03 World

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Chinese Coast Guard patrols to the east of Taiwan are a “provocative act” and the military will closely ‌coordinate with the island’s Coast Guard in responding, Defence Minister Wellington Koo said on Monday.

China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, was angered after Japan and the Philippines said in May that they would begin formal talks on delimiting their maritime boundaries, viewing that as involving waters off Taiwan.

Delimitation is the process of legally establishing the outer limits of a state.

Late on Saturday, Chinese state media said ships had been sent to carry out a “special maritime ⁠traffic law-enforcement operation” in the waters east of Taiwan in response to the Japanese and Philippine announcement.

Taiwan’s Coast Guard sent its own ships to warn away the Chinese ones and said on Sunday they had been “expelled” from restricted waters.

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LONDON — British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will host Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz on Sunday to discuss ongoing support for Ukraine.

The U.K., France and Germany, the so-called E3 group of European nations, have been prominent backers of Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The U.K. and France lead the “coalition of the willing” initiative to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a peace process.

The meeting on Sunday evening comes in the wake of a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack that targeted Saint Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, underscoring Kyiv’s growing ability to hit deep inside Russia. Gov. Alexander Beglov said three people sustained minor injuries in Saturday’s attack, during which residents were advised to stay indoors.

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Gunfire erupted Saturday near a busy street festival in Ohio, wounding at least 12 people and sending some eventgoers scrambling for cover while others rushed to help the victims.

No suspects were in custody hours afterward, Toledo Deputy Police Chief Joe Heffernan said, and officials urged people who were at the festival to come forward with any photos or videos on their phones for possible leads.

The shooting happened near the Old West End Festival, an annual gathering of live music and home tours.

Heffernan said it appeared that at least two people fired weapons and they were “probably shooting at each other.”

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France on Tuesday banned Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering the country, the French foreign minister said, slamming him for actively promoting the annexation of the West Bank and the “re-colonisation” of Gaza.

“Four leaders of settler organisations, and twenty-one violent settlers” were also banned from French territory, Jean-Noël Barrot wrote on X, condemning a “policy that the overwhelming majority of the international community, firmly committed to the two-state solution, cannot accept”.

The minister said the announcement “imposing new sanctions on those responsible for the intensification of settlement-building and violence in the West Bank” was in tandem with Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway.

Smotrich, of the far-right Religious Zionist party, is the second Israeli minister France has banned from its territory in recent months.

Last month, France banned National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir for mocking bound activists seized by Israeli soldiers on a Gaza-bound flotilla carrying aid for the besieged Palestinian territory.

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This week, United Nations climate negotiators will gather in Bonn, Germany, to tell the rest of the world how to save the planet.

The irony is staggering. Germany is the poster child of failed green paternalism. It shut down its nuclear plants, bet everything on renewables, and ended up burning more coal and buying gas from Russia. Germany has no idea how to save the planet — it cannot even save itself.

That’s because Germany and other big-government climate warriors assumed the only force capable of protecting the environment was mandates, all while the market was quietly working.

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British lawmakers have condemned the apparent attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast as “sickening”, “barbaric”, and “medieval” as police announced the arrest of a man thought to be from Sudan. Meanwhile, left-wing politicians have warned of a potential retaliation from the so-called “far-right”.

Footage shared on social media appeared to show a man, seemingly of African descent, repeatedly stabbing at the neck and head area of a man on the ground in an apparent beheading attempt. A police update on Tuesday morning said the suspect, earlier said to be Somalian, is actually of Sudanese origin.

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A French fighter jet shot down a drone that entered NATO ally Latvia’s airspace from Russia on Monday, the latest security incident along Europe’s eastern border while Russia wages war on Ukraine.

NATO command ordered the shoot-down after it was determined that Russia had used electromagnetic warfare in the area, Latvian Defense Minister Raivis Melnis told reporters. The drone was brought down Monday morning near the village of Berzgale, roughly 20 miles from the border. No property damage or injuries were reported.

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A Lebanese culture ministry official told the French news agency AFP on Monday that Israeli bombardment had damaged a UNESCO World Heritage site in the southern city of Tyre, as correspondents there reported damage at the site.

One of the oldest cities on the Mediterranean coast, Tyre, in antiquity, was at various times Phoenician, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine.

