French Minister of the Armed Forces Sebastien Lecornu on Friday lauded the close ties between the two countries following an US$8 billion fighter jet deal signed earlier this year.
“There is a powerful strategic intimacy that is being born with Indonesia and France,” Lecornu told reporters after his meeting with Indonesian Minister of Defense Prabowo Subianto in Jakarta.
Indonesia placed an order for 42 of France’s Rafale fighter jets in an US$8.1 billion deal agreed to in February.
Photo: AFP
The two countries are also in talks over the purchase of two French Scorpene-class attack submarines.
Lecornu met with Subianto as Indonesia prepares to take over the ASEAN rotating presidency.
France has been accepted as an observer state in ADMM-Plus, ASEAN’s defense platform, Lecornu wrote on Twitter yesterday, joining countries including the US and China.
“This is recognition of our investment in regional security and stability,” Lecornu wrote.
France wants to bolster its ties in Southeast Asia “to be in a position to fight against escalation, to rearm and to be in a situation to have credible diplomacy,” Lecornu told reporters.
France also needed to remain engaged “politically” in the area, he said, adding that Paris wanted to play a multilateral role in the region.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS