U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that China’s military exercises aimed at Taiwan, including missiles fired into Japan’s exclusive economic zone, represent a “significant escalation” and that he has urged Beijing to back down.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday the Western military alliance has the joint tasks of both supporting Ukraine in its fight against a Russian invasion and to prevent the conflict from spreading into a war between Russia and NATO.
China’s urging “flexibility” on North Korea appears to coincide with the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions in the region.
“According to unclassified intelligence reports to Congress, there are five key Chinese banks and a specially created holding company that funds the North Korean missile and nuclear technology programs.” — Peter Huessy, Real Clear Defense, August 10, 2017.
Every visit by a foreign leader to Iran draws considerable attention, not to mention criticism, in Israel. A visit, however, by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the leader of a global power working to establish an anti-American axis, is cause for greater concern. While bilateral cooperation between Russia and Iran is not unprecedented, Israel has hoped such relations would remain limited in scope due to the engrained competition between the two for influence in Syria and Moscow’s fear of getting too close to a “regional pariah.” As recently as 2018, some Israeli experts and policymakers even hoped that Russia would “squeeze Iran out of Syria” for Israel’s benefit.
Since coming to power last year, the Taliban has increasingly reverted to form on almost every level. The killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul safe house on July 31 only underscores the group’s continued close ties with the Taliban, particularly the Haqqani network. Taliban leaders are also steadily reimposing the world’s most extreme restrictions by far on women and girls, returning to their old practices of “disappearing” women by closing off their education, restricting their travel, dictating their dress, and limiting their movement.
TOURISTS, CLAD in shorts and sandals, gathered on China’s Pingtan island. Some clutched umbrellas to ward off the sun. Those with cameras tended to point them at the blue waters of the Haitan Strait, which divides Pingtan from Fujian, a province on the country’s east coast. Their holiday snaps on August 4th captured military helicopters swarming overhead and rockets streaking into the sky. These were some of the first missiles fired from the Chinese mainland towards the waters off Taiwan in 26 years.
Three Anti-Stock Theft Unit officers were injured on Monday after suspected Al-Shabaab militants attacked Mandera’s Elram base.
Elram is about 10kms to the Somalia border.
Several of Al-Qaeda’s senior leaders have been killed and following the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri, experts say there are only two likely candidates for the top job at the terror group
The dramatic assassination of Al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri in a US drone strike has left the global terror franchise with a serious recruitment problem.
Until Sunday, al-Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahri was one of the world’s most wanted men.
As the number one extremist on the FBI’s most wanted list, al-Zawahri and his deceased co-conspirator Osama Bin Laden were the masterminds behind the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Centre in New York. Al-Zawahri was considered one of the leaders of terrorism that led the planning and execution of heinous terrorist operations in the US, Saudi Arabia and several other countries across the world.
China on Thursday conducted its largest ever live-fire missile exercise off the shores of Taiwan, just one day after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concluded her controversial diplomatic visit.
The missiles landed in the Taiwan Strait to the island’s North, South, and East, in the first such drill since 1996, escalating China’s antagonism toward Taiwan, Reuters reported.