The city is around 12 miles from Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, and its UNESCO World Heritage-listed ruins include the remains of Roman baths and a second-century triumphal arch and hippodrome.

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The UK government has laid out a $1.47 billion plan to shake its dependence on foreign-made artificial intelligence hardware.

Under the measures, announced Monday, the UK will spend more than $1 billion on a national AI supercomputer. It will be stocked with $530 million worth of hardware, including $200 million that will go toward specialist inference chips for processing AI tasks. Priority will be given to up-and-coming British firms in the procurement process; the government pointed to Olix and Fractile, two UK startups developing new styles of inference chip, as potential beneficiaries. British researchers and startups are expected to be able to use the supercomputer starting in 2030.

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President Donald Trump stormed out of a taped interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after being pressed on his controversial “weaponization” fund and on evidence of his persistent claims of election fraud.

Trump sat with NBC’s Kristen Welker for a taped interview on a Wisconsin farm that touched on the Iran war, potential interest rate hikes and the $1.776 billion “weaponization” fund that could financially compensate convicted violent rioters who attacked police officers on Jan. 6, 2021. Thousands of people stormed the Capitol that day, attempting to disrupt the certification of former President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

The president said he would like to see the weaponization fund proceed despite setbacks that prompted acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to say it was permanently halted.

“If it was up to me, I’d pay them the kind of money that they deserve,” Trump said of the fund. “People have been destroyed. Lives have been destroyed. Many suicides, think of it.” The president has repeatedly made such claims without providing evidence.

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The Jeffrey Epstein saga has once again reached the highest levels of American politics, with former President George W. Bush becoming linked to questions surrounding the pedophile’s controversial treatment by the justice system.A new report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julie K. Brown, published in the Miami Herald, suggests that senior officials within Bush’s Department of Justice (DOJ) may have played a role in decisions that allowed Epstein to avoid more serious federal prosecution in the mid-2000s.The report centres on Michael Reiter, the former Palm Beach police chief who launched the first major criminal investigation into Epstein. Reiter and his team spent months gathering evidence.

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President Donald Trump wants to get an agreement signed with Iran, regardless of the strikes between Iran and Israel over the weekend.

Iran fired strikes at Israel over the weekend, and Israel Defense Forces later announced that “the Israeli Air Force struck military targets belonging to the Iranian terror regime in western and central Iran a short while ago.”

“Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting,’” he posted to Truth Social early Monday morning.

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Manila, Philippines — – An offshore magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked the southern Philippines Monday, killing at least 16 people, injuring more than 200 others, mostly in damaged buildings, and sending a 3-foot tsunami into nearby coasts.

A few buildings collapsed and key infrastructure sustained quake damage in the city of General Santos, and tsunami damage was reported in at least one coastal village. Smaller waves were measured in Indonesia and Palau and as far away as southern Japan.

“It’s a major earthquake and we’re expecting damage,” Teresito Bacolcol, the director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, told The Associated Press.

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Iran lashed out at its neighbors Saturday after U.S. forces downed missiles Iran launched at targets in the Strait of Hormuz.

“U.S. forces intercepted multiple Iranian ballistic missiles and drones launched by Iran toward the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf neighbors,” U.S. Central Command posted on X.

“Iran fired seven ballistic missiles toward Kuwait and Bahrain hours after U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) shot down four Iranian one-way attack drones that were launched toward the Strait of Hormuz,” CENTCOM said.

“The attack drones posed an immediate threat to regional maritime traffic. U.S. forces subsequently struck Iranian coastal surveillance radar sites in Goruk and on Qeshm Island to defend against further maritime attacks.”

The post said Iran’s missile attacks achieved nothing.

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NORMANDY, France — U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned about the invasion of Europe by third-world migrants in a Saturday speech commemorating the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. Hegseth spoke at the Normandy American Cemetery, where thousands of Americans are buried. All but one died storming the beaches on D-Day or in the subsequent Battle of Normandy during World War II.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain and Italy and Greece and Bulgaria,” Hegseth said. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion? Or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.”

Twenty-nine WWII veterans attended the ceremony, and 107-year-old Arthur Rose, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy on D-Day, read a letter he sent home days after the invasion. French and American flags whipped on their poles as wind blasted through the cemetery and waves of rain and sunshine alternated, giving Hegseth an appropriate backdrop to offer a stark warning to Europe: They face yet another existential crisis today, this time from third-world migrants intent on destroying the West.

