About 30,000 people are receiving aid after fleeing the besieged eastern zone of Aleppo in the past few days, taking the total number of displaced people in the Syrian city to more than 400,000, UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura said on Thursday.
By Wednesday, about 18,000 people had been registered entering government-controlled areas and about 8,500 crossing into the Kurdish-controlled zone of Aleppo, De Mistura’s humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland told reporters.
He said those figures were likely to have risen on Thursday.
A ground and air campaign by Syrian government forces and their Russian and Lebanese allies that began in September has cut off rebels in their most important urban stronghold, and left about 250,000 civilians with rapidly dwindling food and medical facilities.
REBEL LOSSES
On Sunday and Monday the city’s rebels suffered their biggest reverse in four years, losing around a third of the area they had controlled.
Syria and Russia have declined a UN request for a pause in the fighting to evacuate 400 sick and wounded in need of immediate treatment, but Russia wants to discuss the idea of setting up four humanitarian corridors, Egeland said.
“A humanitarian corridor can work if all the armed actors respect it,” he added.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
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