Category: Nation World News Wires

SEOUL, South Korea — Former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was found guilty of leading an insurrection on Thursday and sentenced to life in prison for his brief imposition of martial law in 2024, a ruling that marks a dramatic culmination of the country’s biggest political crisis in decades.

The conservative leader was ousted from office after he declared martial law and sent troops to surround the National Assembly on Dec. 3, 2024, in a baffling attempt to overcome a legislature controlled by his liberal opponents.

Judge Jee Kui-youn of the Seoul Central District Court said he found Yoon, 65, guilty of rebellion for mobilizing military and police forces in an illegal attempt to seize the Assembly, arrest political opponents and establish unchecked power for an indefinite period.

Martial law crisis recalled dictatorial past

Yoon’s martial law imposition, the first of its kind in more than four decades, recalled South Korea’s past military-backed governments when authorities occasionally proclaimed emergency decrees that allowed them to station soldiers, tanks, and armored vehicles on streets or in public places such as schools to prevent anti-government demonstrations.

As lawmakers rushed to the National Assembly, Yoon’s martial law command issued a proclamation declaring sweeping powers, including suspending political activities, controlling the media and publications, and allowing arrests without warrants.

The decree lasted about six hours before being lifted after a quorum of lawmakers managed to break through a military blockade and unanimously voted to lift the measure.

Yoon was suspended from office on Dec. 14, 2024, after being impeached by lawmakers and was formally removed by the Constitutional Court in April 2025. He has been under arrest since last July while facing multiple criminal trials, with the rebellion charge carrying the most severe punishment.

Yoon’s lawyers reject conviction

An expressionless Yoon gazed straight ahead as the judge delivered the sentence in the same courtroom where former military rulers and presidents have been convicted of treason, corruption and other crimes over the decades.

Yoon Kap-keun, one of the former president’s lawyers, accused the judge of issuing a “predetermined verdict” based solely on prosecutors’ arguments and said the “rule of law” had collapsed. He said he would discuss whether to appeal with his client and the rest of the legal team.

Former President Yoon claimed in court that the martial law decree was only meant to raise public awareness of how the liberals were paralyzing state affairs, and that he was prepared to respect lawmakers if they voted against the measure.

Prosecutors said it was clear Yoon was attempting to disable the legislature and prevent lawmakers from lifting the measure through voting, actions that exceeded his constitutional authority even under martial law.

The court also convicted and sentenced five former military and police officials involved in enforcing Yoon’s martial law decree. They included ex-Defense Minister Kim Yong Hyun, who received a 30-year jail term for his central role in planning the measure, mobilizing the military and instructing military counterintelligence officials to arrest 14 key politicians, including National Assembly speaker Woo Won-shik and current liberal President Lee Jae Myung.

In announcing Yoon and Kim’s verdicts, Jee said the decision to send troops to the National Assembly was key to his determination that the imposition of martial law amounted to rebellion.

“This court finds that the purpose of [Yoon’s] actions was to send troops to the National Assembly, block the Assembly building and arrest key figures, including the National Assembly speaker and the leaders of both the ruling and opposition parties, in order to prevent lawmakers from gathering to deliberate or vote,” Jee said. “It’s sufficiently established that he intended to obstruct or paralyze the Assembly’s activities so that it would be unable to properly perform its functions for a considerable period of time.”

Protesters rally outside court

As Yoon arrived in court, hundreds of police officers watched closely as Yoon supporters rallied outside a judicial complex, their cries rising as the prison bus transporting him drove past. Yoon’s critics gathered nearby, demanding the death penalty.

There were no immediate reports of major clashes following the verdict.

A special prosecutor had demanded the death penalty for Yoon Suk Yeol, saying his actions posed a threat to the country’s democracy and deserved the most serious punishment available, but most analysts had expected a life sentence since the poorly planned power grab did not result in casualties.

South Korea has not executed a death-row inmate since 1997, in what is widely seen as a de facto moratorium on capital punishment amid calls for its abolition.

Jung Chung-rae, leader of the liberal Democratic Party, which led the push to impeach and remove Yoon, expressed regret that the court stopped short of the death penalty, saying the ruling reflected a “lack of a sense of justice.”

Song Eon-seok, floor leader of the conservative People Power Party, to which Yoon once belonged, issued a public apology, saying the party feels a “deep sense of responsibility” for the disruption to the nation.