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DONALD Trump has vowed to destroy Iran’s stocks of enriched uranium whether or not he makes a deal with the rogue nation.

As his bloody war on Iran reached its 100-day mark, Trump threatened: “We’re very close to a deal, or I’m going to blow the hell out of them.”

Trump says he could work with Iran to destroy uranium Credit: NBC News
The US president said ‘it would take weeks of digging’ to get to the uranium Credit: NBC News

Trump told NBC in an interview recorded on Friday that the US could work with the Iranians to destroy the regime’s stocks of enriched uranium.

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On Friday evening, the US vice-president, JD Vance, blamed Henry Nowak’s murder on the “mass invasion of migrants” and said the “only response” was “righteous anger”, prompting a rebuke from Downing Street which hit out at “people trying to interfere in our democracy and seeking to stir up division”.

The UK justice secretary and deputy prime minister, David Lammy, revealed to Sky News’ Trevor Phillips that he spoke to Vance yesterday following his intervention. Lammy, who is rumoured to be good friends with the vice-president, said:

I spoke to the vice president yesterday, and I wanted to emphasise a number of things.

The first is that our democratic process is working well. This young man has been convicted. There is an investigation into the police by the Independent Police (Conduct)Authority.

There is an investigation into Hampshire Police by the inspectorate. The (attorney general) is looking at the sentencing in relation to this. The national police chiefs are looking at the guidance in relation to this.

The second thing was I disagree with him. This has got nothing to do with mass migration. This young man was a Brit. Let’s be clear about that. And I said, ‘look, Mr vice president, you’re wrong about this’.

And it’s also the case that actually murder is coming down in the United Kingdom. So we had an agreeable conversation. But we disagree.

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The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was expected last year but may not be published until July – experts warn the UK needs significant spending to close big holes in its defence.

David Lammy has defended the Government’s plans for the UK’s defence, saying the pledge for spending to reach 3 percent of national income is “absolutely sacrosanct “.

Amid delays to an investment plan for the future, the deputy prime minister said “the money will be found” to set out how new equipment and infrastructure will be procured, as he faced questions about which departments may face cuts to fund the armed forces. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was expected last year but may not be published until July amid reported wrangling within Government over how to pay for the plans.

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The Israeli ambassador to the United States is slamming Hezbollah’s rejection of a peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, saying they are “trying to destroy that hope.”

“There was real hope at the negotiating table for a new chapter of security and peace,” Ambassador Yechiel Leiter wrote on X. “Hezbollah and Iran are trying to destroy that hope. They must not succeed.”

Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based, Iran-backed militant group, was not involved in the negotiations taking part in Washington over the last several days, though it is the one striking Israeli troops in southern Lebanon and northern Israel.

“Israel will defend its citizens,” Leiter wrote. “Lebanon deserves a future shaped by its government-not by an Iranian-backed terrorist organization.”

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The CEOs of several major artificial intelligence companies are urging members of Congress to adopt new laws that would make it harder for bad actors to develop biological weapons using their technology.

Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Microsoft AI’s Mustafa Suleyman are among the signatories on a public letter calling for laws requiring companies that sell synthetic DNA and RNA to screen customers and orders to prevent the misuse of genetic material.

Organized by the nonpartisan Institute for Progress and the right-leaning Foundation for American Innovation, the letter acknowledges that given the pace of AI development, “there is a real possibility that the knowledge barriers which have historically prevented bad actors from obtaining biological weapons will meaningfully erode.”

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The United States has imposed sanctions on ​Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, along with his wife and three other individuals, according to a filing Thursday from the U.S. Treasury Department. It’s the latest Trump administration move to pressure the island’s leadership.

Included in the sanctions are Alejandro Castro Espín, the sole son of former President Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín. He served as an adviser to Cuba’s Defense and National Security Commission and was present when Raúl Castro greeted then-U.S. President Barack Obama in Havana during a historic March 2016 meeting. Castro Espín’s son, Raúl Alejandro Castro Calis, was also listed.

The sanctions come after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order expanding sanctions against the island and has been threatening military action ever since ousting Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January and then ordering an energy blockade that choked off fuel shipments to Cuba. That has led to severe blackouts, food shortages and an economic collapse across the island.