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    Deadly Flooding and Landslides in Nepal

    In this monsoon season, so far there have been more than 60 weather-related fatalities. With roads cut off and more rain expected, the toll could rise.Landslides and floods set off by torrential rains have killed at least 15 people in Nepal in the last 24 hours, officials in the small Himalayan nation said on Sunday, expressing fear that with further heavy rains expected, that number could rise.Eighteen people were also injured in the flooding over the past 24 hours, and two are missing, said Dan Bahadur Karki, a police spokesman. Dozens of people were evacuated to safety, including some pulled from the rubble of their damaged homes.Officials said the landslides had hampered vehicle traffic in most parts of a country where the terrain already makes travel difficult. Highways were damaged, as were the serpentine roads that connect cities with mountain villages. Military and police forces were deployed to help clear the roads.Koshi, Gandaki and Bagmati Provinces, in the east and center of the country, were among the hardest hit. Weather experts predict that heavy rainfall could affect the remaining provinces as the rain heads west.Nepal, which is among the places most vulnerable to climate change, routinely faces landslides and floods. Last year’s monsoon affected nearly 6,000 households, damaging homes and flooding fields. Since the beginning of the current monsoon season in June, at least 62 people have lost their lives, according to the country’s home ministry. Most of the deaths were because of flooding, but lightning was also a factor.Political instability and widespread corruption have complicated a disaster response already short on resources.The coalition government in Kathmandu is in disarray again, with a new alliance seeking to topple the current prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal. If he is ousted, the country will get its second government since the parliamentary elections held in November 2022. More

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    Pakistan Withers Under Deadly Heat and Fears the Coming Rains

    Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, endured days of temperatures above 100 Fahrenheit, made worse by power cuts and high humidity.In nearly every corner of Karachi, there are signs of the heat wave scorching the sun-baked city.Hundreds of patients suffering from heat-related illnesses pour into the hospitals every day, pushing them far past their capacity. Morgues overwhelmed by a surge in bodies are struggling to find space.Frustrated residents have begun blocking roads with stones and sticks to protest shortages of electricity and drinking water. Even the usually bustling markets and streets have emptied as people avoid leaving their homes unless they must.Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and its economic hub, is the latest place to suffer as South Asia roasts under a blistering heat wave this summer, a brutal reminder of the deadly toll of climate change in a part of the world especially vulnerable to its effects, and in a country where ineffective governance and large economic disparities have magnified the sufferings of its poorest citizens.In a particularly dire eight-day stretch late last month, temperatures reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius), with high humidity adding to the misery. That was the hottest since 2015, a year when officials reported that more than 1,200 people died from heat-related causes in Karachi.With temperatures still hovering near 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the sense of crisis has persisted.“It feels like living in a furnace,” said Akbar Ali, 52, a rickshaw driver who has transported many heat-struck people to the hospital in recent weeks. “It’s terrible seeing people collapse on the street.”Inside a crowded children’s ward at a hospital in Karachi on Friday. Children and older people are particularly sensitive to excess heat.Insiya Syed for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Coney Island Drownings Fail to Deter New Yorkers as City Swelters

    Visitors were mostly unaffected by the third and fourth drownings at New York City beaches this season, matching the total number of swimming deaths last summer.The scene at Coney Island on Saturday was typical for a humid and hot weekend in July: colorful towels, tents and umbrellas packed into the strip of sand.Along the famed boardwalk in Brooklyn, signs warned visitors of the potential dangers posed by lightning or strong currents, and delineated where and when it was safe to swim.Yet in one area, closed off by small red flags staked into the sand, a handful of people ventured into the water with no lifeguards present. To the east, where two teenage sisters drowned in the water the night before, swimmers splashed around, unaware or undeterred, enjoying an escape from the city’s heat as temperatures peaked just below 90 degrees.The two teenage sisters who drowned on Friday entered the ocean after the beach was closed.Dakota Santiago for The New York TimesThe sisters who drowned Friday night, Zainab Mohammed, 17, and Aisha Mohammed, 18, were the second pair of teenagers to drown off New York City’s beaches already this summer. At nearby Jacob Riis Park beach in Queens, two boys, ages 16 and 17, drowned just two weeks earlier. Both incidents happened on especially hot days, after the beaches closed but before the sun had set.On Saturday, another man died after being pulled from the water off Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan, according to the police. He was transported to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    8-Year-Old Is Killed and Two Adults Wounded in Queens Stabbing