The office of current President Lee Jae Myung did not immediately comment on the ruling.

Other officials sentenced for enforcing martial law

Last month, Yoon was sentenced to five years in prison for resisting arrest, fabricating the martial law proclamation, and sidestepping a legally mandated full cabinet meeting before declaring the measure.

The Seoul Central Court had previously convicted two other members of Yoon’s Cabinet in connection with the martial law debacle. That includes Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who received a 23-year prison sentence for attempting to legitimize the decree by forcing it through a Cabinet Council meeting, falsifying records and lying under oath. Han has appealed the verdict.

Yoon is the first former South Korean president to receive a life sentence since former military dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who was sentenced to death in 1996 for his 1979 coup, a bloody 1980 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Gwangju that left more than 200 people dead or missing, and corruption.

The Supreme Court later reduced his sentence to life imprisonment, and he was released in late 1997 under a special presidential pardon. He died in 2021.

NEVADA CITY, Calif. — Crews found the bodies of eight backcountry skiers near California’s Lake Tahoe and were searching for one more after they were caught in an avalanche, the nation’s deadliest in nearly half a century, authorities said Wednesday.

Authorities said the skiers had little time to react.

“Someone saw the avalanche, yelled avalanche, and it overtook them rather quickly,” said Capt. Russell “Rusty” Greene, of the Nevada County sheriff’s office.

Six from the guided tour were rescued six hours after the avalanche hit Tuesday morning during a three-day trek in Northern California’s Sierra Nevada, as a monster winter storm pummeled the West Coast.

Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon said investigators would look into the decision to proceed with the trip despite the forecast for relentless weather.

Authorities have told the families the mission has moved from rescuing people to recovering bodies, Moon said during a news conference.

The victims, including three guides, were found fairly close together, Greene said. The dead and missing include seven women and two men, ranging in ages from 30 to 55. The crews have not yet been able to remove the victims from the mountain because of the extreme conditions, the sheriff said.

Three to six feet of snow has fallen since Sunday, when the group started its trip. The area was also hit by subfreezing temperatures and gale force winds. The Sierra Avalanche Center said the threat of more avalanches remained Wednesday and left the snowpack unstable and unpredictable in an area known for its steep, craggy cliffs.

Rescuers were guided by beacons and a cell phone in dangerous conditions

Rescuers reached the survivors just before sunset on Tuesday.

The skiers all had beacons that can send signals to rescuers and at least one of the guides was able to send texts, but it wasn’t clear if they were wearing avalanche bags, which are inflatable devices that can keep skiers near the surface, Greene said.

While they waited to be rescued, the survivors used equipment to shelter themselves and fend off temperatures dipping below freezing. The survivors located three others who had died during the wait, Moon said.

Rescuers used a snowcat to get within 2 miles of the survivors, then skied in carefully so they didn’t set off another avalanche, the sheriff said.

One of those rescued remains in a hospital Wednesday, Moon said.

The area near Donner Summit is one of the snowiest places in the Western Hemisphere and until just a few years ago was closed to the public. It sees an average of nearly 35 feet of snow a year, according to the Truckee Donner Land Trust, which owns a cluster of huts where the group was staying near Frog Lake.

The avalanche is the deadliest in the U.S. since 1981, when 11 climbers were killed on Mount Rainier, Wash. Each winter, 25 to 30 people die in avalanches in the U.S., according to the National Avalanche Center.

It was the second deadly avalanche near California’s Castle Peak this year, after a snowmobiler was buried by one in January.

Skiers were heading for the trailhead when the avalanche struck

Greene said authorities were notified about the avalanche by Blackbird Mountain Guides, which was leading the expedition, and the skiers’ emergency beacons. The sheriff’s office said Tuesday night that 15 backcountry skiers had been on the trip, not 16 as initially believed.

One skier had pulled out at the last minute, Moon said.

Authorities were waiting to release the victims’ names to give the families time. “They’re still reeling,” Moon said. “I could not imagine what they’re going through.”

The skiers were on the last day of the backcountry trip and had spent two nights in the huts, said Steve Reynaud, an avalanche forecaster with the Sierra Avalanche Center. He said the area requires navigating rugged mountainous terrain. All food and supplies need to be carried to the huts.

