North Korea to Launch Spy Satellite

South Korea’s foreign ministry also slammed the North’s use of ballistic missile technology as a clear violation of the U.N. sanctions, saying Ri was making a “farfetched excuse” to bolster its weapons programs.

“It is a nonsense to use our legitimate joint training and combined defense posture with the U.S., which were to respond to North Korea’s advanced nuclear and missile threats, as an excuse for launching a reconnaissance satellite,” ministry spokesman Lim Soo-suk said.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson noted that any North Korean launch using ballistic missile technology, including for a satellite, would violate U.N. resolutions.

The launch would be the North’s latest in a series of missile launches and weapons tests, including one of a new, solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile last month.

North Korea will launch its first military reconnaissance satellite in June for monitoring U.S. activities, state media KCNA reported on Tuesday.

Ri Pyong Chol, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party, denounced ongoing joint military exercises by the U.S. and South Korea as openly showing “reckless ambition for aggression.”

U.S. and South Korean forces have carried out various training exercises in recent months, including the biggest-ever live-fire exercises last week, after many drills were scaled back amid Covid-19 restrictions and diplomatic efforts with North Korea.

Ri said the drills required Pyongyang to have the “means capable of gathering information about the military acts of the enemy in real time.”

Nuclear-armed North Korea has said it has completed development of its first military spy satellite. Leader Kim Jong Un has approved final preparations for the launch.

Analysts say the satellite will improve North Korea’s surveillance capability, enabling it to strike targets more accurately in the event of war.

Kenya Signs Trade Agreement with Russia

Kenya’s government said on Monday it would sign a trade agreement to spur business cooperation with Russia, an announcement that came as Moscow sought to deepen its influence in Africa to counter the West’s efforts to isolate it over the war in Ukraine.

The Kenyan presidency made the announcement following a meeting between President William Ruto and the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who was visiting the capital, Nairobi.

The office of Kenya’s president said in a statement that trade between the two countries was “still low despite the huge potential” and that the pact would give businesses “the necessary impetus.” There was no timeline for when the agreement will be signed.

Lavrov arrived Monday in the East

African nation for a surprise visit, during which he was expected to discuss collaboration on several issues, including trade, education and cultural affairs, according to Russia’s Foreign Ministry. Ruto also said that Kenya and the African continent were counting on Russia to support their bid to have a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.

Lavrov’s trip was the latest tour that Russia’s top diplomat has made to Africa, part of his work to drum up support for

Moscow as it squared off with Western powers 15 months after the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

Over the past year, Lavrov has made official visits to various African countries to shore up Russian influence on the continent, including Egypt, Uganda, Eritrea and the Republic of Congo.

The Kenyan presidency said Lavrov was on his way to a meeting of the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India and China — formally known as the

BRICS — who were meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. In Moscow, Lavrov has also recently received leaders from African countries, including Uganda and Somalia.

His trip also came just a week after Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, visited several African countries, including Morocco, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Mozambique, and implored African countries not to remain neutral over the war in Ukraine. Much of the continent has refrained from joining economic sanctions against Russia or condemning the invasion of Ukraine last year. (© The New York Times)

Son of Japan’s PM to Resign

This week, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that his son is resigning as his executive policy secretary to take responsibility for using the prime minister’s residence for a private party at which the merrymaking was exposed in magazine photos that triggered public outrage.

Shotaro Kishida, his father’s executive secretary for political affairs and eldest son, invited a group of people including relatives to a year-end party on December 30 at the Prime Minister’s Official Residence. But the revelry became public after photos were published in the weekly Shukan Bunshun magazine showing Kishida’s son and his relatives posing on red-carpeted stairs in an imitation of the group photos taken of newly appointed Cabinets, with his son at the center — the position reserved for the prime minister. Other photos showed guests standing at a podium as if holding a news conference.

“As secretary for (the prime minister’s) political affairs, a public position, his actions were inappropriate and I decided to replace him to have him take responsibility,” Kishida told reporters Monday night. He said his son will be replaced with another secretary, Takayoshi Yamamoto, on Thursday.

Although Kishida had reprimanded his son for the party, criticism from opposition lawmakers and public outrage forced him to ask his son to step down.

Kishida appointed his son as policy secretary, one of eight secretary posts for the prime minister, in October. The appointment, seen as a step in grooming him as his heir, was criticized as nepotism, which is common in Japanese politics, long dominated by hereditary lawmakers. His son was previously his father’s private secretary.

This was not the first time Kishida’s son has come under fire for making use of his official position for private activities. He was reprimanded for using embassy cars for private sightseeing in Britain and Paris and for buying souvenirs for Cabinet members at a luxury department store in London when he accompanied his father on trips.

4 Kids Still Missing in Plane Crash

hopes that 13-year-old Lesly Jacobombaire Mucutuy, Soleiny Jacobombaire Mucutuy, 9, Tien Ranoque Mucutuy, 4, and infant Cristin Ranoque Mucutuy survived. However, a massive search by hundreds of soldiers and indigenous scouts has so far been fruitless, more than four weeks since the crash.

Indigenous advocates have said the tragedy is a result of governmental negligence. Following news of the crash, the Organization of Indigenous People in the Colombian Amazon issued a statement accusing Bogota of failing to enforce safety checks and protocols for planes in the region. The organization’s president Julio Cesar Lopez said that he hoped for a congressional investigation that would prevent future tragedies.

