South Korea grounded firefighting helicopters following a fatal crash on Wednesday as authorities struggle to contain “unprecedented” wildfires that have ravaged the country’s southeast, killing at least 19 people and destroying a centuries-old Buddhist temple.

The helicopter crashed while working to contain a fast-spreading fire in Uiseong County, located more than 125 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of the capital Seoul, according to local fire officials. The pilot, the only person onboard, was confirmed dead.

At least 19 people have been killed and 19 others injured as wildfires fueled by dry air and strong winds rage in the country’s southern regions, threatening several historic sites, according to a situation report released by the Interior Safety Ministry.

Among those killed were four civil servants dispatched to fight the wildfire, authorities said.

The 1,300-year-old Gounsa temple in Uiseong County, a major Buddhist landmark, was burned to the ground with its ceremonial bell the only piece appearing somewhat intact, according to photos from the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism.

Some of the artifacts that were in the historic site, including the seated stone Buddha designated a treasure by the state, were spared from the fire as they were relocated to other temples ahead of the approaching blazes, it added.

More than 10,000 firefighters, police and civil servants have been deployed to multiple areas in the south since dozens of blazes broke out over the weekend, authorities said.

As of Wednesday, the fires had burned more than 17,398 hectares (nearly 43,000 acres) of land, officials said.

Han Duck-soo, South Korea’s prime minister and acting president, said the fires were the worst the country has seen in recent years and had caused “unprecedented damage.”

“We need to focus all our capabilities on extinguishing wildfires for the rest of this week as we’re concerned about unprecedented wildfire damages,” Han told reporters.

Officials in Andong and other southeastern areas ordered residents to evacuate on Tuesday as strong and dry winds hampered efforts to contain the blazes. As of Wednesday, 68% of the fire in Uiseong and Andong had been contained, according to authorities.

In recent days, the wildfires have spread across the Uiseong area and reached dangerously close to the historic Hahoe Folk Village in Andong, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Residents of the village have been asked to evacuate and firefighters have sought to protect the traditional homes, known as “hanoks,” by deploying water around the site’s perimeter.

The wildfires broke out Friday after a spark from a lawn mower ignited in Sancheong, South Gyeongsang province, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Seoul.

The government declared a state of emergency for Ulsan city, South and North Gyeongsang provinces on Saturday. The Korea Forest Service raised its wildfire warning to the highest “serious” level nationwide Tuesday, urging local governments to assign more resources to emergency response and tighten entry restrictions for forests and parks.

As of Wednesday, wildfires were still active in several areas of North and South Gyeongsang and Ulsan city.

Authorities have issued a dry weather alert for the affected areas and wider southeastern regions, however officials hope rain forecasted for Thursday will assist firefighters in their efforts to put out the blazes.

Wildfires are not unusual in South Korea, particularly in February, March and April when conditions are driest.

However, Han said this year has been particularly bad – with 244 wildfires reported, 2.4 times higher than the same period last year.

“We sincerely ask the people to pay special attention and cooperate to prevent wildfires so that our neighbors do not have to suffer the same pain due to large-scale wildfires that repeat every year,” Han said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada must “look out for (itself)” as the fallout over top US officials sharing military operation details inside a popular messaging app reverberates among key intelligence allies and partners.

“It’s a serious, serious issue and all lessons must be taken from any of those, including in this circumstance,” Carney told reporters on a campaign trail stop in Halifax, Nova Scotia Tuesday ahead of the country’s April 28 election.

Canada has long been one of the US’s closest allies, though the relationship has deteriorated in recent months since President Donald Trump threatened to enact sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods and annex the country as the “51st state.”

“We have a very strong intelligence partnership with the Americans through Five Eyes,” Carney said, referring to the intelligence-sharing alliance between Canada, the US, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

“Mistakes do happen, but what’s important is how people react to those mistakes and how they tighten them up,” Carney said.

Carney said the likely leak of sensitive military plans by senior US officials means Canadians must “look out for ourselves.”

