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.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees