COPENHAGEN, Denmark — A massive chunk of Greenland’s ice cap has broken off in the far northeastern Arctic, a development that scientists say is evidence of rapid climate change.

The glacier section that broke off is 42.3 square miles. It came off of the fjord called Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, which is roughly 50 miles long and 12 miles wide, the National Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland said Monday.

The glacier is at the end of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream, where it flows off the land and into the ocean.

Annual end-of-melt-season changes for the Arctic’s largest ice shelf in northeast Greenland are measured by optical satellite imagery, the survey known as GEUS said. It shows that the area’s ice losses for the past two years each exceeded 19 square miles.

The ice shelf has lost 62 square miles, an area nearly twice that of Manhattan in New York, since 1999.

“We should be very concerned about what appears to be progressive disintegration at the Arctic’s largest remaining ice shelf,” said GEUS professor Jason Box.

“Another massive chunk of vital sea ice has fallen into the ocean,” said Greenpeace spokeswoman Laura Meller, who is aboard the organization’s ship Arctic Sunrise at the edge of the sea ice. “This is yet another alarm bell being rung by the climate crisis in a rapidly heating Arctic.”

In August, a study showed that Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra-warm 2019, with the melt massive enough to cover California in more than 4 feet of water.

Rochester, N.Y., fallout: Mayor Lovely Warren fired the police chief and suspended her top lawyer and communications director Monday in the continuing upheaval over the suffocation death of Daniel Prude.

Chief Le’Ron Singletary announced his retirement last week as part of a major shakeup of the Rochester’s police leadership but said he would stay on through the end of the month.

Instead, Warren said at a news conference that she had permanently relieved him while suspending Corporation Counsel Tim Curtin and Communications Director Justin Roj without pay for 30 days following a cursory management review of the city’s role in Prude’s death.

“This initial look has shown what so many have suspected, that we have a pervasive problem in the Rochester Police Department,” Warren said. “One that views everything through the eyes of the badge and not the citizens we serve. It shows that Mr. Prude’s death was not taken as seriously as it should have been by those who reviewed the case throughout city government at every level.”

Trump aide diatribe: The top communications official at the Cabinet department in charge of combating the coronavirus made outlandish and false claims Sunday that career government scientists were engaging in “sedition” in their handling of the pandemic and warned that left-wing hit squads were preparing for armed insurrection after the election.

Michael Caputo, 58, assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services, said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a “resistance unit” determined to undermine President Donald Trump.

Caputo, who has faced criticism for leading efforts to warp CDC weekly bulletins to fit Trump’s pandemic narrative, suggested that he personally could be in danger.

“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going,” Caputo, a Trump loyalist installed by the White House in April, told followers in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page.

Caputo delivered his broadside against scientists, the media and Democrats after a spate of news reports over the weekend that detailed his team’s systematic interference in the CDC’s official reports on the pandemic and other disease outbreaks.

Japan politics: Yoshihide Suga was elected as the new head of Japan’s ruling party Monday, all but assuring that he will become the country’s new prime minister when a parliamentary election is held later in the week.

Despite his low-key image, Suga, 71, has been an important figure in outgoing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration, serving as the government’s top spokesperson in his role as chief Cabinet secretary. Abe announced last month that he would resign due to health problems.

Suga’s victory in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party vote virtually guarantees his election in a parliamentary vote Wednesday because of the majority held by the LDP’s ruling coalition.

Suga, the son of a strawberry grower in northern Japan’s Akita prefecture, said he had come a long way. “I will devote all of myself to work for the nation and the people,” he said in his victory speech.

He has said that his top priorities will be fighting the coronavirus and turning around a Japanese economy battered by the pandemic.

AG tied to fatal crash: South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg reported hitting a deer with his car Saturday night but actually killed a pedestrian whose body was not found until the next day, state investigators said Monday.

Ravnsborg’s office has said he immediately called 911 after the crash on a rural stretch of U.S. Highway 14 and did not realize he had hit a man until his body was found. The Department of Public Safety issued a statement Monday that said only that Ravnsborg told the Hyde County Sheriff’s Office that he had hit a deer. Tony Mangan, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Ravnsborg called 911, saying it is part of the ongoing investigation.

The pedestrian, who was identified as Joseph Boever, 55, was not found until Sunday morning, according to the department. He had crashed his truck in that area earlier, according to relatives, and was apparently walking near the road toward it.

Russian dissident: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is able to breathe on his own and briefly leave his hospital bed, his doctors said Monday, while Germany announced that French and Swedish labs have confirmed its findings that he was poisoned with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok.

Navalny, 44, was flown to Berlin for treatment at the Charite hospital two days after falling ill on a domestic flight in Russia on Aug. 20. Germany has demanded that Russia investigate the case, while Moscow has accused the West of trying to smear Russia.

Navalny has “successfully been removed from mechanical ventilation” and is able to leave his bed “for short periods of time,” the hospital said.