NEW DELHI — Indian and Chinese troops have clashed along their disputed Himalayan border, according to media and military reports on Monday, as Beijing quietly intensifies pressure against its southern neighbor with new incursions into territory claimed by both sides. Details about the latest skirmish remain foggy, and Indian officials played down the events. Indian […]
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HONG KONG — China sent warplanes into the Taiwan Strait over the weekend, a show of force to the Biden administration that signals Beijing’s plans to maintain pressure on Taiwan even as it calls for a reset with the United States. Taiwan’s military said that four Chinese fighter jets, eight bombers and one anti-submarine aircraft […]
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WASHINGTON — The Senate on Friday confirmed Lloyd J. Austin III as defense secretary, filling a critical national security position in President Biden’s cabinet and elevating the first Black American in the country’s history to lead the Pentagon. The 93-to-2 vote came a day after Congress swiftly moved to grant Mr. Austin, a retired four-star […]
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MOSCOW — The Kremlin on Friday welcomed the Biden administration’s offer to extend a nuclear disarmament treaty that is set to expire next month, signaling, as had been expected, that Russia intends to cooperate with the United States on nuclear security despite President Biden’s pledges to otherwise pursue a harder line with Moscow than his […]
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WASHINGTON — In the end, the inauguration triumphed over the insurrection. President Biden’s plea for national unity in his Inaugural Address on Wednesday was rooted in a belief — born of decades working inside the fractious institutions of government — that America can return to an era where “enough of us have come together to […]
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MANILA — Seven Philippine soldiers, including an air force colonel, died when the helicopter they were flying in crashed in the southern Philippines during a hunt for communist rebels over the weekend. The military said the helicopter, a refurbished UH-1H Vietnam-era craft commonly known as a Huey, was flying Saturday with another Huey on a […]
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By Natalie Kitroeff, Alan Feuer and Oscar Lopez MEXICO CITY — When U.S. officials agreed to hand back over to Mexico a former defense minister whom they had accused of being on a drug cartel’s payroll, they did it in hopes of salvaging the badly fraying security cooperation between the two countries. But on Friday […]
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SEOUL, South Korea — A month before the U.S. presidential election, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, held a military parade that featured what appeared to be the country’s largest-ever intercontinental ballistic missile. This week, just days before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration, the North Korean dictator held another parade, showing off a new submarine-launched […]
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MEXICO CITY — The authorities in Mexico say they will bring no charges against a former top military official who was arrested in the United States last year on drug-trafficking and corruption charges, only to be sent home at the request of the outraged Mexican government. The former defense minister, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, had […]
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SEOUL, South Korea — As North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, convened a party congress over the past eight days, outside analysts wondered if his failure to improve the economic lives of his people would affect the dictator’s nuclear ambitions. At the gathering of his ruling Workers’ Party, Mr. Kim provided an unequivocal answer: absolutely not. […]
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HAEAN, South Korea — Along the border with North Korea is a town where the sad legacy of war is perhaps best understood by looking at the crops in the field. Standing on a wind-swept plot on a hillside, Han Gi-taek, 69, peered over the land and recalled the hard labor, cold nights and stray […]
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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, vowed to advance his country’s nuclear capabilities, declaring that it will build land- and submarine-launched solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles, as well as making its nuclear missiles smaller, lighter and more precise, the North’s state media reported on Saturday. Mr. Kim’s declaration comes as President-elect Joseph R. […]
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SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean court on Friday ordered the Japanese government to pay $91,800 each to 12 Korean women kept as sex slaves for Japan’s troops during World War II. The ruling, which is the first of its kind in South Korea, is likely to aggravate the already chilly relations between Washington’s […]
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South Korea will send a delegation to negotiate the release of a ship and its 20-member crew after the vessel was seized by Iranian forces, officials said on Tuesday, the latest development in a provocation by the government in Tehran, which has been economically isolated by U.S. sanctions. Iranian officials said the ship was detained […]
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In a postwar era rife with revolutions, regional disputes and Cold War conflicts, darkened by fears of an East-West nuclear conflagration, Mr. Urquhart deployed and often led his lightly armed peacekeepers into war zones in the Middle East, Congo, southern Africa, Kashmir, Cyprus and other places. They sometimes failed to defuse explosive situations, but often […]
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The season proceeded, with adjustments. Roster sizes were reduced from 15 to 14, and the league no longer required teams to dress a minimum of 12 players for every game. Overtime was abolished, too, in order to get traveling teams out of rinks on time, in deference to wartime restrictions on delaying or rescheduling trains. […]