Reaching the huts in winter takes several hours and requires backcountry skills, avalanche training and safety equipment, the land trust says on its website.

The area near Donner Summit was closed for nearly a century before it was reopened by the land trust and its partners in 2020. Donner Summit is named for the infamous Donner Party, a group of pioneers who resorted to cannibalism after getting trapped there in the winter of 1846-1847.

Blackbird Mountain Guides said in a statement that the group, including four guides, was returning to the trailhead when the avalanche occurred.

When asked what went through her mind as her staff and volunteers responded to the scene, Moon said she was hoping they would be able to make it there safely. Once they did, she said she was “immediately thinking of the folks that didn’t make it, and knowing our mission now is to get them home.”

DNA from gloves found a few miles from the Arizona home of Nancy Guthrie did not match any entries in a national database, authorities said Tuesday, the 17th day of her disappearance.

“There were no DNA hits in CODIS,” the Pima County Sheriff’s Department said, referring to the national Combined DNA Index System.

“At this point, there have been no confirmed CODIS matches in this investigation,” the department said, suggesting that other DNA samples had been put through the system.

CODIS is a storehouse of DNA taken from crime suspects or people with convictions. Any hits could identify possible suspects in Guthrie’s disappearance.

The sheriff’s department said it’s looking to feed DNA evidence into other “genetic genealogy” databases. It did not elaborate.

Investigators, meanwhile, were seen inspecting exterior cameras at a neighbor’s house Tuesday. Vehicles were also arriving and departing from Guthrie’s Tucson-area home while a thick line of news media watched from the street.

The 84-year-old mother of NBC Today co-anchor Savannah Guthrie was reported missing from her home on Feb. 1 after spending the previous night with family, police said. Her blood was detected on the porch.

A porch camera recorded video of a man with a backpack who was wearing a ski mask, long pants, a jacket and gloves. The FBI said the suspect is about 5 feet, 9 inches tall with a medium build.

Gloves were found about 2 miles from Guthrie’s home. The FBI has said that the gloves appeared to match those worn by the man in the video.

“There is additional DNA evidence that was found at the residence, and that is also being analyzed,” the sheriff’s department said.

In addition, the department said it’s working with experts to try to locate Guthrie by detecting her heart pacemaker.

Parsons Corp. said its BlueFly device, which weighs less than a pound and has a range of up to 218 yards, can detect signals from wearable electronics and medical devices. The company said the technology has been used from the air and on the ground in Arizona. It declined further comment about the search.

The sheriff’s department released numbers to show how the public is reacting to Guthrie’s disappearance and the appeal for any information. There were 28,000 phone calls from Feb. 1-16, a 54% increase over the same period a year ago. Not all calls were tips.

Savannah Guthrie posted an Instagram video Sunday in which she issued an appeal to anyone with information about what happened to her mother.

“It is never too late to do the right thing,” she said. “And we are here. And we believe in the essential goodness of every human being, that it’s never too late.”

ILULISSAT, Greenland — When he was growing up in a village in northern Greenland, Jørgen Kristensen’s closest friends were his stepfather’s sled dogs. Most of his classmates were dark-haired Inuit; he was different. When he was bullied at school for his fair hair — an inheritance from the mainland Danish father he never knew — the dogs came to him.

He first went out to fish on the ice with them alone when he was 9 years old. They nurtured the beginning of a lifelong love affair and Kristensen’s career as a five-time Greenlandic dog sled champion.

“I was just a small child. But many years later, I started thinking about why I love dogs so much,” Kristensen, 62, told the Associated Press.

“The dogs were a great support,” he said. “They lifted me up when I was sad.”

For more than 1,000 years, dogs have pulled sleds across the Arctic for Inuit seal hunters and fishermen. But this winter, in the town of Ilulissat, around 186 miles north of the Arctic Circle, that’s not possible.

Instead of gliding over snow and ice, Kristensen’s sled bounces over earth and rock. Gesturing to the hills, he said it’s the first time he can remember when there has been no snow — or ice in the bay — in January.

The rising temperatures in Ilulissat are causing the permafrost to melt, buildings to sink, and pipes to crack but they also have consequences that ripple across the rest of the world.

