SOUTH KOREA
Embassy deletes video
The Israeli embassy removed a video showing an imaginary scenario in which Koreans are attacked by masked assailants in Seoul, a reference to Hamas, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs said yesterday. The ministry said in a statement that the video was deemed “inappropriate” and that it had asked the Israeli embassy to take it down. The video, which is no longer available on the embassy’s social media, depicted a distressing scenario in which a South Korean woman in the capital is abducted by an armed assailant on Christmas Day and forcibly separated from her young daughter, a clip published by South Korean broadcaster YTN showed. The Israeli embassy wrote, alongside the now-removed video posted on its Facebook account on Tuesday: “On October 7th, Israel was attacked by Hamas terrorists. 1,200 men, women and children were killed, and over 240 people were taken hostage in Gaza. Imagine if it happened to you. What would you do?”
UNITED STATES
Decades-old body identified
Remains found by hikers in a shallow grave 47 years ago near a lake on the border of Arizona and Nevada have been identified. The man was Luis Alonso Paredes, who was from El Salvador, but might have been living or working in the Las Vegas area at the time of his death, the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office announced on Tuesday. The remains were discovered on Nov. 23, 1976, in a desert area in northwestern Arizona, just east of Lake Mohave. An autopsy at the time revealed that the victim was likely in his early to mid-30s and had been shot in the head at close range, the sheriff’s office said. However, despite authorities collecting fingerprints during the autopsy, the case soon went cold and the victim remained nameless for close to five decades.
AUSTRIA
Inventor of Glock guns dies
Gaston Glock, the Austrian developer of the handgun that bears his name, died on Wednesday. He was 94. The Glock company announced his death, the Austria Press Agency reported. Glock, a reclusive engineer, founded the company in 1963 in Deutsch-Wagram, near Vienna. It has since expanded worldwide, including a US subsidiary founded in 1985. Glock handguns are used by police and some countries’ military forces, as well as private customers. The weapon was significantly lighter, cheaper and more reliable than the models available when it was created. Glock said on its Web site that its founder “not only revolutionized the world of small arms in the 1980s, but also succeeded in establishing the Glock brand as the global leader in the handgun industry.”
RUSSIA
Plane lands on frozen river
A Soviet-era Antonov 24 aircraft carrying 30 passengers landed on a frozen river near an airport in Russia’s east yesterday because of pilot error, transport prosecutors said. The Polar Airlines An-24 landed safely on the Kolyma River near Zyryanka in the Yakutia region, the prosecutors said. “According to preliminary information, the cause of the aviation incident was an error by the crew in piloting the aircraft,” a spokesperson for the Eastern Siberian transport prosecutor said in a statement. Prosecutors published pictures of the aircraft on a frozen river. The Izvestia newspaper published pictures of passengers disembarking. “The An-24 aircraft landed outside of the runway of the Zyryanka airport,” Polar Airlines said in a short statement. “There were no casualties.”
‘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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