EGYPT
Mummy find announced
The Ministry of Antiquities on Saturday unveiled more than 40 mummies dating back to the Ptolemaic era at a burial site in Tunah Al-Gabal, 260km south of Cairo. Archeologist Rami Rasmi said there were 12 children and six animals, and the rest were adult men and women. The remains were laid on the floor or in open clay coffins in the chamber. The graves in Minya Governate, discovered during an excavation that started in February last year, are in a communal tomb “probably belonging to a petty bourgeois family,” the ministry said.
Photo: AP
PHILIPPINES
Chinese center probed
The government will protest China’s opening of a maritime rescue center on Fiery Cross Reef (Yongshu Reef, 永暑礁), Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin said yesterday, just days after President Rodrigo Duterte’s spokesman said the nation should be grateful for the move. Locsin said he supports Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio’s position that the nation must contest China’s construction of the center, which Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday. “We will” protest if the reports turn out to be true, Locsin said on Twitter. “I however preferred engaging them openly on the floor of the UN General Assembly.” He said his department is awaiting National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon’s assessment as the government cannot rely on media accounts.
INDIA
Derailment kills seven
Seven people were killed and 29 injured when nine coaches of a New Delhi-bound train derailed early yesterday about 30km north of Patna, the Bihar state capital, officials said. Most of the passengers were asleep when the train jumped the tracks. Hundreds of villagers rushed to help rescuers and disaster management personnel to pull out people trapped in the twisted metal and overturned coaches. Indian Railways official Rajesh Dutt Bajpai said that by noon, the rescue work was over. Two of the injured were in critical condition, he said.
NIGERIA
Amnesty report rejected
The army on Saturday rejected an Amnesty International report that said Boko Haram extremists killed at least 60 people in a “devastating” attack on the northeastern border town of Rann. The army in a Facebook post dismissed as “outlandish and unverified” the witness statements that soldiers had left their posts the day before the attack on Monday last week. The army said no attack occurred that day. Amnesty on Friday published satellite imagery that it said showed “hundreds of burned structures” after fighters on motorcycles drove into the town and set homes on fire. The army said the report was “another futile effort” to portray the military as incapable.
SOMALIA
Al-Shabaab fighters killed
Thirteen members of al-Shabaab were killed on Friday in an airstrike 48km outside Mogadishu, the US Africa Command said on Saturday. The strike occurred near Gandarshe in Lower Shabelle region, which the al-Qaeda-linked fighters have used as a staging area for bombings in Mogadishu, it said. It was the 10th US airstrike in the country this year.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and