The nearby Sermeq Kujalleq glacier is one of the fastest-moving and most active on the planet, sending more icebergs into the sea than any other glacier outside Antarctica, according to the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO. As the climate has warmed, the glacier has retreated and carved off chunks of ice faster than ever before — significantly contributing to sea levels that are rising from Europe to the Pacific Islands, according to NASA.

The melting ice could reveal untapped deposits of critical minerals. Many Greenlanders believe that’s why President Donald Trump turned their island into a geopolitical hot spot with his demands to own it and previous suggestions that the U.S. could take it by force.

In the 1980s, winter temperatures in Ilulissat regularly hovered around -13 Fahrenheit in winter, Kristensen said.

But nowadays, he said, there are many days when the temperature is above freezing — sometimes it can be as warm as 50 degrees.

Kristensen said he now has to collect snow for the dogs to drink during a journey because there isn’t any along the route.

Although Greenlanders have always adapted — and could make dog sleds with wheels in future — the loss of the ice is affecting them deeply, said Kristensen, who now runs his own company showing tourists his Arctic homeland.

“If we lose the dog sledding, we have large parts of our culture that we’re losing. That scares me,” he told AP, pressing his lips together and becoming tearful.

The sea ice is disappearing

In winter, hunters should be able to take their dogs far out on the sea ice, Kristensen told AP. The ice sheets act like “big bridges,” connecting Greenlanders to hunting grounds but also to other Inuit communities across the Arctic in Canada, the United States, and Russia.

“When the sea ice used to come, we felt completely open along the entire coast and we could decide where to go,” Kristensen said.

This January, there was no ice at all.

Driving a dog sled on ice is like being “completely without boundaries — like on the world’s longest and widest highway,” he said. Not having that is “a very great loss.”

Several years ago, Greenland’s government had to provide financial support to many families in the far north of the island after the sea ice did not freeze hard enough for hunting, said Sara Olsvig, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents Inuit people from across Arctic nations.

The warming weather also makes life more dangerous for fishermen who have swapped their dog sleds for boats, because there is more rain instead of snow, said Morgan Angaju Josefsen Røjkjær, Kristensen’s business partner.

When snow falls and is compressed, air is trapped between the flakes, giving the ice its brilliant white color. But when rain freezes, the ice that forms contains little air and looks more like glass.

A fisherman can see the white ice and try to avoid it, but the ice formed from rain takes on the color of the sea — and that’s dangerous because “it can sink you or throw you off your boat,” said Røjkjær.

Climate change, Olsvig said, “is affecting us deeply,” and is amplified in the Arctic, which is “warming three to four times faster than the global average.”

The glaciers are melting

Over the course of his lifetime, the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier has retreated by about 25 miles, said Karl Sandgreen, 46, the head of Ilulissat’s Icefjord Center, which is dedicated to documenting the glacier and its icebergs.

Looking out of the window at hills which would normally be covered with snow, Sandgreen described mountain rock revealed by melting ice and a previously ice-covered valley inside the fjord where “there’s nothing now.”

Pollution is also speeding up the ice melt, Sandgreen said, describing how Sermeq Kujalleq is melting from the top down, unlike glaciers in Antarctica which largely melt from the bottom up as sea temperatures rise.

This is exacerbated by two things: black carbon, or soot spewed from ship engines, and debris from volcanic eruptions. They blanket the snow and ice with dark material and reduce reflection of sunlight, instead absorbing more heat and speeding up melting. Black carbon has increased in recent decades with more ship traffic in the Arctic, and nearby Iceland has periodic volcanic eruptions.

Many Greenlanders told AP they believe the melting ice is the reason Trump — a leader who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever” — wants to own the island.

“His agenda is to get the minerals,” Sandgreen said.

Since Trump returned to office, fewer climate scientists from the U.S. have visited Ilulissat, Sandgreen said. The U.S president needs to “listen to the scientists,” who are documenting the impact of global warming, he said.

Teaching children about climate change

Kristensen said he tries to explain the consequences of global warming to the tourists who he takes out on dog sled rides or on visits to the icebergs. He said he tells them how Greenland’s glaciers are as important as the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

International summits, such as the United Nations climate talks in November in the Amazon gateway city of Belem, play a role, but it’s just as important to “teach children all over the world” about the importance of ice and oceans, alongside subjects like math, Kristensen said

“If we don’t start with the children, we can’t really do anything to help nature. We can only destroy it,” Kristensen said.