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MADRID — Earlier this month, 271 former members of Spain’s armed forces used the anniversary of the country’s Constitution to issue a manifesto criticizing the left-wing coalition government and warning that Spain’s unity was under threat. The manifesto was published shortly after chats were leaked to the Spanish news media in which retired air force […]
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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has significantly invested in its relationship with India over the past four years, seeing the country as a crucial partner in counterbalancing the rise of China. Military cooperation and a personal friendship between President Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India — both domineering nationalists — have pushed New […]
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President-elect Joe Biden appears to be framing his foreign policy around three themes: re-engaging with America’s friends and allies, renewing our participation in international organizations and relying more heavily on nonmilitary instruments of power. Considering the challenges posed by China and other countries, as well as transnational threats that range from pandemics to climate change, […]
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WASHINGTON — The scope of a hack engineered by one of Russia’s premier intelligence agencies became clearer on Monday, when the Trump administration acknowledged that another federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security, had been compromised. Investigators were struggling to determine what parts of the military, intelligence community and nuclear laboratories were also vulnerable to […]
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JERUSALEM — A new Israeli television series based on true events from the 1973 war, when the country was caught off guard on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar and feared total destruction, has prompted an intense public reckoning with the scope of war trauma and the treatment of survivors. The high-impact series pried […]
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — A United Nations-backed tribunal in The Hague on Friday sentenced a member of the Hezbollah militant group to life in prison after convicting him in absentia of conspiring in the 2005 car-bomb attack that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri of Lebanon. The defendant, Salim Ayyash, was convicted in August on five […]
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“These recordings, which were truly an extraordinary intelligence achievement, established our feeling, of the top I.D.F., that we will win the war against Egypt,” Gen. Shlomo Gazit, who later become the chief of military intelligence, said in a 2016 interview. Shortly after that intelligence coup, at the request of Moroccan intelligence, Mossad located Mr. Ben […]
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WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday rejected efforts to block the sale of munitions worth $23 billion to the United Arab Emirates, overcoming concerns about sending weapons to Gulf Arab nations. The pair of votes, forced by a bipartisan group of senators, highlighted growing unease in Congress with sending large tranches of sophisticated weapons that […]
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Things went smoothly enough for the first few days, all the way through North Dakota and into Saskatchewan. At the Canadian border, she was given five days to get to her destination. It ended up taking her seven. First, she lost her cell signal, and as the weather got worse, she lost her bearings several […]
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WASHINGTON — The House overwhelmingly passed a $741 billion defense policy bill on Tuesday that would require that Confederate names be stripped from American military bases, defying President Trump’s veto threat and moving lawmakers one step closer to a potential showdown in his final weeks in office. The 335-78 bipartisan vote to approve the legislation […]
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President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to put democracy back on the agenda after four years of President Trump’s unapologetic coddling of dictators. Mr. Biden has promised to host a gathering of the world’s democracies to demonstrate his commitment to democratic values both abroad and at home. But will Mr. Biden go beyond rhetoric and gestures […]
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KABUL, Afghanistan — Suhaila Siddiq, Afghanistan’s first female lieutenant general, who was also a renowned surgeon and unknowingly became a feminist role model in a largely patriarchal society, died here on Friday, at the same hospital where she had treated the wounded and weary of her country’s unending war for decades. She was thought to […]
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NAIROBI, Kenya — Somalis fear a U.S. decision to withdraw troops from their country will be seen as a victory for the Qaeda-linked militants who have wreaked havoc there for years, and sow the potential for further chaos at an especially delicate moment for Somalia and the region. Somali presidential elections are scheduled in just […]
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WASHINGTON — The United States deployed operatives to Estonia in the weeks before the November election to learn more about defending against Russian hackers as part of a broader effort to hunt down foreign cyberattacks, American and Estonian officials said. Estonian officials believe the growing cooperation with the United States will be an important deterrent […]
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Mr. Odachi’s Zero — the agile Japanese fighter plane that dominated the Pacific skies in the war’s early years — was loaded with an 1,100-pound bomb, weighing it down so much that it would be impossible to outmaneuver the enemy. When American fighters spotted him, he jettisoned his bomb into the ocean and managed to […]
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