News in Brief

Date: 15 April 2022 - 22:34

News ID: ۱۰۱۶۴۰

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Friday celebrated the milestone birth anniversary of its late founder with a mass gatherings, fireworks and calls for stronger loyalty to his grandson and current leader Kim Jong Un, but there was no word on an expected military parade amid heightened tensions over its nuclear program. The 110th birthday of Kim Il Sung comes after North Korea conducted a spate of weapons tests in recent months, including its first full-range intercontinental ballistic missile launch since 2017. Experts say North Korea aims to expand its arsenal and ramp up pressure on the United States while nuclear diplomacy is stalled.

***
MUTARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — A bus carrying worshippers traveling to an Easter pilgrimage in mountainous eastern Zimbabwe plunged into a gorge, killing 35 people in the early hours of Friday. The bus was overloaded with 106 passengers and veered off the winding road near Chimanimani and hurtled into a deep ravine, police said. The crash happened near the Chipinge district of Zimbabwe’s eastern Manicaland province, state broadcaster ZBC reported. The bus was carrying members of the Zion Christian Church, a local denomination known for holding regular pilgrimages attended by thousands of people.

***
LONDON (Reuters) - Life expectancy in the United States fell by nearly two years in 2020 to about 77 years amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the sharpest drop compared to 21 other high-income countries, according to a global study. Americans on average are now expected to live for 76.99 years from 78.86 years in 2019, according to the study, which looked at national death and population counts in 2019 and 2020 to calculate the mortality rate ratio. The decline of 1.87 years in life expectancy for 2020 was far higher than the mean reduction of 0.58 years in 21 peer countries, including Canada, France, Germany, Denmark and South Korea. No country experienced a decrease as steep as that of the United States, according to the study. U.S. COVID-19 mortality and excess deaths were among the highest in the world and the virus was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2020, after heart disease and cancer.

***
NEW YORK (CNBC) - Americans harbor some of the most downbeat views on the economy since the recovery from the Great Recession, and some of their attitudes are in line with those seen only during recessions, according to the latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey. Amid soaring inflation, 47% of the public say the economy is “poor,” the highest number in that category since 2012. Only 17% rank the economy as excellent or good, the lowest since 2014. Only one in five Americans describe their personal financial situation as “getting ahead,” the weakest showing in eight years. Most say they are “remaining in place,” and one in 10 say they are “falling backward.” Meanwhile, 56% say they expect a recession in the next year — a level only achieved in the survey during an actual recession.

***
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A wealthy former Democratic Party activist convicted of giving fatal doses of methamphetamine to two men he invited to his suburban Los Angeles home for sex was sentenced on Thursday to 30 years in federal prison. Ed Buck, 67, was found guilty on nine criminal counts in a in a U.S. District Court trial last July stemming from his role in soliciting men for sex games in which prosecutors said he gave out drugs or injected them into his partners. Two of the men suffered fatal overdoses at Buck’s apartment in West Hollywood: Gemmel Moore, 26, on July 27, 2017 and 55-year-old Timothy Dean in January 2019. Buck, a prominent local and national figure in Democratic politics who contributed to the campaigns of President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, was sentenced by a federal judge on Thursday to 360 months in prison, according to a U.S. Justice Department release.