Chinese police said no one else was injured in the incident, which took place near the area where visa applicants typically line up to enter the embassy for interviews.

The explosion was set off by a man from China’s Inner Mongolia region surnamed Jiang, police said, adding that his injuries were not life-threatening. Police did not indicate a possible motive.

Video clips that circulated on social media shortly after the explosion showed smoke in the air outside the embassy compound, and AFP journalists arriving at the scene found heavy Chinese security.

“We heard a rather strong explosion around 1:00 pm (0500 GMT) so we went out on the street to have a look, but very soon the police had cordoned off the area,” said a witness who declined to be identified.

Police quickly cordoned off the spot where the blast took place and China’s state-censorship apparatus moving swiftly to block searches for “US Embassy” on the popular Twitter-like Weibo platform.

AFP journalists said the visa office adjacent to where the blast took place appeared to have resumed operation not long after the incident.

“I heard a loud ‘bang’, and then we all craned our heads to see what it was,” said a man surnamed Liu, who was waiting outside the embassy at the time.

“It seemed (police) reacted pretty quickly, like they were prepared.”

The area where the incident took place is on the outskirts of Beijing and home to several embassies, including those of India and Israel.

China regularly sees cases of disgruntled individuals lashing out at society over various grievances or perceived injustices, often harming themselves or others.

In one of the worst recent incidents, a bomb blast killed eight people and injured dozens of others outside a kindergarten in eastern China in June of last year.

Police blamed it on a 22-year-old man who was suffering from health problems.//AFP

    Twenty-seven people have been confirmed dead, with 131 still missing, after the Xe-Namnoy dam collapsed on Monday in a remote southern corner of Laos, leaving villagers with little time to escape.

It is an unprecedented accident to strike the hydropower industry in Laos, where the Communist government has dammed large sections of its myriad waterways to generate electricity that is mostly consumed by its neighbours.

The search and rescue effort entered a third day Thursday, with China, Vietnam and Thailand sending in specialists, while villagers picked through their wrecked, mud-caked homes for possessions as the flood waters receded.

Carcasses of livestock floated in the knee-deep waters in a devastated village visited by AFP.

Thousands of villagers downstream in Cambodia have also been forced to flee as the water once held back by the dam flowed south.

“Water is still rising, so more people will be evacuated,” Men Kong, a government spokesman in Cambodia’s Stung Streng province, told AFP.

In Laos, Chinese rescuers in life jackets and helmets joined local soldiers searching for the missing Thursday, according to an AFP reporter at the scene, while community volunteers pitched in with private boats to return to villages still totally submerged.

“Water is still rising, so more people will be evacuated,” Men Kong, a government spokesman in Cambodia’s Stung Streng province, told AFP.

In Laos, Chinese rescuers in life jackets and helmets joined local soldiers searching for the missing Thursday, according to an AFP reporter at the scene, while community volunteers pitched in with private boats to return to villages still totally submerged.//AFP

 The search for survivors has been hampered by monsoon weather in the remote southern corner of Laos where the Xe-Namnoy dam collapsed on Monday.

Panicked residents took flight, taking refuge on rooftops or making their way to evacuation centres where some said they were given just a few hours’ warning of the looming disaster.

Boats and helicopters were dispatched to find people still trapped by the widespread flooding that has left at least 131 missing, with road access cut completely in many areas.

Vietnam dispatched military and medical personnel to support rescue efforts and Thailand said it was sending close to $150,000 in aid.

China’s foreign ministry also said it was “willing to promptly provide active support and assistance to the Laos disaster relief work”.

Around a dozen Chinese rescuers in helmets and life jackets joined rescuers in Sanamxai town Thursday near the dam site, according to an AFP reporter at the scene.

State media said more than 3,000 people were left homeless by the deluge, many squeezing into makeshift shelters where they recounted the terrifying scramble to escape the swirling brown floodwaters.

Tran Van Bien, 47, from Ban May village near the dam collapse said he was told to evacuate just two hours before the dam burst on Monday evening, running to a neighbour’s house with his family as his home quickly filled with water.

“We were on the roof of that house the whole night, cold and scared. At 4:00 am a wooden boat passed and we decided to send my wife and my kid out,” he told AFP from a nearby village where he eventually found dry land.

“My wife tied our child to her body, saying if they died, they would die together rather than being alone.”

