1. S. Korea offers military talks with North South Korea on Monday offered military and Red Cross talks with North Korea to ease military tensions along the inter-Korean border and resume humanitarian* exchange between the two sides. Vice Defense Minister Suh Choo-suk said in a statement that South Korea proposed holding military talks with the North on Friday at Tongilgak, a building in the North side of the truce village of Panmunjom. The dialogue was aimed at stopping all hostile acts that escalate military tensions near the military demarcation* line dividing the two Koreas, the vice minister said. 2. Nine dead in flash flood in Arizona Nine people died and a 13-year-old boy was missing on Sunday after their group of family and friends was swept away while cooling off in a creek that suddenly turned treacherous* when a rainstorm upstream* unleashed* floodwaters in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest in the United States. Gila County Sheriff’s Detective David Hornung said that the group from the Phoenix and Flagstaff areas had met up for a daytrip along the popular Cold Springs swimming hole near Payson in central Arizona and were playing in the water on Saturday afternoon when muddy floodwaters came roaring down the canyon. 3. Zhang’s kidnapping suspect indicted A U.S. federal grand jury in Urbana indicted a former University of Illinois doctoral candidate on July 12 in the disappearance of a Chinese visiting scholar last month, federal prosecutors said. Brendt Christensen, 28, is charged with kidnapping Zhang Yingying from near a bus stop on the Urbana-Champaign campus on June 9. Christensen, of Champaign, will now formally enter a plea to the charges at an arraignment* scheduled for tomorrow, one of his attorneys, Thomas Bruno, said. 4. Ex-Brazil leader sentenced for graft Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has been convicted of taking bribes and money laundering in a massive corruption scandal that has swept the country’s political establishment. Brazilian federal judge Sergio Moro, who is leading the multi-billion dollar corruption probe known as Carwash, sentenced the 71-year-old to nine and a half years in prison on July 12. Lula will remain free on appeal. Moro found Lula guilty of accepting US$1.2 million worth of bribes from the engineering firm OAS SA. 5. Chinese sisters died from suffocation The two Chinese sisters whose bodies were dumped in woodland in Japan died of suffocation* after being strangled*, according to a police autopsy* report on Friday. It also noted that the color of parts of their skin was unusual, the reason for which remains unknown. The bodies of the sisters were discovered on Thursday in luggage abandoned in a forest in Kanagawa Prefecture, according to Kyodo News Agency reports. Chen Baolan, aged 25, and 22-year-old Chen Baoling worked in restaurants in Yokohama, and reportedly went missing on July 6. A friend said they had tried to get in touch with Baolan but received no reply. Later in the day a friend of the younger sister, Baoling, said that she had been absent from work without reason. 6. Turkey fires 7,400 civil servants Almost 7,400 police, soldiers, civil servants and academics have been dismissed from their posts in Turkey as the country marked one year since an attempted coup* against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday. Erdogan joined a massive, flag-waving crowd near the iconic July 15 Martyrs’ Bridge in Istanbul to remember 250 people who died on July 15, 2016 resisting the coup. (SD-Agencies) | 