“My responsibility is to plan for the worst, is to think about the most difficult evolution of the new threat environment, what it means for Canada and how do we best protect Canada,” Carney said. “Part of that response is to be more and more Canadian in our defense capabilities, more and more Canadian in our decisions, to take greater ownership.”

Other Five Eyes allies have been tighter lipped about the apparent intelligence leak.

A spokesperson for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer insisted nothing was awry in the UK-US relationship.

“We have a very close relationship with the US on matters of security, defense and intelligence,” spokesman Dave Pares told the Associated Press. “They are our closest ally when it comes to these matters, have been for many years and will be for many years to come.”

France’s foreign ministry said “the United States is our ally, and France intends to continue its cooperation with Washington, as well as with all its allies and European partners, in order to address current challenges — particularly in the area of European security,” according to the AP.

“Australia and the United States engage regularly on implementation of mutually recognised standards for the protection of classified material,” they said in a statement.

A spokesperson for New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon declined to comment.

The two most important things in Jerce Reyes’s life, according to those who know him best, are family and soccer.

The former professional soccer player’s tattoos are a testament to those passions: of a soccer ball and other symbols on his left arm, as well as the names of his two daughters, which were all inked by his friend Victor Mengual.

Little did this Venezuelan player know that some of those drawings would, years later, lead to him being placed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in the United States in September.

This month, the 35-year-old was among the hundreds of Venezuelan deportees transferred to El Salvador’s most notorious prison after US President Donald Trump invoked an 18th century law to deport hundreds of undocumented migrants to the Central American country.

Part of the reasoning for Reyes’s deportation, US authorities argue, lies on his arms, which they say is evidence of his membership to an infamous Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.

But Mengual, who works as a tattoo artist in Venezuela and tattooed Reyes twice in 2018 and 2023, says this is all a misunderstanding.

Below the crown, Mengual had tattooed the word “Dios,” which means God in Spanish and is also the nickname of the late Argentinian soccer star Diego Armando Maradona.

Other tattoos Mengual drew on Reyes are the names of his daughters, Isabela and Carla Antonella, a map of Venezuela, a star, and a goalkeeper, his position on the pitch, he said.

US authorities have linked certain tattoos to the criminal group. Guidance on Tren de Aragua from the Texas Department of Public Safety states that tattoos of crowns, roses or stars are all widely used by the gang members, while two of its mottos include the words Real and Dios.

“It’s so unjust!” Mengual despaired. “I’ve read in the news that Tren de Aragua uses crowns or roses, but, so what? I don’t understand why an innocent man has to pay for it?”

‘This is not true’

In southern Mexico, Reyes’s partner denies the accusations against him.

The deportee’s lawyer Tobin said Reyes left the Venezuelan city of Machiques last March following political unrest. He arrived in Mexico and registered on the CBP One app, a Biden-era mechanism for migrants to legally enter the US.

Records show Reyes entered the US on September 1 for an appointment with migration authorities but was immediately detained, accused of being a gangster, and placed in ICE custody.

She also showed reels of Reyes’s performances as a soccer player in Venezuela’s First and Second Divisions.

In December, Reyes and Tobin applied for asylum and withholding of removal and he was granted a hearing to present his case based on the political situation in Venezuela. A few months later, Trump was inaugurated and quickly launched an immigration crackdown.

According to his lawyer, Reyes is still due to appear in front of an immigration judge in San Diego on April 17.

On March 16, Araujo started scrolling through videos shared on social media by the Salvadorean presidency showing the deportees’ arrivals at the Counter-Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum-security prison designed to hold El Salvador’s gangsters.

Amid clips showing deportees frog-marched in white uniforms towards their cell, Araujo was able to spot someone resembling her partner.

The following day Tobin got confirmation that Reyes had indeed been deported. His name later appeared in a list of deportees first published by CBS News, as claims of innocence from the families of the deportees began to sprout across the media.

