Pakistan, India trade fire in disputed Kashmir, 7 people dead

Pakistani police officers stand guard at Chakoti post situated at the line of control between Pakistan and Indian Kashmirs, in Pakistan in this October 2014 file photo. (AP)
Updated 02 April 2019
Follow

Pakistan, India trade fire in disputed Kashmir, 7 people dead

  • The fatalities were some of the highest since tensions flared between in February
  • The cross-border firing resumed on Tuesday morning after a brief lull

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and India traded fire in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, leaving seven people dead — three Pakistani soldiers, a Pakistani villager, an Indian woman and a girl and a member of the Indian paramilitary troops, officials said Tuesday.

The fatalities were some of the highest since tensions flared between the rival nuclear-armed nations after a suicide bombing killed 40 Indian troops in Indian-administered Kashmir in February.

Pakistan’s military said Indian troops targeted its military positions overnight in the border town of Rakhchakri in Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir. Along with the three soldiers killed, a fourth was wounded, the army said. The statement added that Pakistani soldiers “responded effectively.”

The Indian fire also killed a 70-year-old Pakistani villager in a remote area of Niaza Per on Monday evening, according to Pakistani police official Waheed Qureshi.

In India, the army accused Pakistani troops of firing mortars and small-arms fire Monday along the disputed frontier, the highly militarized so-called Line of Control, hitting the sector of Poonch in Indian-controlled Kashmir. It said Indian soldiers retaliated.

Indian police officer M.K. Sinha said an Indian paramilitary officer, a woman and a girl were killed while at least 18 civilians and five troops were wounded.

The cross-border firing resumed on Tuesday morning, after a brief lull, he said.

Days after the Feb. 14 suicide attack in Kashmir, India launched an airstrike inside Pakistan, saying it targeted militants from the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group who had claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Pakistan retaliated and said it shot down two Indian air force planes; one Indian pilot was captured and later released and handed back to India amid signs of easing tensions. Pakistan said Washington, Moscow, Beijing and Riyadh helped avert all-out fighting but tensions remained. Islamabad later claimed no Pakistani was linked to the attack and that Jaish-e-Mohammed had no training camps inside Pakistan.

The group was founded by Pakistani militant Masood Azhar after his release from prison in India in 1999 in exchange for 155 hostages held on an Indian Airlines flight hijacked in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Azhar is believed to be seriously ill, living at an undisclosed location.


Britain and NATO allies must spend more, be tougher,  UK’s Cameron to say

Updated 15 sec ago
Follow

Britain and NATO allies must spend more, be tougher,  UK’s Cameron to say

  • The upcoming NATO summit must see all allies on track to deliver their pledge made in Wales in 2014 to spend 2 percent on defense

LONDON: Britain’s foreign minister, David Cameron, will urge its fellow NATO members to meet their pledge to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, and to be tougher and more assertive with adversaries, in a speech to be delivered on Thursday.
In what is billed as his first major pronouncement as foreign secretary, Cameron will say NATO must “out-compete, out-cooperate and out-innovate,” and that Britain must not only bolster existing alliances but also forge new partnerships around the globe.
“We are in a battle of wills. We all must prove our adversaries wrong – Britain, and our allies and partners around the world,” Cameron will say at the UK’s National Cyber Security Center, according to extracts released by his office.
“The upcoming NATO summit must see all allies on track to deliver their pledge made in Wales in 2014 to spend 2 percent on defense. And we then need to move quickly to establish 2.5 percent as the new benchmark for all NATO allies.” Last month, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said British defense spending would increase to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2030 — an additional 75 billion pounds ($94 billion) over the next six years.
Britain has been one of the most vocal and active backers of Ukraine in the wake of the invasion by Russia, and Cameron, a former prime minister, will say too nations are not learning the lessons of that conflict.
Some in Europe seem unwilling to spend on defense while war rages nearby, Cameron will say, adding that while some nations have criticized attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, only Britain and the United States have carried out strikes in retaliation.
“If (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s illegal invasion teaches us anything, it must be that doing too little, too late only spurs an aggressor on,” he will say. .”.. This cannot go on. We need to be tougher and more assertive.”


