Russian President Vladimir Putin lands in Beijing for talks with China’s Xi Jinping
Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Contributor/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beijing on Tuesday ahead of talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Putin was welcomed by Chinese officials, including Foreign Minister Wang Yi, upon landing late Tuesday local time at an airport in Beijing.
On Wednesday, talks between Putin and Xi are set to occur at the Grand Hall of the People, followed by a formal reception, according to the Kremlin.
The two leaders “will discuss China-Russia relations, cooperation in various fields and international and regional issues of mutual interest,” the spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
The state visit marks Putin’s 25th trip to China, according to the spokesperson.
The two discussed the U.S. war in Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, fentanyl and increasing Chinese purchases of American farm products, according to a White House official.
Xi also warned that if the issue of Taiwan is handled “improperly,” the two nations could “come into conflict,” according to China’s official state broadcaster Xinhua.
A view of the site where Mexican Army troops killed Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as ‘El Mencho,’ leader of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (Jalisco New Generation), during a federal operation in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico on February 22, 2026. (Stringer/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — President Claudia Sheinbaum said there is a “greater calm” in Mexico on Monday, a day after violence ignited in the country following the killing of the drug lord known as “El Mencho.”
Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, was killed in an operation led by Mexican authorities on Sunday in Jalisco, Mexican officials said.
Widespread cartel-organized violence erupted following his death, with vehicles set on fire, hundreds of road blockages and attacks on gas stations and businesses, according to Mexican authorities.
“Today there is greater calm,” Sheinbaum said during a press briefing Monday. “The public can rest assured that peace, security, and normalcy are being safeguarded across the country.”
Sheinbaum said that as of Monday morning, there are no longer any blockades and “normal activity has largely been restored.”
Oseguera Cervantes was one of the most wanted criminals in both Mexico and the United States. He was one of the top traffickers of fentanyl into the U.S., and last year President Donald Trump designated the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the White House said.
When Mexican forces moved in to arrest him on Sunday, “El Mencho’s security detail opened fire,” Mexico’s Secretary of National Defense Ricardo Trevilla Trejo said Monday.
El Mencho “fled the location, leaving behind a group heavily armed,” Trevilla said. “The attack by organized crime members was extremely violent.”
Mexican special forces members continued to pursue El Mencho and eventually were able to injure him and two of the bodyguards with him, according to Trevilla.
El Mencho and the two bodyguards died during the helicopter evacuation flight that was heading towards a medical facility in Jalisco, Trevilla added.
Ultimately, 25 members of the Mexican National Guard and 30 cartel members were killed in Jalisco, Mexican officials said. Four cartel members were also killed in Michoacan, officials said.
Among those killed was a “principal confidant” of El Mencho in Jalisco who was “coordinating road blockades, vehicle burnings, and attacks on military and government facilities,” Trevilla said.
Seventy cartel members have been detained across seven states, Mexican officials said Monday.
The U.S. Embassy in Mexico on Monday continued to urge Americans in locations throughout Mexico to shelter in place due to “ongoing security operations and related road blockages and criminal activity.”
“While no airports have been closed, roadblocks have impacted airline operations, with most domestic and international flights cancelled in both Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta,” the U.S. Embassy said in a security alert. “All ride shares are suspended in Puerto Vallarta. Some businesses have suspended operations.”
New data from NISAR shows where Mexico City and its environs subsided by up to a few centimeters per month (shown in blue) between Oct. 25, 2025, and Jan. 17, 2026. Uneven and seemingly small elevation changes have added up over the decades, fracturing roads, buildings, and water lines. (David Bekaert/JPL-Caltech//NASA)
(MEXICO CITY) — More than 20 million people in Mexico City are living on ground that’s sinking above an ancient reservoir.
The city has long been recognized as one of the fastest sinking sites in the world, but researchers didn’t have the ability to continuously track the movement from space until now.
NASA shared a satellite image on Wednesday from the U.S.-India satellite NISAR that captures parts of Mexico’s capital sinking by more than half an inch every single month. The space agency said the impact of those incremental changes have added up over time, leading to “fracturing roads, buildings, and water lines” across the city.
Dora Carreón-Freyre, a researcher who has studied Mexico City’s sinking for more than 25 years, has seen that damage up close in the Iztapalapa region, which she says is one of the hardest hit.
“The houses that are founded in [volcanic] rock are stable, but the houses in the middle between the rock and the lacustrine plain are already broken, most of them,” Carreón-Freyre told ABC News. “In 2017, a taxi fell inside a fracture.”
Over the years, scientists studying the city’s land subsidence, a scientific term for sinking, primarily relied on ground and space satellites that could only collect annual data.
NASA says NISAR is the first satellite to carry two radar systems at different wavelengths, allowing it to record near real-time ground movement changes from space every 12 days. For David Bekaert, a scientist who works on the NISAR mission, that frequency is what makes the data so valuable.
