Hundreds of hikers hit by snowstorm on Mount Everest
Mount Everest 8,848 m (29,029 ft) and the Himalayas, aerial photo, Nepal, Asia./(Bim/Getty)
(SEOUL, South Korea) — Scaling the world’s highest peak is a risky adventure. But even hanging around the base camp can be dangerous, as hundreds of holiday makers being trapped when the area was hit in an unexpected blizzard over the weekend.
Taking advantage of an eight-day National Day holiday in China, many visitors and tour groups flocked to Tibet, trekking through the remote Karama Valley, which leads to the eastern side of Mount Everest, known in Tibetan as Qomolangma.
Tour groups heading to Mount Everest during the holiday were fully booked months in advance. Usually, the weather on Mt. Everest is great at this time of year. But an unexpected blizzard trapped hundreds of trekkers in the mountain.
A local government release said that, as of Sunday, 350 trekkers had reached the small township of Qudang, while authorities had made contact with the remaining 200-plus trekkers.
Qu Zhengpu, a 27-year-old experienced hiker, told ABC news he believes that there are more trekkers on the mountain with no cellphone signal, so it’s almost impossible for the rescue teams to get contact with them. Some of his experienced hiking friends even chose to stay on the mountain and wait for the snow to stop.
“This scale of snow storm is very rare this time of the year for Mount Everest, even my local friends haven’t seen that for years,” he said.
There are two trails on the China side of Mount Everest. The northern part is mostly for mountain hikers, while the eastern side for trekkers.
After hiking up the northern side of Mount Everest, astronomy photographer and mountaineering enthusiast Geshuang Chen wanted to explore and film more on the mountain, so she joined a trekking tour group this holiday, and became one of the members trapped by the blizzard.
Chen got off the mountain safely.
She told ABC News that the heavy snow storm started on the night of Oct. 4.
“The snow was so heavy, the thunder and lighting made it terrifying,” Chen said. “On the morning of the 5th, the snow was more than 3 feet deep, already up to my thigh. I barely slept for the whole night, I was so worried.”
The local government has organized a rescue team of police and villagers with yaks to go into the mountain to help the trapped trekkers. Chen said she was extremely grateful to arrive in the nearby town safely, where she was greeted by the local villagers with warm milk tea and food.
Kremlin Press Office / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images
(LONDON) — President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was greeted by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Wednesday ahead of expected talks, the Kremlin said in a short statement.
The meeting between Putin and Witkoff ended after around three hours, according to Russian state media.
Yuri Ushakov, a top aide to Putin, told reporters that the meeting was “a very useful and constructive conversation,” in comments reported by Russia’s Tass state news agency.
The two main topics discussed were “the Ukrainian crisis” and “the prospect of possible development of strategic cooperation between the United States and Russia,” Ushakov said.
“On our part, in particular on the Ukrainian issue, some signals were transmitted,” Ushakov said. “The corresponding signals were received from President Trump. Now the situation is such that our president has complete information — that is, our signals, the signals from President Trump — and the results of these conversations have not yet been reported to Trump.”
“Therefore, I would refrain from more detailed comments,” Ushakov said. “Let’s see when Witkoff will be able to report to Trump about the conversation that took place today. After that, obviously, we will be able to add my comments to something more substantial.”
Witkoff was met on his arrival in Moscow by Kirill Dmitriev — the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — at the capital’s Vnukovo Airport, according to state media agencies Tass and Interfax.
The visit is Witkoff’s fifth to Moscow since Trump took office, with the special envoy at the forefront of White House efforts to end Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
A source familiar with Witkoff’s plans told ABC News on Tuesday that the special envoy was expected to hold meetings with Russian leadership on Wednesday.
Tass reported that Witkoff and Dmitriev walked in the Zaryadye Park in central Moscow before Witkoff’s convoy traveled to the Kremlin.
Witkoff was last in Moscow on Apr. 25, when he met with Russian Putin at the Kremlin.
Last month, Trump said he would impose additional economic measures — including secondary sanctions on Russian fossil fuel export customers, the largest of which are India and China — if Putin failed to agree to a ceasefire by Aug. 8.
Trump cited Russia’s continued drone and missile strikes on Ukraine when issuing his ultimatum to the Kremlin, which was initially set at 50 days but later shortened to only 10 days. In July, Russia set a new monthly record for long-range attacks on Ukraine, per data from the Ukrainian air force, firing 6,443 drones and missiles into the country.
Ukraine is backing the U.S. demand for an immediate ceasefire, after which negotiations as to a full peace deal can take place. On Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he “coordinated” positions with Trump in a phone conversation.
“Today, we coordinated our positions — Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskyy wrote in a post to X. “We exchanged assessments of the situation: The Russians have intensified the brutality of their attacks. President Trump is fully informed about Russian strikes on Kyiv and other cities and communities.”
On Monday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Russia was open to more meetings with Witkoff. “The dialogue continues and the United States continues its efforts to mediate in the search for a Ukrainian settlement,” he said, as quoted by Tass.