 – ‘Insufficient warning’ –

The $1.2 billion dollar Xe-Namnoy dam, a joint venture between Laos and Korean companies, was still under construction in southern Attepeu province when it collapsed after heavy rains pounded the area earlier this week.

Two South Korean companies involved in the project’s construction said damage was reported a day before the auxiliary “Saddle D” dam collapsed.

However a timeline from operator Korea Western Power Co. obtained by AFP said 11 centimetres of subsidence was spotted at the dam’s centre as early as Friday.

“It remains unclear what caused the dam to subside in some places and develop cracks. But all of these happened under heavy rains,” a Korea Western Power spokesman told AFP.

The 410 MW project is one of more than 50 hydropower plans underway in Laos, which has billed itself as the “Battery of Asia” in its ambitious bid to become a major power exporter in the region.

It has said it wants to double its power generation capacity to 28,000 MW by 2020 and has opened its doors to foreign investors — mainly from China, Thailand and Vietnam — to build dams on its vast river network.

But the projects have come under fire by rights groups who say local communities are forcibly displaced and lose key access to river waters for farming and fishing.

“Many of the people affected by the current dam collapse have already suffered other impacts due to dam construction. This tragedy has compounded their suffering,” International Rivers said in a statement Thursday.

“Communities were not given sufficient advanced warning to ensure their safety and that of their families. This event raises major questions about dam standards and dam safety in Laos.”//AFP

The Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department in charge of Islamic affairs said measures can be taken by the Government in order to protect children, society, and the image of Islam.

“Although such marriages are allowed in Islam, we must look at it from a larger point of view due to public interest, especially in terms of the protection of children,” he told reporters at the Parliament lobby on Thursday (July 25).

He was asked to respond to a remark by Kelantan Deputy Mentri Besar and PAS vice-president Datuk Mohd Amar Nik Abdullah, who said that the party was against a blanket ban on child marriages.

The Government also intends to ban the practice eventually as child marriages exploit children, and to a certain extent, “glorifies the paedophile”.

“The Government can intervene to ban it in accordance with Syariah law if the marriage is considered exploitative in nature. We must think about that,” Dr Mujahid said.

Meanwhile, PAS deputy president and Kubang Kerian MP Datuk Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man said the Government can take action but it must study the matter from various aspects.

“If we can see, child marriages do not only revolve around Islam but other religions. It affects the orang asli.

“Their traditions also allow marriages between those as young as 15 to 16 years old.

“So what is the root of the problem here? “Can we know whether the divorce rate in those age groups is higher compared with those who are older?

“We must look at the issue in totality and not just the age factor,” he said.

Video clips posted online showed smoke in the air outside the diplomatic compound in the Chinese capital and police roping off a perimeter around the area, with witnesses saying an explosion had occurred.

The location appeared to be near where Chinese citizens typically line up to enter the US embassy for visa interviews.

However, the details of the incident were not immediately clear as witness reports conflicted.

The US Embassy declined comment and Chinese security forces could not immediately be reached.

The diplomatic area where the incident took place is on the outskirts of Beijing and home to several embassies, including those of the United States, India and Israel.//AFP

President Donald Trump has touted a goal of sending Americans to the Moon again for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, building a lunar gateway to test the technology and spacecraft that will carry humans to Mars.

At a hearing in Washington, Senator Bill Nelson said the White House decision to return to the Moon — a program former president Barack Obama halted in order to focus on reaching Mars — could drag down the whole process.

“We don’t want to rob the NASA budget of what is the goal, and the goal is to get to Mars with humans,” said Nelson, a Democrat from Florida, which is home to Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center.

“Do these missions help us achieve our goal of getting humans to Mars?” he asked.

In 2009, an independent expert panel known as the Augustine Commission warned that NASA’s resources did not match its lofty goals.

With an annual budget of around $18 billion, NASA would need an extra $3 billion per year to make it to Mars, it found.

NASA officials have said as recently as this year they are trying to craft a deep space program with far less, using only inflation-based increases in the budget.

And the National Academies of Science has calculated that if NASA’s budget continued on its current path, “forget the scenario of getting to Mars by the 2030s. It would take us until 2050,” Nelson added.

“I don’t think we want to wait that long.”

Global partners concerned

In 2017, Congress’s NASA authorization bill required NASA to define and deliver to Congress a step-by-step plan for reaching Mars.

