After Kim Jong Un’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing, North Korean staff were seen meticulously wiping down everything the leader had touched — a move analysts say is part of strict security protocols designed to thwart foreign espionage.

Even with the appearance of a budding friendship between Kim and Putin, footage showed the reclusive state’s extraordinary measures to conceal any clues about Kim’s health.

In a post on Telegram, Kremlin reporter Alexander Yunashev shared video of Kim’s two staff members carefully cleaning the room in the Chinese capital where Kim and Putin had met for more than two hours.

The chair’s backrest and armrests were scrubbed and a coffee table next to Kim’s chair was also cleaned. Kim’s drinking glass was also removed.

“After the negotiations were over, the staff accompanying the head of the DPRK carefully destroyed all traces of Kim’s presence,” the reporter said, referring to North Korea.

After talks in the room, Kim and Putin left for a tea meeting and bid a warm farewell to each other.

Such measures are standard protocol since the era of Kim’s predecessor, his father Kim Jong Il, said Michael Madden, a North Korea leadership expert with the US-based Stimson Centre.

“The special toilet and the requisite garbage bags of detritus, waste and cigarette butts are so that a foreign intelligence agency, even a friendly one, does not acquire a sample and test it,” Madden said.

“It would provide insight into any medical conditions affecting Kim Jong Un. This can include hair and skin tags,” he said.

In 2019, after a Hanoi summit with US President Donald Trump, Kim’s guards were spotted blocking the floor of his hotel room to clean the room for hours, and taking out items, including a bed mattress.

Kim’s team has been spotted cleaning items before he uses them as well.

During his 2018 meeting with then South Korean President Moon Jae-in, North Korean security guards sprayed a chair and a desk with sanitiser and wiped them down before Kim came to sit.

Before he sat at another summit with Putin in 2023, his security team wiped his chair down with disinfectant and vigorously checked to make sure the chair was safe, with one of the guards using a metal detector to scan the seat, video footage showed.

Rescue teams struggled to reach survivors days after a powerful earthquake in eastern Afghanistan left more than 1,400 people dead, as access to remote areas remained obstructed.

A magnitude-6.0 shallow earthquake hit the mountainous region bordering Pakistan late Sunday, collapsing mud-brick homes on families as they slept.

Fearful of the near-constant aftershocks, people huddled in the open or struggled to unearth those trapped under the heaps of flattened buildings.

The earthquake killed at least 1,469 people and injured more than 3,700, according to the latest toll from Taliban authorities, making it one of the deadliest in decades to hit the impoverished country.

UN refugee chief Filippo Grandi said on X that the quake had “affected more than 500,000 people” in eastern Afghanistan.

The vast majority of the casualties were in Kunar province, with a dozen dead and hundreds hurt in nearby Nangarhar and Laghman provinces.

Access remained difficult, as aftershocks caused rockfall, stymying access to already isolated villages and keeping families outdoors for fear of the remains of damaged homes collapsing on them.

‘Everyone is afraid’

“Everyone is afraid and there are many aftershocks,” Awrangzeeb Noori, 35, told AFP from the village of Dara-i-Nur in Nangarhar province. “We spend all day and night in the field without shelter.”

The non-governmental group Save the Children said one of its aid teams “had to walk for 20 kilometres (12 miles) to reach villages cut off by rock falls, carrying medical equipment on their backs with the help of community members”.

The World Health Organisation said Wednesday it was scaling up its emergency response to address the “immense” needs and that it required more resources in order to “prevent further losses”.

WHO has appealed for $4 million to deliver lifesaving health interventions and expand mobile health services and supply distribution.

“Every hour counts,” WHO emergency team lead in Afghanistan Jamshed Tanoli said in a statement. “Hospitals are struggling, families are grieving and survivors have lost everything.”

The Taliban government’s deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat told AFP that areas which had taken days to reach had been finally accessed.

“We cannot determine the date for finishing the operation in all areas as the area is very mountainous and it is very difficult to reach every area.”

ActionAid noted that women and girls were particularly vulnerable in emergencies as they face steep restrictions under the Taliban authorities.

Residents of Jalalabad, the nearest city to the epicentre, donated money and goods including blankets.

“I am a simple labourer and I came here to help the earthquake victims because I felt very sad for them,” said resident Mohammad Rahman.

Deepening crisis

Around 85% of the Afghan population lives on less than one dollar per day, according to the United Nations.