    Police officers arrived at an apartment in Jamaica to find a man holding his father at knife point and an 8-year-old mortally wounded.It was just after 5 p.m. on the Fourth of July when a bleeding woman staggered out of a Queens apartment building, begging for help.She had been stabbed in the back.When police officers from the nearby 103rd Precinct arrived, they found a grisly scene in a fifth-floor apartment: an older son holding his father at knife point; a younger boy nearby, dying from his wounds, the police said.The officers said the older son was holding his father in a headlock. They told him to drop the knife multiple times in English and Spanish, they said. When he did not, officers fired one round, striking the older son, who dropped the knife, said John Chell, the chief of patrol for the New York Police Department.The suspect is being treated for his injuries at a nearby hospital.“This was a tragic and horrific event,” Chief Chell said at a hastily gathered news conference on Thursday evening outside the apartment building, at the corner of Sutphin Boulevard and 94th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens.Police officials did not speculate on a motive for the attack that left the younger boy, who was 8 years old, dead. The family members’ names were not released, nor was the precise nature of the relationships among them.Police officials said the investigation was continuing. “This is a domestic incident,” Chief Chell said. “There is a relationship with all them here, and we’ll figure that out.”The police said that the woman, who is 29, and the father, 43, were expected to recover from their injuries. An 8-month-old girl who was also in the apartment was unharmed, the police said.Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations, said that the officers who had responded to the scene were crushed by the news that the boy had succumbed to his injuries: “One of them said, ‘We wish we could have got here a little sooner to save this young life.’” More

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    Segunda vuelta electoral en Irán: quiénes son los candidatos y qué proponen

    El balotaje ocurre después de una votación especial celebrada tras la muerte del presidente Ebrahim Raisi ocurrida en un accidente de helicóptero en mayo.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]El viernes se enfrentarán dos candidatos, un reformista y un ultraconservador, en la segunda vuelta de las elecciones presidenciales de Irán, tras una primera vuelta con la asistencia de votantes más baja en la historia del país y en medio de una atmósfera de apatía generalizada ante la posibilidad de que pueda lograrse un cambio significativo mediante el sufragio.La segunda vuelta electoral ocurre después de una votación especial celebrada tras la muerte del presidente Ebrahim Raisi ocurrida en un accidente de helicóptero en mayo.¿Qué sucedió en la primera vuelta de las elecciones de Irán?Alrededor del 40 por ciento de los votantes, un récord de baja participación, acudió a las urnas el pasado viernes, y ninguno de los cuatro candidatos incluidos en la boleta reunió el 50 por ciento de los votos que se necesitan para ganar las elecciones.El candidato reformista, Masoud Pezeshkian, exministro de Salud, y Saíd Yalilí, un exnegociador en temas nucleares y ultraconservador de línea dura, recibieron más votos que los demás, por lo que participarán en la segunda vuelta electoral que se celebrará el 5 de julio.Pezeshkian avanzó gracias a que el voto conservador se dividió entre dos candidatos y uno de ellos recibió menos del uno por ciento.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Hurricane Beryl Batters Jamaica After Pummeling 2 Other Islands

