National Security - Page 306

A man identified as 35-year-old Fernando Andres Sabag Montiel was arrested late Thursday evening after apparently attempting to assassinate the vice president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

A number of European MEPs have demanded that the EU slap sanctions on Britain should Liz Truss decide to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol.

China’s state-run Global Times cited government-approved “experts” to declare that the catastrophic decline in marriages nationwide – 2021 saw the lowest rates in marriage registrations since the government began documenting them – was “a normal phenomenon” that citizens should not concern themselves with.

Colombia’s far-left President Gustavo Petro announced a plan to end the nation’s special permit to carry weapons in remarks during a Security Council meeting on Wednesday – a plan that would leave Colombians with no legal way of owning firearms.

The Chinese government announced the southwestern city of Chengdu, provincial capital of Sichuan with a population of 21 million, will be under coronavirus lockdown from Thursday evening at 6:00 p.m.

67-year old Ravil Maganov, vice-president of Russia’s second-largest oil company Lukoil, reportedly died on Thursday morning after falling out of a sixth-floor hospital window in Moscow.

Shiite militias in Basra, Iraq, opened fire on each other early Thursday morning in what the Kurdish news outlet Rudaw described as “heavy confrontations,” just days after Shiite followers of anti-Iranian cleric Muqtada al-Sadr stormed the capital, Baghdad, prompting riots that left at least 30 people dead.

The Taiwanese Defense Ministry delivered a report to the legislature on Thursday that said China’s belligerent military exercises around the island included “combat drills to carry out simulated attacks on U.S. ships that enter into the first island chain.”

The United Nations human rights office published its long-awaited report on Chinese Communist Party abuses against Uyghurs and other non-Han ethnic groups in East Turkistan on Wednesday, effectively confirming the atrocities researchers and journalists have documented for years but refusing to acknowledge the systematic elimination of these groups as genocide.

China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday heaped blame on the United States for an ugly battle in Baghdad, Iraq, between Shiite Muslim nationalists and Shiites loyal to Iran.

Kenya’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a recount of ballots cast across 15 voting stations on August 9 during Kenya’s presidential election, Voice of America (VOA) reported.

China’s state-run Global Times on Wednesday chose to eulogize Mikhail Gorbachev, the final leader of the Soviet Union, by calling him “naive and immature” for “cozying up” to the Western world instead of using an iron fist to hold his empire together.

CARACAS – The Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela (R4V) announced on Monday that the number of Venezuelan migrants that have so far fled from their country and its socialist regime had reached 6,805,209 by August 5, more than 20 percent of the nation’s population.

North Korea has likely amassed between 2,500 and 5,000 tons of chemical weapons, including extremely toxic nerve agents such as sarin, in recent years, according to estimates published in a joint report on Tuesday by the RAND Corporation and South Korea’s Asan Institute for Policy Studies, the website NK News reported.

In July, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted two agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for working with a ring of Chinese spies whose mission was to intimidate and silence critics of the Chinese Communist regime living abroad. One of their victims was an artist named Chen Weiming, whose sculpture blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic was torched by the espionage team in July 2021. The indomitable sculptor has since recreated the work using non-flammable materials.

A poll published this week by the Venezuelan firm Meganálisis found an overwhelming majority of the country subscribes to Christian beliefs and holds socially conservative viewpoints such as opposition to legalized abortion and same-sex marriage.

The government of Noto, a central Japanese town known for its squid fishery, said Monday that its once controversial decision to erect a giant squid statue with pandemic relief funds in October 2020 had paid off, as it had since boosted tourism in the area and thus generated significant income for the local economy, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) reported Tuesday.

Ukraine has relied heavily on Turkish-made Bayraktar drones to fight the Russian invasion.

Taiwan’s military fired live ammunition on a Chinese drone on Tuesday after the drone intruded into the airspace above one of the sovereign island nation’s outer islets, the online newspaper Taiwan News reported, noting that the incident marked the first time Taipei has used live ammunition to fire warning shots on a Chinese drone.

The Taliban jihadist terror organization celebrated the final withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan on Wednesday, the anniversary of the occasion, with fireworks and a celebration at Bagram Air Base, formerly America’s largest military facility in the country.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which operates under the office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), urged America on Tuesday to “develop reparation proposals” for descendants of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, claiming its “lingering legacy” still represses black Americans today.

Police in Ikongo, Madagascar, fatally shot at least 19 people on Monday after a 500-person-strong lynch mob overpowered a local police station holding four people suspected of kidnapping an albino child and murdering the child’s mother, Deutsche Welle (DW) reported Tuesday.

Christians who have remained in Afghanistan since the Sunni Islam-based Taliban terror group seized control of the country last August “face routine torture and persecution” from Taliban members and various other Afghans, the Afghan newspaper Etilaat Roz reported on Monday citing an original report by Fox News.

Evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein said the New York Times (NYT) engaged in treasonous behavior via their innuendo-laden linking of former President Donald Trump’s alleged possession of classified material to the CIA’s claims of the deaths of informants in recent years.

The communist Castro regime of Cuba is fiercely punishing political prisoners arrested during the nationwide July 11, 2021, protests for their unwillingness to comply with the regime’s “ideological rehabilitation,” meant to make them loyal to communism, family members of the detainees told Radio Televisión Martí on Monday.

The British Defense Ministry on Monday reported that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has been pushed to the sidelines of the Ukraine conflict by unhappy dictator Vladimir Putin.

Roughly a third of Pakistan was considered underwater as of Monday due to ongoing flooding that has killed at least 1,136 people since the nation’s monsoon season began in June, Pakistan Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The endless nightmare of China’s “zero Covid” coronavirus lockdowns continued this week, as millions of people in major cities were marched back into quarantine restrictions.

The Kenyan national police service’s investigative unit, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI), allegedly determined in recent days that three Venezuelan nationals had illegal access to Kenya’s electoral commission servers five months ahead of the country’s general election on August 9, during which a disputed presidential vote occurred, Kenya’s the Nation newspaper reported on Monday.

Mikhail Gorbachev is most fondly remembered in the United States as the man Reagan challenged — “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — but later came to respect, and who left a legacy of freedom.

The foreign ministry of Chile issued an outraged statement on Monday condemning conservative Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro after the latter claimed during a presidential election debate the day before that leftist Chilean President Gabriel Boric had “set fire to the Metro,” a reference to riots that gripped the country in 2019.

Russia took delivery on its first shipment of Iran-built drones two weeks ago, and is reportedly encountering serious technical issues with the weapons as it tries to deploy them against Ukraine.

Open borders Ireland is being used by Albanian human traffickers as a back door to ship illegal migrants into Britain.

Supporters of Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr swarmed through Baghdad’s secure Green Zone on Monday, occupying the presidential palace and ultimately engaging in gun and grenade battles with Iraqi security forces and Iran-backed militia – but they also took time out for a bizarrely cheerful pool party in the sumptuous backyard of the palace.

The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH), a watchdog group specializing in abuses on the island, revealed on Monday that dissident Daniel Joel Cárdenas Díaz will appeal his 15-year sentence for allegedly participating in the nationwide peaceful protests on July 11, 2021.

Influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his supporters to stop violent riots in Baghdad on Tuesday after 24 hours that left at least 30 dead and hundreds wounded in the Iraqi capital’s “Green Zone.”