“He’s innocent, and it’s not only the family who says it, everyone who knows Jerce knows this is not true,” Araujo claims.

A community calls for his release

In Reyes’ hometown Machiques, a small, rural city close to the border with Colombia, his old club Perijaneros FC is starting a campaign to demanding his release.

In footage shared on Instagram and TikTok, children from the soccer school recite a prayer for their former coach, who left town like so many others looking for a better future abroad.

In the last decade, more than eight million Venezuelans have fled economic crisis and political repression under President Nicolas Maduro, who criticized the US and El Salvador for “kidnapping” his fellow citizens last week.

When the news broke that he had been deported to El Salvador, the community was shocked, he said.

“I don’t understand, how can you take a person and put it in a cell without a thorough investigation? How could they not look into this before condemning a person?”

A light earthquake rattled Beijing overnight, waking residents and sending students rushing from their dorms as videos of shaking living rooms went viral on Chinese social media on Wednesday.

The 4.5-magnitude quake struck a suburb of the nearby port city of Tianjin at 01:21 a.m. local time at a depth of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

The China Earthquake Networks Center measured the quake at a magnitude of 4.2 and a depth of 20 kilometers (12.4 miles), placing the epicenter in Yongqing county in neighboring Hebei province.

The epicenter was only 13 kilometers from Beijing at the closest point, the Beijing Earthquake Agency said, with tremors felt strongly in some areas of the Chinese capital.

“It did not cause any structural damage to buildings in the city and will not impact the normal functioning of daily life or production,” the agency said in an statement. The quake would not influence seismic activity in the city, it added.

Beijing, a metropolis of 22 million people, has periodically been affected by tremors from earthquakes nearby. The Beijing plain is a seismically active area and home to more than a dozen seismic fault lines, including one that runs from the city’s Shunyi district in the northeast through downtown.

But for many residents, tremors strong enough to wake them in the middle of the night were a novel experience.

The quake was among the top trending topics on Chinese social media platforms on Wednesday, with many Beijingers posting videos of swaying ceiling lights and sharing their experiences of waking up to their bedrooms quivering.

“I made a quick judgment and decided not to run – because I didn’t feel any tremors, and my phone showed that both the magnitude of the epicenter and the level expected to reach Beijing were low,” she said.

Chirimiri Li, a university student in the capital, took no chances after being woken by a loud ring on her roommate’s cellphone. She said she initially thought the alarm was set for the wrong time and was about to ask her roommate to turn it off.

“That’s when I realized the slight shaking I had felt earlier wasn’t from staying up too late – it was actually an earthquake,” Li said.

“I immediately woke up the rest of our dorm and told everyone there was an earthquake. When we opened the door, we saw people already running outside, so we figured it’s better to be safe than sorry and ran out too. By then, the shaking had already stopped.”

The students stayed in an open area for about half an hour before the crowd gradually started to head back.

“I was a bit scared when I first told everyone about the earthquake, but once we all decided to run out together, we calmed down,” Li said, adding that the only other quake she remembered in Beijing was back when she was in kindergarten.

On Chinese social media, some noted that most users who shared their experiences of running outside were students.

“Nothing happened in my residential complex,” one comment said.

“Office workers have already become lazy and numb — wearing eye masks and earplugs to sleep, completely unaware of anything going on,” said another.

South Korea’s government fabricated birth records, falsely reported children had been abandoned and failed to properly conduct safety checks of prospective parents during its postwar frenzy of sending babies overseas for adoption, a long-awaited investigation reported on Wednesday.

Authorities say more than 200,000 South Korean children have been adopted overseas since the 1950s, when the impoverished country was rebuilding from the devastation of World War II and the Korean War – giving rise to a massive and lucrative adoption industry.

Many of those adopted children, now adults scattered across the globe and trying to trace their origins, have accused agencies of coercion and deception, including in some cases forcibly removing them from their mothers.