Russia’s biggest airstrike in weeks piles pressure on Ukraine power grid

Updated 43 min 48 sec ago
Follow

Russia’s biggest airstrike in weeks piles pressure on Ukraine power grid

  • Russia’s defense ministry said it struck Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and energy facilities in retaliation for Kyiv’s strikes on Russian energy facilities

KYIV: Russian missiles and drones struck nearly a dozen Ukrainian energy infrastructure facilities on Wednesday, causing serious damage at three Soviet-era thermal power plants and blackouts in multiple regions, officials said.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 39 of 55 missiles and 20 of 21 attack drones used for the attack, which piles more pressure on the energy system more than two years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
“Another massive attack on our energy industry!” Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote on the Telegram app.
Two people were injured in the Kyiv region and one was hurt in the Kirovohrad region, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
Galushchenko said power generation and transmission facilities in the Poltava, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Vinnytsia regions were targeted.
Some 350 rescuers raced to minimize the damage to energy facilities, 30 homes, public transport vehicles, cars, and a fire station, the interior ministry said.
National power grid operator Ukrenergo said it was forced to introduce electricity cuts in nine regions for consumers and that it would expand them nationwide for businesses during peak evening hours until 11 p.m. (2000 GMT).
Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, interviewed by the Ukrainska Pravda media outlet, said electricity imports would not make up for power shortages. He said hydropower stations had also been hit, clarifying an earlier company statement omitting hydro stations from the list of affected facilities.
Power cuts for industrial users, he said, were “almost guaranteed” but interruptions for domestic users would depend on how well they reduced consumption.
“Many important power stations were damaged,” he said, citing three stations operated by DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest private company, as well as two hydropower stations.
“The damage is on quite a large scale. There is a significant loss of generating power, so significant that even imports of power from Europe will not cover the shortage that has been created in the energy system.”
Russia’s defense ministry said it struck Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and energy facilities in retaliation for Kyiv’s strikes on Russian energy facilities.
“As a result of the strike, Ukraine’s capabilities for the output of military products, as well as the transfer of Western weapons and military equipment to the line of contact, have been significantly reduced,” the ministry said.

WORLD WAR TWO ANNIVERSARY
President Volodymyr Zelensky noted the attacks were launched on the day Ukraine marks the end of World War Two.
“This is how the Kremlin marks the end of World War Two in Europe, with a massive strike, attempting to disrupt the lives of our people with its Nazism,” he said in his nightly video address.
In an earlier online address, Zelensky singled out what he said was the West’s limited progress in curbing Russian energy revenue and some countries that attended President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration for a fifth term in the Kremlin on Tuesday.
Fighting Nazism back then, he said, was “when humanity unites, opposes Hitler, instead of buying his oil and coming to his inauguration.”
Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks on Russian refineries this year despite apparent objections by the United States, trying to find a pressure point against the Kremlin whose forces are slowly advancing in the eastern Donbas region.
Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries may have disrupted more than 15 percent of Russian oil refining capacity, a NATO military alliance official has said.
After pounding the energy system in the first winter of the war, Russia renewed its assault on the grid in March as Ukraine was running low on stocks of Western air defense missiles.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal estimated that more than 800 heating facilities had been damaged and up to 8 GW of power generation lost so far, adding the government needed $1 billion to fund repair work.
DTEK vowed to keep working to restore power at its facilities, and its CEO, Maxim Timchenko, called on Ukraine’s allies to provide more air defense systems.
Officials did not name the facilities hit on Wednesday, part of a policy of wartime secrecy that Kyiv says is needed to prevent Russia using the information for further strikes.
But Lviv governor Maksym Kozytskyi said Russia attacked a natural gas storage facility in his region in the west of the country, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.
In central Poltava region, energy infrastructure was hit by a drone, Poltava Regional Governor Filip Pronin said.
The governors of Vinnytsia and Zaporizhzhia said critical civilian infrastructure facilities were damaged.


Armenia’s prime minister in Russia for talks amid strain in ties

Updated 09 May 2024
Follow

Armenia’s prime minister in Russia for talks amid strain in ties

  • Putin hosted Nikol Pashinyan for talks following a summit of the Eurasian Economic Union, a Moscow-dominated economic alliance
  • Armenia’s ties with its longtime sponsor and ally Russia have grown increasingly strained after Azerbaijan waged a lightning military campaign in September to reclaim the Karabakh region

MOSCOW: Armenia’s prime minister visited Moscow and held talks Wednesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid spiraling tensions between the estranged allies.

