Nepal devastation the worst in its history. Plus: unusual response as Trump curries favour with Kim, Myanmar militias entrench cyberscam operations, China breaking Asia’s ‘flying geese’ industrial model; region seeks open-road AI pathway; and why women are forced to drink.

Mount Langtang Lirung, 45km north of Kathmandu, rises to an imposing 7,245m above sea level and has a tragic history. It now has an even more tragic present.

In 2015, an earthquake shook central Nepal, triggering an avalanche on its south face. Rock and ice plunged into a glacier below, burying a village and killing some 300 people.

On Wednesday, a 4.4 magnitude earthquake struck near the Nepal-China border at 8.37am local time, the Nepali Times reported. It coincided with an avalanche on the north face of the mountain. Debris from the avalanche blocked the Lhende Khola River that marks the border, forming a temporary lake. But the dam soon burst, sending a tsunami of mud and boulders racing down the Trisuli River.

The unimaginable scale of the catastrophe was becoming apparent, the paper said in an editorial. It said: “With every notice about a bank branch that lost all its staff, a police station without a single survivor, buses full of Janai Purnima [Nepal’s sacred Hindu festival] pilgrims swept away, and phone calls to this office from Indian families asking to locate their loved ones – we have had to come to terms with the tragically high cost in human lives.

“In terms of economic damage to infrastructure and property, it is the worst in this country’s history… The debris flow at Timure on the border [with China] was nearly 80m high and as the flood raced downstream it swept everything in its path. It spared nothing.”

By Friday, The Hindu reported the death toll had reached 469.

The Indian Express said authorities had reported differing numbers of missing people – up to as many as 1,300. A Reuters report said 667 tourists were among the missing, including 540 foreigners from 31 countries.

Some 35 Australians were missing, along with 65 Americans, 55 Malaysians, 53 Ukrainians, 33 British citizens and 25 Canadians.

Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said three people had been killed in Xizang (Tibet) and 588 were missing.

The flood hit at the beginning of the trekking season in Nepal, the peak season for tourism in Tibet, and two days before an auspicious full moon day for Hindus and Buddhists and those who follow animist faiths.

The risk of more devastation remains. The Hindu said Nepal and China had both warned of danger as two lakes had developed on either side of the border and threatened to burst.

Crowds gathered at army centres and hospitals in Nepal, as people searched for loved ones. The Kathmandu Post told the story of Shashikala Khatiwada, whose husband was trapped in a hydropower project tunnel. Her husband, Dipak Rimal, messaged her saying he was in the tunnel but the gate was blocked. With him were 35 other workers.

The flooding catastrophe was not a ’natural’ disaster, the Nepali Times editorial said. “Nothing about it was natural,” the paper said. “[N]ot the glacier melting due to greenhouse gas build-up due to fossil fuel burning, not the location of expensive hydropower plants on trans-Himalayan rivers, not designing highways to follow rivers, not the settlements that have grown around them, not the corruption and greed, not the poor governance.

“No one could have predicted this disaster would happen when it did. But anyone could have said it was bound to happen one day.”

Two papers, same commentary slamming ‘megalomaniacal’ Trump

Donald Trump’s recent social media post currying favour with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and downgrading military exercises with Seoul’s forces provoked an unusual response from South Korea’s media: two English-language papers this week published the same harshly worded opinion piece, describing Trump as an ageing, raging president with a megalomaniacal belief in his own brilliance.

The commentary was written by Trudy Rubin, a columnist with The Philadelphia Inquirer, and distributed by the Tribune Content Agency. It was........

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