On Wednesday, the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its findings on the first 100 cases analyzed out of 367 total petitions filed by adoptees sent overseas between 1964 and 1999.

The adoptees hail from 11 different countries – and many believed their adoptions could have been the result of corruption and malpractice, suspicions that have swirled among the Korean adoptee community for years.

Of those first 100 cases, 56 were identified as “victims” of the government’s negligence, which amounted to a violation of their rights under the Korean constitution and international convention, the commission found.

Part of the problem was that adoptions were almost entirely run by private agencies relying on donations, without government oversight, said Commissioner Lee Sang-hoon at a news conference announcing the findings on Wednesday.

“When adoption agencies depend on donations from adoptive parents, they are pressured to continue sending children abroad to sustain their operations. This structure increases the risk of illegal adoptions,” Lee said.

The commission found evidence of fabricated records, including “deliberate identity substitution” and false reports that the children being adopted had been abandoned by their birth parents. Often there was lack of proper parental consent for adoption, the commission said.

The adoption process was also riddled with problems – including inadequate screening of adoptive parents, neglect from guardians caring for the children, and cases where foreign adoptive parents were pressured to pay to be given a child.

The report gave one example of a woman who signed an adoption consent form the day after giving birth. An adoption agency then took custody of the child after conducting just one interview with the mother, without obtaining any documentation verifying her identity or proving the biological relationship.

The investigation of more than 300 cases began in 2022 and is due to end in May. The latest findings add to a growing list of evidence of deeply rooted, widespread malpractice and coercion in what the commission called a mass exportation of children to meet foreign demand.

It recommended that the government offer an official apology, conduct a comprehensive survey of adoptees’ citizenship status and come up with remedies for victims whose identities were falsified.

“It’s been a long wait for everybody,” said Han Boon-young, who grew up in Denmark and who was one of the 100 adoptees whose cases were heard by the commission. “And so now we do get a victory. It is a victory.”

However, she said she hadn’t been designated a “victim” because of insufficient documentation.

“If they say, we recognize that this is state violence, then how can they not recognize those who don’t have much information? Because that’s really at the core of our issues, that we don’t have information … it’s been falsified, it’s been altered,” she said on Wednesday after the report’s release.

“We’ve had no rights because we don’t have any documents in the first place… This is about human rights – it goes beyond individual cases.”

While adoptions continue today, the trend has been declining since the 2010s after South Korea amended its adoption laws in an effort to address systemic issues and reduce the number of children adopted overseas.

US President Donald Trump told Newsmax he believes Russia wants to end its war with Ukraine, but that Moscow could be “dragging its feet.”

“I think that Russia wants to see an end to it, but it could be they’re dragging their feet. I’ve done it over the years,” the president told the right-wing cable channel in an interview that aired Tuesday night.

“I think Russia would like to see it end and I think Zelensky would like to see it end, at this point,” Trump said.

His comments came only hours after Russia said it would only implement a US-brokered deal to stop using force in the Black Sea once sanctions imposed on its banks and exports over of its invasion of Ukraine are lifted.

Following days of separate negotiations with Ukrainian and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia, the White House said the two sides had agreed “to ensure safe navigation, eliminate the use of force, and prevent the use of commercial vessels for military purposes in the Black Sea” while also agreeing to implement a previously announced pause on attacks against energy infrastructure.

While Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed in a news conference that Ukraine had agreed to stop using military force in the Black Sea, the Kremlin released its own statement on the talks, which included far-reaching conditions for signing up to the partial truce.

Those included lifting sanctions on its agricultural bank and other financial institutions and companies involved in exporting food and their re-connection to the US-controlled SWIFT international payments system.

On Tuesday afternoon, Trump told reporters that his administration was looking at Russia’s conditions. “We’re thinking about all of them right now. There are five or six conditions. We are looking at all of them,” the president said.

Ukrainian and US officials have said the deal to halt strikes in the Black Sea would be a potentially significant step forward, despite it falling short of the 30-day full ceasefire initially proposed by the White House.