadvantaged us all.” She said, “China is more likely to respond favorably if it cannot play one of us off against another.”

Yellen reiterated US support for helping Europe reduce its reliance on Russia as a source of energy, while calling for further efforts to toward renewable sources.

Janet Yellen in Brussels, on May 17.

“We must heed this wake-up call to expedite the global transition to a more secure and cleaner energy future,” she said. “The longer the current disruption lasts — the more aggressively we say no to Russian oil — the more remunerative it will naturally become to switch to renewables.”

Tax Deal

Transatlantic coordination has proved vital as well for the global corporate tax deal achieved last year, Yellen noted. But, “we still have important work to do to get international tax reform across the finish line,” she said. This will require the US and European Union enacting the 15% minimum tax agreed on, she said.

“Open issues” with regard to the other main pillar of that deal — reallocating taxing rights so that multinational companies pay more taxes in the countries where they generate revenue — must be resolved, Yellen said.

(Updates with reference to von der Leyen tweet in fifth paragraph.)

More than 100,000 people are now listed as missing in violence-wracked Mexico, a grim milestone that the United Nations chief on Tuesday called “a tragedy rights of enormous proportions.”

Rights groups appealed for urgent action to tackle disappearances that have skyrocketed during years of spiraling drug-related violence.

The National Registry of Missing Persons, which has been tracking disappearances since 1964, said that as of Monday the whereabouts of 100,012 people were unknown. About 75 percent are men.

The Movement for Our Disappeared immediate warning that the figure was “certainly well below the number” of actual cases, calling for the government to deal with the crisis “in a comprehensive and manner.”

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said the disappearances represented a “human tragedy of enormous proportions.”

“No effort should be spared to put an end to these human rights violations and abuses of extraordinary breadth, and to vindicate victims’ rights to truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition,” she added.

Only 35 of the disappearances recorded have led to convictions — a “staggering rate of impunity” that is “mostly attributable to the lack of effective investigations,” Bachelet’s office said.

– ‘Pattern of impunity’ –

The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances described the situation as “heart-breaking.”

Enforced disappearances are a daily occurrence in Mexico, “reflecting a chronic pattern of impunity,” they added.

The UN committee, which is made up of independent experts, warned in April that Mexico was facing an “alarming trend of rising enforced disappearances.”

Organized crime groups were mainly responsible for these disappearances, “with varying degrees of participation, acquiescence or omission by public servants,” it said.

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The committee’s report was rejected by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said his government would not tolerate impunity or corruption.

Frustration at slow progress in official investigations has led families of the disappeared, especially mothers, to form groups that search for clandestine graves using picks and shovels.

The crisis is fueled by the state’s apathy, said Cecilia Flores, the leader of one such group in the northwestern state of Sonora who is looking for her sons Alejandro and Marco Antonio.

“If the authorities did their job, not so many would have disappeared,” she told AFP.

“For them, a disappeared person is one less criminal and one more statistic,” Flores said.

– ‘Staggering number’ –

Authorities say some 37,000 unidentified bodies are being held in forensic services, though civil organizations warn the number could be much higher.

Authorities are working to consolidate a database of the disappeared with genetic samples, though many corpses have been buried without being identified because morgues are overflowing.

The International Committee of the Red Cross described the 100,000 missing as “a staggering number that underscores the immediate need to strengthen prevention, search, and identification mechanisms for those who are missing and their families.”

However, it recognized “important progress” made by Mexico in some areas including identifying the dead and easing the pain of families of the missing.

“The first few hours are the most important,” said Marlene Herbig, head of the ICRC’s missing persons program in Mexico.

“When someone disappears, their relatives have the right to know what has happened. Knowing the fate of disappeared persons is primarily a humanitarian act.”

The first reported disappearances in Mexico date back to the authorities’ so-called “dirty war” against leftist movements from the 1960s to 1980s.

Mexico has also registered over 340,000 deaths — mostly attributed to organized crime groups — since 2006, when a major anti-drug military offensive was launched.

sem-yug-dr/md

Torrential rain flooded the Perkoa zinc mine on April 16, trapping eight workers inside.

Rescue workers have found no survivors in a rescue chamber deep inside a flooded zinc mine in Burkina Faso, the government has said, all but extinguishing hope that eight missing miners could still be alive after a month.

The Perkoa mine, owned by Canadian firm Trevali Mining Corp and located about 120km (75 miles) west of the capital Ouagadougou, was abruptly submerged on April 16 after torrential rain fell unexpectedly during the country’s dry season.

There had been some hope during a month-long search and rescue operation that the missing men might have reached the rescue chamber, which is stocked with food and water and located approximately 570 meters (1,870 feet) below ground.

“The rescue teams have opened the refuge chamber, unfortunately, it is empty,” the government’s information service said on Tuesday in a statement posted on social media.

“Everything suggests that the miners were unable to reach the refuge chamber at the moment when the flood occurred and searches are ongoing,” the statement said.

Trevali said in his own statement, released shortly after the government’s one, that the refuge chamber had been found intact with no one inside.

Distraught relatives of the missing men have been gathering every day at the site in the Sanguie province, seeking solace from each other as they faced the agonising wait for news.

Both the company and the government have launched investigations into the causes of the incident.

The Perkoa mine consists of an open pit with underground shafts and galleries below. Most of the workers who were there at the time of the flash flood were able to escape, but the missing eight were more than 520 meters (1,706 feet) beneath the surface.

Six of the missing men are Burkina Faso nationals, one is from Tanzania and one from Zambia.