The skies over the Amazon have seen many accidents. Of 641 accidents registered by Colombia’s civil aviation authority since 1996, 56, or 8.74% of the total, took place in the Amazon region, even though less than 2% of the Colombian population lives there.

Pilots working in the area must contend with aging planes and a wild terrain, experts say.

dangerous. Most settlements in the region are only accessible by plane.

Official Drains Reservoir to Save Phone

tually face disciplinary action.

Vishwas told The Indian Express that news reports of his phone-retrieval operation had been greatly exaggerated. He also said the Paralkot reservoir was not used for irrigation.

But Shukla, a district magistrate in the area, said local farmers did rely on it. “He will face consequences for draining the water, and this won’t be tolerated,” she added. (© The New York Times)

Record Migration Numbers in UK

Say you drop your brand-new smartphone into a reservoir while posing for a selfie during a picnic. Would you consider it lost and buy a replacement, or drain the reservoir to retrieve it?

An Indian official who chose the latter option has been suspended from his job. He is also facing the glare of the national news media in a drought-prone country where water is a precious commodity.

Three adults onboard a plane died in a crash in the Amazon on May 1. Since then, authorities have been searching for four Colombian children who were also on the plane. Only traces of the children have been found in the surrounding forests: a baby bottle, a makeshift shelter, a dirty diaper, and even what appeared to be small footprints.

These discoveries have fueled

The same plane that carried the four children had previously crashed two years prior, in 2021, due to an engine malfunction. It performed a controlled crash landing, causing considerable damage to the propeller, engine and one wing.

After being repaired, the plane crashed again on May 1 under similar circumstances, on a route with no good options for emergency landing.

Unfortunately, despite the considerable risks of flying in the Amazon, air travel is often the only way to get around, as few roads cross through the jungle and waterways are even more

The official, Rajesh Vishwas, 32, was picnicking with friends in central India on May 21 when he dropped his Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra into the Paralkot reservoir in Chhattisgarh state, where he lives. The $1,200 device is a new model, and Vishwas, a government food inspector, apparently decided that he had to have it back and claimed that it had official departmental data, according to Indian television station NDTV.

Initially, some villagers he knew spent two days diving in the reservoir in an attempt to retrieve the phone, Vishwas told The Indian Express newspaper. No luck. So he rented a diesel pump and drained about 3 feet of water — by some estimates, enough to irrigate 1,500 acres of farmland.

Vishwas later said he had received “oral permission” from R.C. Dhivar, an official at the local Water Resources Department, to drain 3 or 4 feet of water.

Priyanka Shukla, a top local official, said in an interview on Saturday that Vishwas had no authority to drain the water.

By the time Vishwas retrieved his phone this past week, it was unusable, according to reports in the Indian news media. And after word of his operation made headlines across the country, he was temporarily removed from his post for having “misused his position.”

Officials said they had asked Dhivar to explain his position on the episode, in writing, within two days. He could even-

Too many people are coming into Britain. Official figures on Thursday showed that net migration reached record levels last year, with 606,000 people – net – coming into the country. To break that down, around 1.2 million people arrived in 2022 and about half of that number of people left.

These numbers come despite pledges from successive Conservative governments to drastically reduce the numbers of people moving to the UK, particularly in the wake of Brexit – a rupture that was touted by its proponents as a necessary step for Britain to “take control” of its borders. The lifting of Covid restrictions and the war in Ukraine contributed heavily to the record numbers.

The vast majority of people arriving – 925,000 – were non-EU nationals, and around one in 12 of those were asylum seekers, included for the first time in the ONS’s annual release.

These numbers will force the hands of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his embattled Home Secretary Suella Braverman, both of whom have joined their predecessors in promising to reduce arrivals despite the strain on Britain’s public services, where key sectors like health care are marred by chronic staffing shortages.

The pair have sought to focus attention on refugees and asylum-seekers crossing the English Channel on small boats, rather than on overall migration, despite that route representing a tiny proportion of arrivals to the UK.

Ministers have been criticized by rights organizations and politicians across the political divide for their use of hardline rhetoric against those people, with Braverman controversially rallying against an “invasion” of migrants across the Channel.

Last week, Sunak told the BBC at the G7 summit that legal migration to the UK was “too high,” though he did not offer a specific plan to reduce it.

“What I would say is we’re considering a range of options to help tackle numbers of legal migration and to bring those numbers down – and we’ll talk more about that in the future,” Sunak said.

He has a long-touted promise to “Stop the Boats.” Arrivals of asylum-seekers on small, illegal vessels run by criminal trafficking gangs have soared in recent years and attracted widespread media coverage.

Snap Elections in Spain

pact. Legally, the parties have only until June 9 to apply to run on a joint ticket.

Although the Socialists’ overall vote share remained largely steady in the local and regional vote, the dire performance of United We Can across the country leaves the coalition with a questionable mandate to continue.

Sunday marked a new low of United We Can’s electoral performance since it won its first votes in a European election in 2014.

The party was founded by Spain’s precursor to the Occupy protest movement and was originally led by university professor Pablo Iglesias. Tackling the austerity politics imposed by the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, United We Can promised policies drawn from grassroots activism and grew to become a national force. After joining the coalition government in 2019 with the Socialists, United We Can has focused on issues such as gender identity.

There are several complications with the new election date. A late July election is unprecedented in a Southern European country like Spain, when many will be on vacation away from their registered voting address and when political parties will be in the middle of negotiating alliances spurred by the local elections.