UNITED STATES
Pentagon probes breach
The Department of Defense is investigating a “critical compromise” of communications allegedly brought on by one of its engineers and that affected 17 air force installations, a search warrant obtained by Forbes showed. The employee, who is not named because charges have not been made formally, also possibly breached FBI communications, the magazine said. A base contractor tipped off government officials, saying that an engineer at Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee had taken government technology home, Forbes said. The materials would have given the employee “unauthorized administrator access” to radio communications technology across 17 defense facilities.
HAITI
US nurse, child kidnapped
An American nurse and her child have been kidnapped, a Christian aid group said on Saturday, days after the US government ordered its nonessential personnel out of the country due to spiraling insecurity. Alix Dorsainvil and her child were kidnapped on Thursday morning near Port-au-Prince, El Roi Haiti said in a statement on its Web site. She is the wife of the group’s director, who is Haitian, and the mother and child were taken from the El Roi campus “while serving in our community ministry.”
POLAND
Wagner on border: PM
More than 100 mercenaries belonging to the Russian-linked Wagner Group in Belarus have moved close to the border, the Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Saturday. He told a news conference that the mercenaries had moved close to the Suwalki Gap, a strategic stretch of territory between Belarus and Kaliningrad, a Russian territory separated from the mainland. Poland is a member of the EU and NATO, and it has worried about its security with Russian ally Belarus and Ukraine on its eastern border. “Now the situation becomes even more dangerous,” Morawiecki told reporters, adding that “this is certainly a step towards a further hybrid attack on Polish territory.”
RUSSIA
Mother tried for online posts
A nine-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother have been called as witnesses in a criminal case against their mother after she was accused of repeatedly “discrediting” the army. Lidia Prudovskaya and her two children were summoned by investigators in the northern region of Arkhangelsk on Friday to give testimony in the case, Russian news outlet Sota reported. Prudovskaya previously faced administrative charges on similar allegations after sharing anti-war posts on social media platform VKontakte in September last year. Discrediting the military is a criminal offense under a law adopted after Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in February last year. The law is regularly used against Kremlin critics.
CANADA
Six die in plane crash
Six people have died after a small plane crashed in Kananaskis Country, a mountainous region west of Calgary, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said on Saturday. The police said that an aircraft with five passengers and a pilot left Springbank Airport near Calgary on Friday night en route to Salmon Arm, British Columbia. RCMP Staff Sergeant Ryan Singleton said that contact was lost with the plane at about 9:30pm. Shortly after the plane was reported overdue, a search by the Royal Canadian Air Force found the crash site. The RCMP did not release the names of the victims.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home