“We don’t have this roadmap yet. It is seven months overdue,” Nelson said.

“What gives? Let’s see the program for going to Mars and see where all this other fits in.”

Testifying at the hearing, Chris Carberry, chief executive of Explore Mars, said international and private partnerships could help the United States make it more affordable to reach Mars.

“Our international partners want us to lead,” he told lawmakers.

“But they have concerns that we keep changing directions. They are not sure that we are going to stick with the direction.”

Even more, aerospace experts have identified about a dozen technologies that “we need to start working on pretty much immediately if we have any hope of landing humans on Mars in the 2030s,” Carberry added.

These include developing spacecraft that can survive the harsh entry into Mars and land softly enough, as well as the ability to lift people off the surface and head back to Earth.

“Some will take quite awhile to achieve, Carberry said. “We have to start working on them now.”

Praising the bipartisan support for NASA he sees among lawmakers, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, a Republican who heads the Senate subcommittee on space, said he hopes Congress’s next NASA funding bill will lay out a longer term vision, rather than going year to year.

“This next NASA authorization, the hope is that it will reach further and be bolder in its aspirations,” he said.

Cruz then asked retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who has spent a US record of 665 days in space, for her view on what is needed going forward.

“The one most important thing is constancy of purpose,” she answered.

“We have to have a vision that lasts more than one administration. We have to have a budget line that will support those goals and objectives that we are trying to reach.”

Public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said all six Aum Shinrikyo cult members remaining on death row had been executed on Thursday morning. There was no immediate official confirmation.

The executions come after authorities hanged “guru” Shoko Asahara and six of his one-time followers earlier this month, after years on death row.

If confirmed, the executions would draw a line under years of legal wrangling and public soul-searching over the group and its crimes.

The additional executions had been widely expected, and while Japan is one of the few developed nations to retain the death penalty, public support for it remains high despite international criticism.

Local media said authorities wanted to execute all Aum members on death row before the country’s emperor abdicates next year, which will start a new imperial era.

As the Aum’s crimes were committed within the Heisei era of the current emperor, authorities wanted the executions to be carried out before the new era begins, local media said.

The Aum gained international infamy with the 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway during rush hour, which killed 13 people and injured thousands more.

Members of the group released the chemical in liquid form at five points through the subway network, and soon commuters began struggling to breathe, staggering from trains with their eyes watering.

Others keeled over, foaming at the mouth, with blood streaming from their noses.

The attack plunged the capital into chaos, and prompted a crackdown on the cult’s headquarters in the foothills of Mount Fuji, where authorities discovered a plant capable of producing enough sarin to kill millions.

Aum members have also been convicted of an additional sarin attack in the town of Matsumoto the year before the Tokyo attack, as well as the murder of an anti-cult lawyer and his family.

Thirteen cult members spent years on death row as prosecutors continued to investigate their crimes, and some activists opposed the executions, fearing the members would be elevated to the status of martyrs.

But victims of the group’s attacks welcomed the July 6 execution of Asahara and six other Aum members.

One man who was injured in the subway sarin attack told AFP he felt “the world had become slightly brighter” when he heard news of the executions.

Asahara developed his cult in the 1980s, and at one point the wild-haired “guru” had at least 10,000 followers, including the doctors and engineers who produced the group’s chemical agents.

Despite the crackdown on the Aum, it was never formally banned.

It officially disowned Asahara in 2000 and renamed itself Aleph, but experts say the former guru retained a strong influence before his execution.

Asahara’s execution set off a battle among his surviving family members for his remains, with his wife and several children who are in successor cults to the Aum seeking to obtain them.

He was cremated days after his execution, and his youngest daughter, who has broken with the Aum’s successor cults, said she would receive his ashes.

Local media reported that the ashes would be scattered at sea to avoid creating a pilgrimage site for Asahara’s followers.

“Iga ninja earn an annual income of ¥9.45 million, but they’re still in short supply” — a fake news story with this claim began to spread on the internet starting around Friday. The city government of Iga, Mie Prefecture, famous as the hometown of ninja, and other entities were subsequently inundated with applications for the supposed ninja jobs from all over the world. The applications amounted to about 110 emails, including one that read: “I want to be a ninja. I have confidence in my physical strength.”

Most of the emails were written in English and came from 13 foreign countries.