Putin hosted Nikol Pashinyan for talks following a summit of the Eurasian Economic Union, a Moscow-dominated economic alliance. that they both attended earlier in the day. The negotiations came a day after Putin began his fifth term at a glittering Kremlin inauguration.
In brief remarks at the start of the talks, Putin said that bilateral trade was growing, but acknowledged “some issues concerning security in the region.”
Pashinyan, who last visited Moscow in December, said that “certain issues have piled up since then.”
Armenia’s ties with its longtime sponsor and ally Russia have grown increasingly strained after Azerbaijan waged a lightning military campaign in September to reclaim the Karabakh region, ending three decades of ethnic Armenian separatists’ rule there.
Armenian authorities accused Russian peacekeepers who were deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh after the previous round of hostilities in 2020 of failing to stop Azerbaijan’s onslaught. Moscow, which has a military base in Armenia, has rejected the accusations, arguing that its troops didn’t have a mandate to intervene.
The Kremlin, in turn, has been angered by Pashinyan’s efforts to deepen ties with the West and distance his country from Moscow-dominated security and economic alliances.
Just as Pashinyan was visiting Moscow on Wednesday, Armenia’s Foreign Ministry announced that the country will stop paying fees to the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Russia-dominated security pact. Armenia has previously suspended its participation in the grouping as Pashinyan has sought to bolster ties with the European Union and NATO.
Russia was also vexed by Armenia’s decision to join the International Criminal Court, which last year indicted Putin for alleged war crimes connected to the Russian action in Ukraine.
Moscow, busy with the Ukrainian conflict that has dragged into a third year, has publicly voiced concern about Yerevan’s westward shift but sought to downplay the differences.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov conceded Tuesday that “there are certain problems in our bilateral relations,” but added that “there is a political will to continue the dialogue.”


AstraZeneca to withdraw COVID vaccine globally as demand dips

Updated 08 May 2024
Follow

AstraZeneca to withdraw COVID vaccine globally as demand dips

  • AstraZeneca says initiated worldwide withdrawal due to “surplus of available updated vaccines”
  • Drugmaker has previously admitted vaccine causes side effects such as blood clots, low blood platelet counts

AstraZeneca said on Tuesday it had initiated the worldwide withdrawal of its COVID-19 vaccine due to a “surplus of available updated vaccines” since the pandemic.

The company also said it would proceed to withdraw the vaccine Vaxzevria’s marketing authorizations within Europe.

“As multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed there is a surplus of available updated vaccines,” the company said, adding that this had led to a decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer being manufactured or supplied.

According to media reports, the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker has previously admitted in court documents that the vaccine causes side-effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts.

The firm’s application to withdraw the vaccine was made on March 5 and came into effect on May 7, according to the Telegraph, which first reported the development.

The Serum Institute of India (SII), which produced AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine under the brand name Covishield, stopped manufacturing and supply of the doses since December 2021, an SII spokesperson said.

London-listed AstraZeneca began moving into respiratory syncytial virus vaccines and obesity drugs through several deals last year after a slowdown in growth as COVID-19 medicine sales declined.


Ex-national security adviser criticizes UK PM for not suspending arms sales to Israel

Updated 08 May 2024
Follow

Ex-national security adviser criticizes UK PM for not suspending arms sales to Israel

  • Lord Peter Ricketts: ‘Pity’ govt ‘could not have taken a stand on this and got out ahead of the US’
  • American decision to pause delivery of weapons seen as warning to Israel to abandon or temper plan to invade Rafah

LONDON: A former UK national security adviser has condemned Prime Minister Rishi Sunak for failing to suspend weapons sales to Israel, The Independent reported on Wednesday.

After the US paused a delivery of bombs, Sunak has yet to follow suit despite mounting pressure from within his own Conservative Party.

Lord Peter Ricketts, a life peer in the House of Lords and retired senior diplomat, said Britain should have been “ahead of the US” in ending arms sales to Israel.

The US decision to pause the shipment of bombs is seen as a warning to Israel to abandon or temper its plan to invade Rafah in southern Gaza.

More than 1 million Palestinian civilians are sheltering in the city after being forced out of northern sections of the enclave.

Ricketts said it is a “pity” that “the government could not have taken a stand on this and got out ahead of the US.”

Conservative MP David Jones made the same call in comments to The Independent, saying: “We should give similar consideration to a pause.”

He added: “Anyone viewing the distressing scenes in Gaza will want to see an end to the fighting. Hamas is in reality beaten. Now is the time for diplomacy to bring this dreadful conflict to an end.”

At Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, Sunak faced a flurry of questions over Britain’s potential ties to an Israeli invasion of Rafah. He said the government’s position remains “unchanged.”