SRI LANKA
Prisoners granted amnesty
President Ranil Wickremesinghe has granted amnesty to more than 1,000 convicts and released them from jails across the country to mark Christmas, a prisons official said yesterday. Among the 1,004 freed were those jailed for not being able to pay outstanding fines, Prison Commissioner Gamini Dissanayake said. A similar number of convicts were freed in May to mark Vesak, which celebrates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death. The latest pardon came after police arrested nearly 15,000 people during a week-long military-backed anti-narcotics drive that was halted on Christmas Eve.
CHINA
Beijing coldest in 70 years
Beijing recorded the most hours of subfreezing temperatures this month in more than seven decades as a cold wave has enveloped northern and central swathes of the country, bringing snowstorms and record-breaking temperatures. A weather observatory in the capital as of Sunday had recorded more than 300 hours of subfreezing temperatures since Dec. 11 — the most since records began, in 1951, the official newspaper Beijing Daily reported. The city experienced nine consecutive days with temperatures below minus-10°C, the paper added. Temperatures at 78 weather stations across the country hit record lows for the month of December, the National Meteorological Center said.
UNITED KINGDOM
UK to deploy ship off Guyana
The navy is to deploy a ship off Guyana later this month, the Ministry of Defence said on Sunday, as the South American nation faces a border dispute with neighbor Venezuela over the oil-rich Essequibo region. The deployment follows a visit by a British junior foreign minister to Guyana earlier this month, intended to offer the UK’s support for the country, an ally and former British colony. Guyana and Venezuela agreed earlier this month to avoid any use of force and not to escalate tensions in the long-running dispute.
PHILIPPINES
Troops kill nine rebels
Troops yesterday killed nine communist rebels in a series of firefights, about a month after the two sides agreed to resume peace talks, the armed forces said. The fighting occurred in four remote villages near the southern city of Malaybalay, a military statement said, at the start of a two-day unilateral Christmas truce declared by the Communist Party and its armed wing, the New People’s Army. The military’s Fourth Infantry Division did not immediately release details of the Malaybalay clashes.
UNITED KINGDOM
Secretary sorry for wife joke
Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs James Cleverly on Sunday apologized after he was reported to have joked about spiking his wife’s drink with a sedative known for its use as a date-rape drug. The Sunday Mirror tabloid reported that Cleverly, one of the most senior ministers in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government, had joked to female guests at an event this month that “a little bit” of the drug in his wife’s drink was “not really illegal.” He reportedly joked that the secret to a long marriage was ensuring your spouse was “someone who is always mildly sedated so she can never realize there are better men out there.” “In what was always understood as a private conversation James, the Home Secretary tackling spiking, made what was clearly meant to be an ironic joke — for which he apologizes,” a spokesperson for Cleverly said in a statement.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
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