Iga Mayor Sakae Okamoto, who had been interviewed by a U.S. radio network, flatly denied the story at a press conference on Tuesday. “The news was totally groundless. Iga city doesn’t recruit new employees to be ninja,” he said.

According to Iga city officials, a program on National Public Radio on July 16 triggered the fuss. In the program, a reporter said, “Today, ninja performers can earn anywhere from about $23,000 [¥2.56 million] to $85,000 [¥9.45 million], which is a really solid salary.”

Sources on the internet disseminated the news secondhand, embellished with the information that ninja are scarce and can earn an annual income of ¥9.45 million. It then spread worldwide through Facebook and Twitter, the officials said.

The job-seeking emails came from Japan, Spain, the United States, the Philippines and other countries. They included appeals such as “I am a 39-year-old Italian who has experience with martial arts,” “I belonged to the army and have been to sea as a sailor” and “I’ll devote my life to being a ninja.” Some applicants attached their resumes and mug shots. In addition to Iga, the applications were sent to the Iga-Ueno Tourist Association, the Ninja Museum of Igaryu and Mie University’s International Ninja Research Institute, officials said.

As for his interview with the U.S. radio network, Okamoto was surprised at the large reaction to the news.

“I explained that the city has been making efforts to promote tourism with ninja as a key element. But I never mentioned that ninja were in short supply and their annual income. I didn’t expect news about ninja would spread throughout the world in such a manner,” he said.Speech

In the last year 18.8 million new internal displacements associated with disasters were recorded in 135 countries and territories, according to the recent Global Report on Internal Displacement.  Weather-related hazards triggered the vast majority of displacement, with floods accounting for 8.6 million and storms 7.5 million in 2017.

The East Asian region is most prone to natural disasters and accounted for 46 per cent of the total displacement.

China recorded the highest number of internal displacement with 4. 4 million displaced internally in 2017. Floods in Hunan in Southern China between June and July led to the region’s largest displacement, more than 1,620,000 people. Further flooding displaced 547,000 in other southern provinces.

Philippines is located along the pacific “typhoon belt” and “ring of fire” and is exposed to recurring typhoons, storms and landslides that displaced around 2.5 million people in the last one year.

India had the third highest number of people displaced in the region with 1. 2 million internal displacements. The recent floods in eastern state of Bihar displaced around 855,000 people that had to be put in camps.  The floods destroyed agriculture land which resulted in the migration of people from rural to urban areas. Monsoons and resultants floods displaced around 946,000 people in Bangladesh.

Viet Nam is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world.  According to the report more than 70 per cent of the population live in coastal areas and low-lying deltas exposed to typhoons, tropical storms and floods. The last year saw around 633,000 people displaced.

In Nepal 384,000 people were displaced due to the recurrent flash floods and landslides that destroyed nearly 89,000 homes and displaced people across 35 districts including such areas where flooding is relatively unusual.

The recurrent volcanic eruptions, landslides, floods and earthquakes in Indonesia have displaced around 365,000 people. Natural disasters displaced 351,000 in Myanmar and 135,000 in Sri Lanka.

The tropical storm known as Kai-tak and some small scale floods displaced 82,000 people in Malaysia. Lesser number of displacements were reported from Japan and Pakistan in the last year.  However with the recent unprecedented floods in Japan the number of displaced people will be higher than the numbers displayed.

The Global Report on Internal Displacement report suggests that the high numbers of displaced people reflect the need of work to be done in sustainable development and addressing impacts of climate change.

Scott Michael Johnson is the 1,642nd person to be identified of the 2,753 people killed when two passenger jets, hijacked by Al-Qaeda, destroyed the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, the symbol of New York’s financial wealth.

Johnson worked as a securities analyst at investment banking company Keefe, Bruyette and Woods, New York’s chief medical examiner Barbara Sampson said.

“You get pulled right back into it and it also means there’s a finality. Somehow I always thought he would just walk up and say, ‘Here I am. I had amnesia’,” his mother, Ann Johnson told The New York Times.

It was the first identification since August 2017, although that man’s identity was not publicly revealed at his family’s request.

“We made a commitment to the families of victims that we would do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to identify their loved ones,” said Sampson.

While more than 1,100 9/11 victims remain unidentified, DNA technology has led to 89 percent of all positive identifications, the medical examiner’s office said.