KATHMANDU, Nepal (AP) — Rescuers searching a mountainside in Nepal on Monday recovered the bodies of 17 of the 22 people who were on board a plane that crashed a day earlier, officials said. A search is continuing for the remaining people, airline spokesperson Sudarshan Bartaula said. Bartaula said rescuers believe some bodies are pinned under the plane’s wreckage. Rescuers working with their bare hands have not been able to move the metal debris, he said. The Tara Air turboprop Twin Otter lost contact with the airport tower on Sunday while flying on a scheduled 20-minute flight in an area of deep river gorges and mountaintops. Four Indians and two Germans were on the plane, Tara Air said. The three crew members and other passengers were Nepali nationals, it said. The wreckage was located by villagers who had been searching in the area for the Yarsagumba fungus, which is commonly referred to as Himalayan Viagra, according to local news reports.

 

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N’DJAMENA (Reuters) -- Around 100 people were killed in clashes between artisanal gold miners in north Chad on May 23 and May 24, Defense Minister Daoud Yaya Brahim said on Monday. The violence broke out during the night at an informal gold mining site in the mountainous Kouri Bougoudi district, near the border with Libya. Chad’s government sent a fact-finding mission to the site on May 25 to assess the unrest and restore calm, saying at the time that human lives were lost and several people injured without giving numbers. “The death toll we established after our mission on the ground reaches around 100 dead,” Brahim told Reuters. All informal mining operations have been suspended and we have proceeded to evacuate people from the site, he added. 

 

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PARIS (Reuters) -- The Mona Lisa was left shaken but unharmed on Sunday when a visitor to the Louvre tried to smash the glass protecting the world’s most famous painting before smearing cream across its surface in an apparent climate-related publicity stunt. The perpetrator was a man disguised as an old lady who jumped out of a wheelchair before attacking the glass. “Maybe this is just nuts to me...,” posted the author of a video of the incident’s aftermath that shows a Louvre staffer cleaning the glass. “(He) then proceeds to smear cake on the glass, and throws roses everywhere before being tackled by security.” Another video posted on social media showed the same staffer finishing cleaning the pane while another attendant removes a wheelchair from in front of the Da Vinci masterpiece. “Think of the earth, people are destroying the earth”, the man, dressed in a wig, said in French in another video posting that showed him being led away from the Paris gallery with the wheelchair, indicating that the incident likely had an environmentalist motive.

 

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MEXICO CITY (AP) — Hurricane Agatha, the season’s first, headed for a stretch of tourist beaches and fishing towns on Mexico’s southern Pacific coast Monday amid warnings of dangerous storm surge and flooding from heavy rains. After forming on Sunday, Agatha quickly gained power, and it was predicted to make landfall as a strong Category 2 hurricane Monday afternoon or evening, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said. It was moving toward the area near Puerto Escondido and Puerto Angel in the southern state of Oaxaca — a region that includes the laid-back tourist resorts of Huatulco, Mazunte and Zipolite. The hurricane center said Agatha could “bring an extremely dangerous storm surge and life-threatening winds.” Early Monday, Agatha had maximum sustained winds of 110 mph (175 kph) — just 1 mph under the threshold for a Category 3, the hurricane center said. The storm’s center was about 65 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Puerto Angel and heading to the northeast at 6 mph (9 kph).

 

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The husband of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving late on Saturday in Napa County, California after being involved in a two-vehicle crash, the California Highway Patrol said on Sunday. Paul Pelosi, 82, was booked into the Napa County Detention Center after being charged with two misdemeanors and bail was set at $5,000, according to police and county online records. On Sunday, he was not listed as being in custody. The California Highway Patrol said Pelosi was driving a 2021 Porsche and attempting to cross State Route-29, when his vehicle was struck by a 48-year-old man driving a 2014 Jeep. No one was injured, the highway patrol said. The other driver was not arrested. California law bars drivers from operating a vehicle with a blood alcohol level above 0.08 grams per deciliter of blood. Nancy Pelosi was in Rhode Island on Sunday delivering a commencement address at Brown University. Nancy and Paul Pelosi have been married since 1963. 

 

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BENI (Reuters) -- Suspected takfiri militants killed 15 civilians in an attack on a village in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo, a human rights group and local official said on Monday. Fighters believed to be members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) stormed the village of Bulongo in North Kivu province after dark on Sunday, pillaging homes and murdering inhabitants that crossed their path, municipality mayor Jean Paul Katembo told Reuters. Bulango is around 40 km east of the city of Beni in the Ruenzori district. The attackers killed 15 people and set fire to six vehicles, Ricardo Rupande, president of the Ruenzori Sector Civil Society group, said.