“This all allows us to build time series or snapshots on how the ground is moving over time,” Bekaert told ABC News.
For researchers who have spent decades studying the city on foot, the new satellite data offers something they never had before.
“To have these tools and to realize the distribution of these differential rates –it’s amazing,” Carreón-Freyre said. “Things that we only learned by walking everywhere when we were young, it’s different now. Technology is here to help us.”
The image is a compilation of data collected by NISAR between October 2025 and January 2026.
A century of sinking
Th fact that Mexico City is sinking is not new. NASA says it has been documented the changes for more than a century.
According to a 1995 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the city was already sinking roughly two inches per year by the late 1800s.
By the 1950s, that number jumped to 18 inches, the report found.
The first finding was reported by engineer Roberto Gayol in 1925, who pointed to a large canal and tunnel built to drain water out of the city’s waterlogged ground as the potential cause.
Scientists now point to a more direct culprit — decades of draining the ancient lakebed aquifer that the city was built on.
As water is pumped out, the ground above it compacts and stays that way, according to a study published by the American Geophysical Union. Think of wet clay that gets squeezed flat and hardens in place.
Still, not every part of the city sinks at the same rate, Bekaert said.
“That compaction causes the ground surface to sink, and because it doesn’t happen evenly, different parts of the city move at different rates,” Bekaert explained.
Parts of the city have lost as much as 30 feet of elevation over the last century, according to researchers, and scientists say the worst-hit areas have sunk as much as 127 feet.
NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation launched NISAR on July 30, 2025, from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
Mexico City is just the beginning when it comes to this technology, scientists say.
“More broadly, my interest lies in mapping ground motion across coastal zones, where a large proportion of the world’s population lives and understanding surface change is particularly important,” Bekaert said.
Scientists say NISAR can now continuously monitor sinking cities anywhere on Earth — a capability Carreón-Freyre says is urgently needed as that threat is already playing out elsewhere in the world.
“And what I saw in the Philippines is really terrible because they have two phenomena working together that is very bad for the population: subsidence and sea level rise,” she said. “They are sinkings 30 centimeters per year.”
The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier docks at Souda Bay on Crete Island, Greece on February 24, 2026. (Stefanos Rapanis/Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Officials from Iran and the United States opened high-stakes negotiations in Geneva on Thursday, a third round of nuclear talks that are arriving amid heightened tensions and that could prove pivotal in President Donald Trump’s decision about whether to order a military intervention.
The White House previously said it would accept nothing short of a full stop for Tehran’s uranium enrichment efforts. Trump in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night warned that Iran sought to restart that program after the United States “obliterated” it in strikes on the nation in June.
The White House in recent weeks ordered a major U.S. military buildup in the Middle East, as Trump has weighed options for possible strikes against Iran.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that Iran poses a “very great threat” to the United States, but added that the president would prefer to deal with Tehran through diplomacy. He also said Tehran appeared to be attempting to restart its nuclear program.
“You can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it,” Rubio told reporters during his trip to St. Kitts and Nevis. “They’re not enriching right now, but they’re trying to get to the point where they ultimately can.”
Officials from Oman are facilitating the indirect talks in Switzerland. The White House’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner are representing the United States.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry said early on Thursday that Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, arrived in Switzerland on Wednesday evening and met with Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, his Omani counterpart.
Araghchi during that meeting “stressed that the success of the negotiations depends on the seriousness of the other side and its avoidance of contradictory behavior and positions,” according to Iran.
Questions remained about the current state of Iran’s nuclear program, despite Trump saying it had been “obliterated” in June. Senior Israeli officials told ABC News in July that some enriched uranium may have survived the powerful U.S. strikes. Washington maintains that Iran is seeking to build nuclear weapons, a claim that Tehran has denied.
Araghchi on Tuesday appeared to agree with the White House’s efforts to stop it from building a nuclear weapon, but stopped short of saying there would be no future enrichment of any kind.
“Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon; neither will we Iranians ever forgo our right to harness the dividends of peaceful nuclear technology for our people,” Araghchi said in a social media post.
Witkoff in an interview that aired Sunday on Fox News said that Tehran was “probably a week away from having industrial-grade, bomb-making material, and that’s really dangerous.”
Witkoff and Kushner have been given an extensive remit by the White House, which has also tapped them as lead negotiators for other high-stakes talks, including those related to Russia’s war against Ukraine.
That approach has drawn some criticism, including from Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican of North Carolina, who said on Wednesday that it was “suspect” that “the same two people” would have the time to effectively manage the workload.
“It’s just not the way to project steady, strong leadership which the world needs from the United States on these very dangerous hot spots,” Tillis said.
Iran has a “positive outlook” on the talks and hopes to “move beyond this ‘neither war nor peace’ situation,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in public remarks in Farsi on Wednesday in Sari, Iran.
“Hopefully, we can move beyond this ‘neither war nor peace’ situation,” he added. “If that happens, we will then be able to remove obstacles from our path much more easily.”
