Death toll from Japan earthquake rises
TOKYO -- The death toll has hit 39 from a powerful earthquake that struck the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido last week, authorities said Sunday. One person remained missing in the hard-hit town of Atsuma, where multiple landslides triggered by the quake slammed into houses at the foot of steep hills.
All but four of the victims were from Atsuma, a community of 4,600 people.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited hard-hit Kiyota ward on the eastern edge of Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido. In some parts of Kiyota, the earth liquefied and sank as much as 3 feet, tilting houses, cracking roads and unleashing a mudflow that solidified and trapped vehicles in parking lots.
The magnitude-6.7 earthquake struck before daybreak Thursday and knocked out power and train service across Hokkaido, home to 5.4 million people. It took two days to restore electricity to most households. A few hundred were still without power Sunday, mostly in Atsuma.
About 2,600 people were staying in temporary shelters, down from a peak of 16,600, the Hokkaido government said.
20 people die in S. Sudan plane crash
JUBA, South Sudan -- A commercial plane crashed into a lake in South Sudan on Sunday and killed 20 people, a local official said.
The 19-seater commercial Baby Air plane had been traveling from the capital, Juba, the minister of information for the town of Yirol, Taban Abel Aguek, said.
Officials were investigating the cause of the crash.
Among the dead were at least three children and the bishop of Yirol, authorities said.
The three survivors are a 6-year-old child, an adult man and an Italian doctor with an aid organization who was in serious condition, Aguek said.
"There were people everywhere," the official said of the crash site.
Yirol is in the central part of the civil-war-torn East African country.
More families fleeing airstrikes in Syria
CAIRO -- Syrian government forces and allied Russians stepped up their air attacks on the opposition's last major stronghold of Idlib and neighboring areas, forcing more people out of the province, a war monitor reported Sunday.
It is expected that Syrian President Bashar Assad, supported by Russia, will soon launch a final offensive on Idlib, which has been under the rebels' control since 2015.
Russian jets Sunday carried out 14 successive air raids in the rebel town of Latamneh in the northern part of Hama province that borders Idlib, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Government helicopters, meanwhile, dropped at least 63 barrels packed with explosives on areas in Idlib and Hama, the fiercest such bombing in weeks, the observatory said.
At least one child was killed and six other civilians injured in Idlib's southern village of Hobeit by the barrel bombing, the observatory said.
A hospital in Latamneh was also knocked out of service as a result of airstrikes and shelling.
The latest attacks have forced dozens of families to leave the targeted rebel areas in Idlib and Hama for safer areas, according to the Britain-based monitor.
Syria's state news agency SANA reported that the army mounted intense shelling strikes against militants mainly from an al-Qaida-linked group in the northern section of Hama.
An unspecified number of "terrorists" were killed or injured in the strikes that also destroyed rocket launchers, SANA reported.
SANA did not mention attacks in Idlib.
Remarks by critic of U.K.'s May raise ire
LONDON -- Former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson compared Prime Minister Theresa May's plan for leaving the European Union to putting the country's constitution in a "suicide vest" and handing the detonator to the EU -- remarks that drew condemnation from colleagues on Sunday.
The attack, and Johnson's choice of metaphor, widened the divide in the governing Conservative Party over Brexit.
Johnson, a strong supporter of exiting the EU, quit May's government in July after rejecting her proposal for close economic ties with the bloc after the U.K. leaves next year. His article in the Mail on Sunday ramped up speculation that he plans to challenge her leadership.
Johnson said May's plan, which would keep the U.K. aligned to EU regulations in return for free trade in goods, was a "humiliation" and amounted to "agreeing to take EU rules, with no say on those rules."
He also said that by agreeing that the U.K.'s Northern Ireland must effectively remain in a customs union with the bloc in order to avoid a hard border with EU member Ireland, "we have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution -- and handed the detonator" to the EU.
Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan tweeted that the comments marked "one of the most disgusting moments in modern British politics" and should be "the political end of Boris Johnson."
Conservative lawmaker Tom Tugendhat, a former army officer, said on Twitter that he had seen the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Afghanistan, and "comparing the PM to that isn't funny." He said that Johnson should "grow up."
-- Compiled by Democrat-Gazette staff from wire reports
A Section on 09/10/2018