INDIA
Maoist rebels killed in battle
At least 31 suspected Maoist rebels were killed in a battle with Indian troops, police said yesterday. The fighting erupted on Friday when counterinsurgency troops, acting on intelligence, cornered nearly 50 suspected rebels in the Abujhmarh forest area along the border of Narayanpur and Dantewada districts in the central state of Chhattisgarh, state police Inspector General Pattilingam Sundarraj said. The operation was launched on Thursday, and the battle began the next day, lasting about nine hours, Sundarraj said.
UNITED STATES
US, Seoul sign military deal
Washington and Seoul have tentatively agreed to a new deal covering the costs of maintaining the US military presence there, the State Department and the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Friday. Under the agreement, which must still be approved by the South Korean government and ratified by its parliament before taking effect, Seoul’s contribution would rise 8.3 percent during the first year of the five-year deal, to US$1.125 billion. Additional increases, capped at 5 percent per year, would then be applied.
UNITED KINGDOM
AUKUS remotely pilot ship
The Australian, British and US navies controlled uncrewed ships in Australia from more than 16,000km away in Portugal as part of a series of military experiments, the Royal Navy said on Friday. The AUKUS security pact between the three nations, which aims to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region, is helping bring new military technology to the front line at an “unprecedented” pace, the navy said. “The successes experienced, including proving the ability of all three AUKUS navies to command-and-control vessels on the other side of the world in a tactically realistic scenario, show how close we are to realizing our ambition of a genuine team of crewed and uncrewed systems, capable of operating and prevailing everywhere on the planet, from the seabed to space,” Royal Navy Director Develop Rear Admiral James Parkin said in a statement.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Five treated after TikTok dare
A Prague hospital on Friday said it was treating five children who had swallowed magnets following a “piercing challenge” they had found on TikTok. The children placed sphere-shaped magnets at the tip of their tongues to imitate piercing and then swallowed them by accident, the Motol University Hospital said in a statement. “One patient was lucky enough to excrete the magnets easily, but other patients remain in hospital and two are likely to undergo acute surgeries today,” it added. People who swallow several magnets or a magnet and a metal object ran the risk of the objects connecting inside the body, it said. “They may pull the stomach and the intestine towards each other and damage them or even cause perforation or inflammation,” it said.
UNITED KINGDOM
Truss lettuce commemorated
A fake plaque has been erected outside a supermarket in Walthamstow, England, to commemorate a lettuce bought there that outlasted Liz Truss’ premiership. At the end of her 49 days as prime minister, a wilting ￡0.60 (US$0.79) iceberg lettuce in a blond wig was declared the winner of a race to last the longest as she lost her grip on power. As it looked like her time in Downing Street was up, the Daily Star set up a Webcam on the lettuce to see if it would have a longer shelf-life than the prime minister. After seven days it duly did.
‘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
RSS