After decades of conflict, Afghanistan faces endemic poverty, severe drought and the influx of millions of Afghans sent back to the country by neighbouring countries in the years since the Taliban takeover.

The Norwegian Refugee Council cautioned that “forcing Afghans to return will only deepen the crisis”.

It is the third major earthquake since the Taliban authorities took power in 2021, but there are even fewer resources for the cash-strapped government’s response after the United States slashed assistance to the country when President Donald Trump took office in January.

Even before the earthquake, the United Nations estimated it had obtained less than a third of the funding required for operations countrywide.

In two days, the Taliban government’s defence ministry said it organised 155 helicopter flights to evacuate around 2,000 injured and their relatives to regional hospitals.

Fitrat said a camp had been set up in Khas Kunar district to coordinate emergency aid, while two other sites were opened near the epicentre “to oversee the transfer of the injured, the burial of the dead, and the rescue of survivors”.

Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes, with the country still recovering from previous disasters.

Western Herat province was devastated in October 2023 by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake, which killed more than 1,500 people and damaged or destroyed more than 63,000 homes.

• Court says Trump exceeded powers in enacting tariffs.
• Trump cites longstanding US trade deficit as emergency.
• Tariffs remain in effect during appeal to Supreme Court.

Donald Trump’s administration asked the US Supreme Court on Wednesday to hear a bid to preserve his sweeping tariffs pursued under a 1977 law meant for emergencies, after a lower court invalidated most of the levies central to the Republican president’s economic and trade agenda.

The Justice Department appealed an August 29 ruling by a federal appeals court that the president overstepped his authority in invoking the law known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, undercutting a major Trump priority in his second term.

The tariffs currently remain in effect as the appeals court paused its order to give the administration time to seek Supreme Court review.

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to decide by September 10 whether it would hear the case. The Justice Department also proposed an accelerated timetable for resolving the litigation, with oral arguments in the first week of November, just a month after the start of the court’s 2025-2026 term.

Lawyers for small businesses challenging the tariffs are not opposing the government’s request for a Supreme Court hearing. One of the attorneys, Jeffrey Schwab of Liberty Justice Center, said in a statement they were confident they would prevail.

“We hope for a prompt resolution of this case for our clients,” Schwab said.

The levies are part of a trade war instigated by Trump since he returned to the presidency in January that has alienated trading partners, increased volatility in financial markets and fueled global economic uncertainty.

Trump has made tariffs a pillar of US foreign policy, using them to exert political pressure and renegotiate trade deals and extract concessions from countries that export goods to the United States.

The litigation concerns Trump’s use of IEEPA to impose what Trump calls “reciprocal” tariffs to address trade deficits in April, as well as separate tariffs announced in February as economic leverage on China, Canada and Mexico to curb the trafficking of fentanyl and illicit drugs into the US.

IEEPA gives the president power to deal with “an unusual and extraordinary threat” amid a national emergency and had historically been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets. Prior to Trump, the law had never been used to impose tariffs.

Trump’s Department of Justice has argued that the law allows tariffs under emergency provisions that authorise a president to “regulate” imports or block them completely.

The appeals court ruling stems from two challenges, one brought by five small businesses that import goods, including a New York wine and spirits importer and a Pennsylvania-based sport fishing retailer. The other was filed by 12 US states — Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Vermont — most of them governed by Democrats.

The Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the authority to impose taxes and tariffs, and any delegation of that authority must be both explicit and limited, according to the lawsuits.

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, agreed, ruling that the president’s power to regulate imports under the law does not include the power to impose tariffs.

“It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the President unlimited authority to impose tariffs,” the appeals court said in its 7-4 decision.

The appeals court also said that the administration’s expansive view of IEEPA violates the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, which requires executive branch actions of vast economic and political significance to be clearly authorised by Congress.

The New York-based US Court of International Trade, which has jurisdiction over customs and trade disputes, previously ruled against Trump’s tariff policies on May 28.

Another court in Washington ruled that IEEPA does not authorise Trump’s tariffs, and the government has appealed that decision as well. At least eight lawsuits have challenged Trump’s tariff policies, including one filed by the state of California.

The administration’s appeal comes as a legal fight over the independence of the Federal Reserve also seems bound for the Supreme Court, setting up a potential legal showdown over Trump’s entire economic policy in the months ahead.