COLU @ CONCEPTS

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — U.S. and South Korean troops kicked off their annual drills Monday that come after President Donald Trump and North Korea exchanged warlike rhetoric in the wake of the North’s two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month. The Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills are largely computer-simulated war games held every summer and have drawn furious responses from North Korea, which views them as an invasion rehearsal. Pyongyang’s state media on Sunday called this year’s drills a “reckless” move that could trigger the “uncontrollable phase of a nuclear war.” Despite the threat, U.S. and South Korean militaries launched this year’s 11-day training on Monday morning as scheduled. The exercise involves 17,500 American troops and 50,000 South Korean soldiers, according to the U.S. military command in South Korea and Seoul’s Defense Ministry. No field training like live-fire exercises or tank maneuvering is involved in the Ulchi drills, in which alliance of...

LONDON (AP) — After more than 150 years as Britain’s most famous timekeeper, London’s Big Ben bell fell silent Monday for four years of repair work that will keep it quiet on all but a few special occasions. The giant bell atop Parliament’s clock tower sent a dozen deep bongs into a gray sky at noon, marking the hour as it has done almost continuously since 1859. It is not due to resume its regular duties until 2021. Hundreds of parliamentary staff, journalists and lawmakers gathered in a courtyard under the Victorian clock tower to mark the moment, while hundreds more tourists and passers-by lined sidewalks and filled nearby Parliament Square, cellphones held aloft. The mood was light-hearted — it is, after all, just a bell — but total silence fell as the first bong sounded. The crowd burst into cheers and applause as the last faded away, and bells at nearby Westminster Abbey pealed a noisy farewell to their neighbor. The bell is being stilled to allow workers to carry ou...

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — The huge raised-relief images show a Confederate trinity sitting astride their horses, high above the ground. Hats held across their chests, President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson ride across the face of Stone Mountain into faded glory. Part theme park and part shrine to Dixie’s Lost Cause, this granite outcrop east of Atlanta — sculpted like a Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy — is once again an ideological battlefield as a new fight rages over rebel symbolism across the South. In the aftermath of the Aug. 12 white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a Democratic candidate for Georgia governor said the carving should be removed. But removal would probably mean destroying a work of public art that took decades to complete and is the centerpiece of one of Georgia’s biggest tourist destinations. The images carved into the mountain, “like Confederate monuments across this state, stand as constant r...

MILAN (AP) — Firefighters in Italy have freed a 7-month-old baby from the rubble of a house where he had been trapped with his family following a 4.0-magnitude quake on the Italian resort island of Ischia. At least one person — an elderly woman who was inside a collapsed church — was killed in the quake just before 9 p.m. (1900 GMT) Monday. Another 39 were injured. Firefighters pulled the baby from the rubble some seven hours after the quake, and are continuing work on rescuing his two brothers. Sky TG24 said that the two boys, 5 and 7 years old, were given bottles of water early Tuesday and were responding to rescuers. Source: www.apnews.com 

MADRID (AP) — Four alleged members of a terror cell accused of killing 15 people in attacks in Barcelona and a Spanish resort appeared in court Tuesday, a day after the last missing member of the cell was gunned down by police near Barcelona. The four men were arrested last week for their alleged involvement in the planning or execution of attacks in Barcelona on Thursday and the northeastern resort town of Cambrils early Friday. They were to testify before National Court Judge Fernando Andreu in Madrid. The judge will decide whether they should be jailed preventively or released, with or without conditions. Spanish media have named the suspects as Driss Oukabir, Mohammed Aalla, Salh el Karib and Mohamed Houli Chemal but these names have not yet been confirmed by police. The four were arrested following the attacks: Three in the northern Catalan town of Ripoll and another in Alcanar, south of Barcelona, where a house that was accidentally blown apart turned out to be a bo...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Expelled from their main stronghold in northern Iraq, Islamic State militants are now trapped in a military vise that will squeeze them on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said. Mattis arrived in the Iraqi capital on an unannounced visit Tuesday just hours after President Donald Trump outlined a fresh approach to the stalemated war in Afghanistan. Trump also has vowed to take a more aggressive, effective approach against IS in Iraq and Syria, but he has yet to unveil a strategy for that conflict that differs greatly from his predecessor’s. In Baghdad, Mattis was meeting with senior Iraqi government leaders and with U.S. commanders. He also planned to meet in Irbil with Massoud Barzani, leader of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region that has helped fight IS. Mattis told reporters before departing from neighboring Jordan that the so-called Middle Euphrates River Valley -- roughly from the western Iraqi city of al-Qaim to the...

  SINGAPORE (AP) — The focus of the search for 10 U.S. sailors missing after a collision between the USS John S. McCain and an oil tanker in Southeast Asian waters shifted Tuesday to the damaged destroyer’s flooded compartments. The sea search by aircraft and ships from the U.S., Singapore and Malaysian navies will continue east of Singapore where the McCain and the tanker collided at daybreak Monday, the 7th Fleet said Tuesday, but the deployment of divers to search inside the warship, now docked at Singapore’s naval base, was a blow to families still hoping for a miracle. “Equipped with surface supplied air rigs, divers will access sealed compartments located in damaged parts of the ship,” the fleet said in a statement announcing that divers had joined the search. “Additionally, they will conduct damage assessments of the hull and flooded areas.” The collision tore a gaping hole in the McCain’s left rear hull and flooded adjacent compartments including crew bert...