    The island confirmed its first death amid a surge of water, damaging winds and flooding. The storm is barreling toward the Cayman Islands and the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.Jamaica was hammered by a surge of water, damaging winds and flooding rainfall on Wednesday as Hurricane Beryl delivered a glancing blow when it passed just south of the coast, claiming at least one life on the island. The effects of the storm, a Category 4, struck Jamaica just days after it swept through the eastern Caribbean, killing at least seven other people.Virtually every building on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique in Grenada lay in ruins after the storm made landfall there earlier this week, leaving hospitals and marinas destroyed, rooftops torn away and tree trunks snapped like matchsticks across the drenched earth.“We have to rebuild from the ground up,” said Dickon Mitchell, prime minister of Grenada.Ahead of the hurricane, Jamaica closed its airports and issued an evacuation order for low-lying and flood-prone areas. The storm was the strongest to approach the island in over a decade. The last time a major hurricane passed within 70 miles of Jamaica was in 2007, and it has been even longer since one made landfall.Workers boarding up an office building on Wednesday in Kingston, Jamaica.Marco Bello/ReutersThe first confirmed death in Jamaica because of the storm came when a woman was killed as a tree fell on her house in the western parish of Hanover, the head of the country’s disaster agency, Richard Thompson, said.A rescue team was also searching for a 20-year-old man who had been swept away in a gully in Kingston after trying to retrieve a ball that he and friends had been playing with, according to a senior police officer, Michael Phipps.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ex-Engineer Charged With Obstructing Inquiry Into Military Crash That Killed 16

    James Michael Fisher, 67, was arrested on charges that he made false statements during a criminal investigation into a the crash of a Marine Corps aircraft in Mississippi in 2017, the Justice Department said.A former U.S. Air Force engineer has been charged with making false statements and obstructing justice during a federal criminal investigation into a 2017 military plane crash that killed 16 people, the Justice Department said Wednesday.The engineer, James Michael Fisher, 67, formerly of Warner Robins, Ga., had been living in Portugal when he was arrested Tuesday morning on an indictment issued by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Mississippi, the department said in a news release. He is charged with two counts each of making false statement charges and obstruction of justice. If convicted, could receive up to 20 years in prison.According to the department, Mr. Fisher, a former lead propulsion engineer at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex, “engaged in a pattern of conduct intended to avoid scrutiny for his past engineering decisions related to why the crash may have occurred.” He also “knowingly concealed key engineering documents” from investigators and “made materially false statements” to them about his decisions, the department said.The Justice Department did not specify a cause of the crash, which took place on July 10, 2017, in the Mississippi Delta when a U.S. Marine Corps KC-130 aircraft known as Yanky 72 crashed near Itta Bena, Miss., killing 15 members of the Marine Corps and a Navy corpsman. Witnesses at the time said the plane had disintegrated in the air as it neared the ground, prompting an urgent rescue effort in one of the South’s most rural areas. The authorities estimated the debris field was about three miles in diameter.The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for further information on Wednesday evening, and court documents could not immediately be obtained. It was unclear if Mr. Fisher had legal representation. The Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex also did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday evening. Alain Delaquérière More

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    A Family Loses 3 Generations of Women in India Crowd’s Panic

    Vinod Kumar was away from home on Tuesday, as he usually is for days at a time in search of masonry work, when he got the dreadful call.All the women in his family, three generations of them, were dead, crushed in a stampede.For the rest of the day, Mr. Kumar and his three sons went from hospital to hospital searching for their loved ones among the bodies of the 121 people who had died when a large gathering of a spiritual guru broke into deadly panic.Close to midnight, they found the bodies of his wife, Raj Kumari, 42, and daughter, Bhumi, 9, at the government hospital in Hathras, laid out on large slabs of ice among the dozens others in the corridor.“Why did you leave me just like that? Who will scold the children now and push them to go to school?” Mr. Kumar wailed at the feet of his wife.But he couldn’t afford to be entirely lost in grief yet. The body of his mother was yet to be found. He bent over to pick up his daughter for one last embrace. Bhumi wore a yellow top, and her hair was tied in a ponytail with a pink band.“Let her sleep,” Nitin, Mr. Kumar’s oldest son, told him, pulling the girl away from his father to lay her back on the slab so they could continue the search.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More