Disaster

At least two people died and 30 suffered injuries when an Amtrak train collided with a backhoe on the tracks at approximately 7:53 am near Booth Street in Chester, causing the lead engine of the train to derail.  Service has been suspended along the Northeast Corridor in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. According to Amtrak, there were 341 passengers and seven crewmembers on board Palmetto train 89 at the time of the incident, which took place in Chester, Delaware County.

Canadian television broadcaster and federal politician Jean Lapierre has been killed in a plane crash just hours before a scheduled meeting with representatives from the Sanders and Trump campaign.  Russia have called Lapierre’s death as a “deliberate terrorist act” – saying his anti-establishment views posed a threat to Western leaders.

North Korea have warned its citizens to brace themselves for a possible famine and extremely severe economic hardship in the comings months.  State-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun published an editorial saying that the “the road to revolution is long and arduous,” warning citizens that they may have to go “on an arduous march, during which we will have to chew the roots of plants once again,” in reference to the famine in the 1990’s which killed 3 million people.

Hopefully, this will remain an isolated case. Bird flu has been found in ducks belonging to a South Korean poultry farm – the first case of the dangerous flu in 4 months Yahoo News reports: The case involved a strain known as H5N8, the same type of influenza that occurred last November.  All 11,604 ducks at the infected farm in the city of Icheon, 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Seoul have been slaughtered, the official said.

The AP reports on the starvation of Yemen and its terrible effects:

The spread of hunger has been the most horrific consequence of Yemen’s war since Saudi Arabia and its allies, backed by the United States, launched a campaign of airstrikes and a naval blockade a year ago. The impoverished nation of 26 million people, which imports 90 percent of its food, already had one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world, but in the past year the statistics have leaped.