“These efforts are very important, including in the context of the ongoing process of direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations,” Peskov said. “Work is continuing, and we remain committed to the idea that a political and diplomatic solution to the Ukrainian problem is, of course, our preferred option.”
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Shannon K. Kingston, Yuriy Zaliznyak and Ellie Kaufman contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — President Donald Trump again on Monday expressed frustration with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as Russian strikes on Ukraine continued despite White House efforts to broker a peace deal between the warring neighbors.
“Every conversation I have with him is a good conversation,” the president told reporters of Putin during an Oval Office executive order signing event. “And then unfortunately, a bomb is loaded up into Kyiv or someplace, and then I get very angry about it.”
Trump has repeatedly admonished Putin for Russia’s nightly strikes on Ukrainian cities. Nonetheless, the president told reporters he was still hopeful of progress towards a peace deal.
“I think we’re going to get the war done,” Trump said, though added, “You never know what’s going to happen in a war. Strange things happen in war. The fact that [Putin] went to Alaska, our country, I think, was a big statement that he wants to get it done.”
Both Russia and Ukraine continued long-range strikes through the weekend and into Monday. On Tuesday, Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 59 drones into the country overnight, of which 47 were shot down or suppressed.
The air force reported impacts of 12 drones across nine locations.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces downed at least 51 Ukrainian drones overnight into Tuesday morning, two which were en route to Moscow.
Following in-person meetings with Putin in Alaska and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — plus a host of European leaders — in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, Trump raised the hope of an imminent bilateral meeting between the Russian and Ukrainian presidents.
Zelenskyy has repeatedly expressed willingness to attend such a meeting. But Putin and his officials have consistently dodged the proposal.
“Maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” the president told ABC News Monday of the potential for the two men to meet. Trump said he had spoken to Putin since Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington, but declined to discuss the specifics of the call.
Asked if he would act if the bilateral meeting does not materialize, Trump refused to detail possible consequences but said he may act “over the next week or two.”
U.S. peace efforts continued on Monday, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaking with European counterparts and Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg traveling to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy.
For both U.S. officials, the question of future security guarantees for Ukraine to prevent future Russian aggression was a key topic of discussion.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha took part in the call with Rubio. “I reiterated Ukraine’s position that security guarantees must be concrete, legally binding and effective,” he wrote on X after. “They should be multidimensional, including military, diplomatic, legal and other levels.”
Zelenskyy said his meeting with Kellogg was “productive,” again expressing his thanks to Trump’s efforts to broker a deal and his willingness to lend U.S. backing to security guarantees.
Kellogg, meanwhile, said the U.S. side is “working very, very hard” to get “to a position where, in the near term, we have, with a lack of a better term, security guarantees. That’s a work in progress.”
PORT SUDAN CITY, Sudan — Humanitarians in Sudan, where a two-year civil war has given rise to the world’s most acute needs and made assistance increasingly difficult, warn that a vacuum left by cuts to U.S. funding for aid programs cannot be filled.
The civil war between the country’s army and a paramilitary group has displaced 11 million people internally and 4 million more are refugees in other countries. It’s the only place in the world where famine conditions have been confirmed in multiple locations, and the United Nations says 30 million Sudanese require assistance — or 60% of the country’s population.
The U.S. shuttered its arm for foreign assistance at the beginning of July, formerly the U.S. Agency for International Development, folding it under the State Department in a move Secretary of State Marco Rubio said marked the end of an “era of government-sanctioned inefficiency.” And the U.S. Senate could vote on legislation proposed by the Trump Administration as soon as this week to claw back over $8 billion in funding due to be dispersed for USAID in the remainder of the fiscal year.
“Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited,” Rubio wrote on Substack, adding the U.S. “will favor those nations that have demonstrated both the ability and willingness to help themselves and will target our resources to areas where they can have a multiplier effect.”
The months-long drawdown of USAID reduced its staff by 83% — down from 10,000 employees to a few hundred — and resulted in stop-work orders for grantees of its funds, including in Sudan. The State Department says the life-saving work of the agency, which distributes grants to aid implementers, is continuing, and said its new “America First” foreign assistance policy would be accountable to policymakers in Washington instead of global entities like the United Nations.
A senior State Department official last week called the end of USAID and the institution of a new overarching office at State “a milestone for American engagement in the world,” saying U.S. assistance abroad would be “linked up diplomatically” with U.S. interests.
The British medical journal Lancet found that in the absence of USAID’s funds and works, 14 million more people would die in the next five years, a third of those children under 5.
The senior State Department official downplayed the study.
“You can go back and relitigate all these little decisions. That’s not our focus. That’s not the secretary’s focus,” the official said. “We are excited about what sort of the America First foreign assistance agenda is going to look like, and how much impact we can have moving forward.”
Meanwhile, in the world’s most dire humanitarian crisis, where access for emergency food and medical workers has been made increasingly difficult by warring parties, people are fleeing violence on foot, children are malnourished, and Sudanese are dying from treatable conditions.
