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Britain’s recently elected prime minister, Keir Starmer, said the special relationship between Britain and the United States is stronger than ever as he met President Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday.
“The special relationship is so important, it was forged in difficult circumstances and endured for so long and is stronger now than ever,” he said.
MOSCOW: Russia’s FSB security service has opened a criminal case against a journalist working for CNN who it said had illegally crossed the Russian border to film a report inside the Kursk region, the Interfax news agency reported on Thursday.
Interfax named the journalist as Nick Paton Walsh, a British citizen. It said the FSB had also opened similar cases against two Ukrainian journalists
Interfax cited the FSB as saying Moscow would soon issue an international arrest warrant related to the cases. The maximum punishment for anyone found guilty of illegally crossing the border is five years in jail, it said.
TAIPEI: A US warship sailed through a sensitive waterway separating Taiwan from China on Thursday, the US Navy said, as a way to demonstrate Washington’s “commitment to upholding freedom of navigation.”
China claims democratic Taiwan as part of its territory, and has in recent years upped military pressures by sending in increasing numbers of fighter jets, drones and naval vessels around the island.
Thursday’s transit of the 180-kilometer Taiwan Strait comes as the United States and its allies have increased crossings to reinforce its status as an international waterway, angering Beijing.
The voyage by the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson showed Washington’s “commitment to upholding freedom of navigation for all nations as a principle,” the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in a statement Thursday.
“No member of the international community should be intimidated or coerced into giving up their rights and freedoms.”
Taiwan’s defense ministry confirmed that the warship sailed south to north, and that “no anomaly was detected in our surroundings.”
Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army dismissed the transit as “a public hype” and said its Eastern Theatre Command “organized naval and air forces to tail and stand guard against the US ship’s passage throughout the entire process.”
Chinese troops “are on constant high alert to resolutely defend national sovereignty,” it said in a statement.
A Canadian Halifax-class frigate conducted last month “a routine transit through the Taiwan Strait,” a move condemned by the Chinese military.
Beijing has said it would never renounce the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in recent years, upping the rhetoric of “unification” being “inevitable.”
In response, Taiwan has strengthened economic and political ties with its partners — most notably the United States, its biggest weapons provider — while increasing its defense budget.
On Thursday, the island’s cabinet approved a record-high defense budget of NT$647 billion ($20.2 billion) for next year, an increase of six percent compared to 2024.
President Lai Ching-te said this month that the budget reflected Taiwan’s “determination to improve our self-defense capabilities... to ensure peace and prosperity.”
The amount would still need to be scrutinized and approved by Taiwan’s fractious parliament, where Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party no longer holds a majority.
DHAKA: Floods triggered by torrential rains have swamped a swath of low-lying Bangladesh, disaster officials said Thursday, adding to the new government’s challenges after weeks of political turmoil.
At least two people have died and hundreds of thousands are stranded in the floods in at least eight districts in southern and eastern areas.
“Around 2.9 million people have been affected and more than 70,000 people have been taken to shelters,” Mohammad Nazmul Abedin, senior official in the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief, told AFP.
Long-time premier Sheikh Hasina quit as prime minister this month and fled to India after weeks of deadly student-led protests, ending her 15-year autocratic rule.
The South Asian nation of 170 million people, crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has seen frequent floods in recent decades.
It is among the countries most vulnerable to disasters and climate change, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.
The annual monsoon rains cause widespread destruction every year, but climate change is shifting weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
The army and the navy have been deployed, with speedboats and helicopters rescuing those stranded by the swollen rivers.
Much of the country is made up of deltas where the Himalayan rivers the Ganges and the Brahmaputra wind toward the sea after coursing through India.
Neighbouring India’s foreign ministry rejected accusations it was to blame for the floods, denying it had deliberately released water from an upstream dam.
It said the catchment area had experienced the “heaviest rains of this year over the last few days,” and that the flow of water downstream was due to “automatic releases.”
Asif Mahmud, a key leader of the student protests that ousted Hasina, and now the sports minister in the interim cabinet, had accused India of not only hosting Hasina, but of “creating a flood” by deliberately releasing water from dams.
India said that was “factually not correct.”
“Floods on the common rivers between India and Bangladesh are a shared problem inflicting sufferings to people on both sides, and requires close mutual cooperation toward resolving them,” New Delhi’s foreign ministry said in a statement.
Hasina’s rule saw widespread human rights abuses, including the mass detention and extrajudicial killings of her political opponents.
But Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government preferred Hasina over her rivals from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which it saw as closer to conservative Islamist groups.
Modi has offered his support to the new Bangladeshi leader Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who is heading the caretaker administration.
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APIA, Samoa: UN chief Antonio Guterres warned Thursday that some Pacific territories face “annihilation” from climate-induced cyclones, ocean heatwaves and rising sea levels.
On a visit to Samoa, he said the fate of Pacific islands depended on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Nearly 200 nations agreed to strive for that target in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, but UN estimates indicate that the world is not on track to achieve it.
“High and rising sea levels pose an enormous threat to Samoa, to the Pacific and to other small island developing states, and these challenges demand resolute international action,” Guterres said.
The Pacific region contributes just 0.02 percent of global carbon emissions, he noted.
“Yet you are on the front lines of the climate crisis, dealing with extreme weather events from raging tropical cyclones to record ocean heatwaves,” the UN secretary-general continued.
“Sea levels are rising even faster than the global average, posing an existential threat to millions of Pacific Islanders,” he added.
“People are suffering. Economies are being shattered. And entire territories face annihilation.”
Guterres urged richer nations to live up to their commitments to help pay for the consequences of climate change in developing countries.
He also called for international action to tackle the impact of climate change, overfishing and plastic pollution on the Pacific Ocean.
Guterres said major powers’ interest in the region was rising, an allusion to the jostling for power and influence in the Pacific between China and the United States and its allies.
“The Pacific is best managed by Pacific islanders,” the UN chief said. “It must never become a forum for geostrategic competition.”
