UNITED NATIONS
Funding cuts hit aid
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) yesterday said it was drastically scaling back its global humanitarian aid plans due to the “deepest funding cuts ever.” The agency said in a statement that it was seeking US$29 billion in funding compared with US$44 billion requested in December, in a “hyper-prioritized” appeal. The US, the world’s top donor, has heavily slashed its foreign aid under President Donald Trump. Other donor nations have cut back their contributions in the face of an uncertain economic outlook. “Brutal funding cuts leave us with brutal choices,” OCHA Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher said. Nearly midway through the year, the agency has received only US$5.6 billion out of the US$44 billion that it had requested while facing surging crises in Sudan, Gaza and Myanmar, among others.
UNITED KINGDOM
N Korea casualties in Kursk
More than 6,000 North Korean soldiers are believed to have been injured or killed while fighting in Russia’s Kursk region in support of Moscow’s war on Ukraine, according to estimates by British intelligence, underscoring North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s role as a key ally of President Vladimir Putin in a war now in its fourth year. The number amounts to more than half of the 11,000 North Korean troops initially deployed to the Kursk region, the British Ministry of Defence said on X. “Significant DPRK casualty rates have almost certainly been sustained primarily through large, highly attritional dismounted assaults,” the statement said, referring to the North’s formal name. Bloomberg was unable to independently verify the figures. Neither Russia nor Ukraine provides official figures for the number of combat casualties.
MEXICO
Mayor shot dead in office
Four armed men on Sunday stormed a mayor’s office in the south, killing her and another member of her staff, police said. The men arrived on motorcycles at the town hall in San Mateo Pinas, in the state of Oaxaca, police said. After threatening officers guarding the facility, they stormed into mayor Lilia Garcia’s office and shot her and another official, Eli Garcia, dead. Two municipal police officers were also wounded in the attack, authorities said. “There can be no impunity for this act,” Oaxaca Governor Salomon Jara wrote on social media. The state prosecutor’s office said it was investigating the attack, while military and federal agents were deployed in the area.
AUSTRALIA
Egret’s 38-hour flight tracked
A species of heron has been tracked flying for almost two days non-stop between Australia and Papua New Guinea during its northern migration, scientists said. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation researchers used GPS to follow eight plumed egrets and 10 great egrets over several months after the birds left the Macquarie Marshes in New South Wales. Great egrets were found to disperse in all directions, while the plumed egrets all migrated north, and one was tracked flying almost 2,400km over several months before settling near the town of Kalo. It took that bird 38 hours to fly more than 700km across the Coral Sea, findings published in the journal Pacific Conservation Biology yesterday said. It was the first time scientists had recorded the plumed egrets’ migration. Another Australian bird, the bar-tailed godwit, holds the world record for flying more than 13,500km nonstop in 11 days during its migration from Alaska to Tasmania.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
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