Pietro Curtaz, an emergency logistics coordinator for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, or MSF) said children he sees crossing Sudan’s border are malnourished at a rate of 29%.
The cuts to USAID — and the chaos that followed — have “come with a body count” in Sudan said Tom Perriello, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan in the last year of the Biden administration from 2024 to 2025.
There were 29 USAID employees in Sudan in 2023, at the outset of the war, according to then-administrator Samantha Powers.
The July 1 reprogramming of USAID into the State Department cut two additional U.S. staffers dedicated to Sudan, leaving just nine remaining in the region, said Andrea Tracy, a former USAID Sudan official who now runs her own humanitarian funding mechanism for the country.
Tracy saw colleagues lose their jobs on a daily basis as USAID wound down the programs it funded in the country, she told ABC News in a June phone call.
“I was talking to one of the regional directors the other day, and just that morning, she got an email saying another 40 programs are going to be cut,” she said. “So we haven’t found the floor yet.”
The dramatic reorientation of U.S. aid abroad comes as the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Germany have announced a scaling down of their own foreign assistance budgets and as humanitarian crises in places like Sudan — where the civil war has stretched into a third year — deepen.
According to data from the U.N., USAID provided 44% of the world’s humanitarian funding in 2024 for Sudan.
A U.N. spokesman told ABC News that “food aid, nutrition support and essential health services” have been cut back as the U.N.’s annual fund for Sudan is funded at only 14%.
“Without urgent additional support, the risk of famine and further deterioration remains high,” said Dan Teng’o, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The State Department did not respond to requests by ABC News for the current data on its assistance commitments to Sudan after foreign aid freezes and layoffs.
But it said in a statement that “foreign assistance continues to arrive in Sudan,” citing a $56 million donation to the World Food Program and a wheat grain delivery under USAID that would feed “as many as 3.2 million people for an entire month.”
It also said emergency assistance continues for refugees of Sudan who have been displaced to “seven neighboring countries due to the conflict.”
Important dollars for refugee assistance are in jeopardy, too, as humanitarians brace for the impacts of a proposed $1.7 billion cut to U.S. refugee assistance. As a part of Rubio’s reorganization, the State Department proposed a 50% reduction for aid to the world’s refugees in its 2026 budget request to Congress.
Chain reactions and health care at the brink Humanitarians, who are legally protected under international law, have not been spared from the violence of the civil war, which has deprived people of the chance to stave off starvation and made access increasingly difficult.
Five humanitarians in June died when a U.N. convoy came under attack, the U.N. said.
In the void, small, grassroots organizations began to sprout when war broke out two years ago. A coalition known as Mutual Aid stood up emergency clinics and soup kitchens that became “a lifeline” for Sudanese, Tracy said. The coalition was backed by nearly 80% funding from USAID, organizers have said.
When the White House on President Donald Trump’s first day in office froze all U.S. assistance abroad, Tracy said, some 1,500 of the kitchens in Sudan closed almost immediately.
Perriello, whose role as the special envoy in Sudan has been left vacant by the Trump administration, said the Mutual Aid coalition was among a group of “edgy efforts … redefining approaches to aid.” These programs suffered the first and “deepest” cuts, he said.
Tracy said the pain from the cuts has been felt most acutely in the health sector, where medicine is not moving the way it used to and a “chain” of “different components that rely on each other” are not in place.
“Once you break one of those components, it all breaks,” she said.
MSF, which provides emergency medical care in Sudan, is operating in a country where the World Health Organization estimates only 20 to 30% of health facilities are operational.
“Wherever we look in Sudan, you will find humanitarian and medical needs. All those needs are overwhelming, urgent, and unfortunately, unmet,” Claire San Filippo, MSF’s emergency coordinator for Sudan, said.
A “case study” for impact of cuts At the Tine border point in Chad, east of the violence-plunged Darfur region of Sudan, Curtaz, the emergency coordinator for MSF, told ABC News the cuts are impossible to miss.
“Clinically … we tend to see people that are in much worse condition than before because of all of that,” he said.
MSF is independent and donor-funded, taking no dollars from the U.S. government and therefore not directly affected by the cuts and shutdown of USAID.
Sudan has become a “case study” for the “impact of those cuts,” Curtaz said.
“One of the examples you can touch first,” he said, is the lack of shelter for refugees under a 110-degree sun. People arrive by foot in Chad having spent the day with no form of shelter, he said.
The 18,000 people hosted in Tine should have had at least 350 toilets, meeting a standard in acute situations of one toilet for every 50 people, Curtaz said. But for a group surging toward 20,000 people, it had only nine toilets.
Asked whether the large, interconnected humanitarian system is neglecting Sudan, Curtaz agreed.
“A majority of the weight is lying on us, on the host community and on grassroots organizations that are doing their best to support the population,” he said. “So, yes.”
“For the first time in my life,” Tracy said, MSF doctors and administrators told her “‘We really need the USAID money … to come back online, because we’re carrying way more of a load than we can handle. We’re falling apart here.’”
