SIX COUNTIES: Hundreds of workers at Northern Ireland Railways and Ulsterbus have backed industrial action in a dispute over pay. 

Translink staff, who are members of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, indicated their support for walkouts and industrial action short of a strike. No dates have yet been set for industrial action, but the union warned major transport disruption could be seen over the summer. 

The dispute concerns contract disparity for railway supervisors, which the union said involves some being paid less than the people they supervise.

SPAIN: The government said today that the massive April power outage across Spain and Portugal that left tens of millions of people without power was caused by technical and planning errors that left the grid unable to handle the voltage surge.

Ecological Transition Minister Sara Aagesen told reporters that a voltage surge led to small grid failures, mainly in the south, which then cascaded to larger ones and brought the system down.

She ruled out that the failure was due to a cyberattack.

PYONGYANG: North Korea will send 5,00 military construction workers and a thousand de-miners to support reconstruction work in Russia’s Kursk region, a top Russian official said today.

North Korea has already sent thousands of troops and a vast amount of conventional weapons to back Russia’s war against Ukraine. 

In April, Pyongyang and Moscow said that their soldiers fought together to repel a Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk border region, though Ukraine has insisted it still has troops present there.

SWITZERLAND: The authorities cleared a village in the east today over a potential rockslide, three weeks after a mudslide submerged a vacated village in the south-west.

Residents of Brienz, about 25 miles south-west of Davos, were barred from entering the village because a rock mass on a plateau overhead has “accelerated so rapidly that it threatens to collapse,” a local officials said.

Farm work in the area was also being halted, and livestock owners moved their animals out of nearby pastures due to early warning signs on Sunday.