Sky24 (2026)

01/12/2025

Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty met Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, where the two discussed “defence and security cooperation, military exchanges, training collaborations and regional peace and stability”, a statement issued by the Foreign Office (FO) said on Sunday.

Abdelatty arrived in Islamabad last night for a two-day official visit and also met President Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar earlier today.

The FO statement said during his meeting with Field Marshal Munir, “both sides reaffirmed the importance of continued high-level engagement between the armed forces of the two countries”.Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty met Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, where the two discussed “defence and security cooperation, military exchanges, training collaborations and regional peace and stability”, a statement issued by the Foreign Office (FO) said on Sunday.

Abdelatty arrived in Islamabad last night for a two-day official visit and also met President Asif Ali Zardari and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar earlier today.

The FO statement said during his meeting with Field Marshal Munir, “both sides reaffirmed the importance of continued high-level engagement between the armed forces of the two countries”.

24/11/2025

Nov 24 (Reuters) - India's Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) (HIAE.NS), opens new tab said on Monday the crash of a Tejas fighter jet in Dubai last week was an isolated occurrence caused by exceptional circumstances, without providing further details.
On Friday, a Tejas fighter jet crashed in a ball of fire in front of horrified spectators during an aerial display at the Dubai Airshow. The Indian Air Force has said it will set up a court of inquiry to investigate the cause.
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State-owned Hindustan Aeronautics manufactures the aircraft, which is powered by General Electric (GE.N), opens new tab engines. Both companies have said they will support the investigation.
Tejas, which means brilliance in Sanskrit, is seen as crucial for India's efforts to modernise its air force fleet of mainly Russian and ex-Soviet fighters.
The crash, which killed the pilot, dampens New Delhi's hopes of exporting the home-built jet and leaves it reliant on Indian military orders to sustain its role as a showcase of domestic defence technology. Such a public loss could overshadow India's efforts to establish the jet abroad after a painstaking development over four decades, experts have said.

24/11/2025

Zohran Mamdani has reiterated his view that Donald Trump is a “fascist” and a “despot” just days after the pair had a surprisingly cordial meeting at the White House.

Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, the New York City mayor-elect was asked if he still considered Trump a threat to democracy. “Everything that I’ve said in the past I continue to believe,” Mamdani replied. “I think it is important in our politics that we don’t shy away from where we have disagreements.”

In his victory speech on 4 November, Mamdani said New York had demonstrated it could be the “light” in a “moment of political darkness”, taking aim at the president. “If there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power,” Mamdani said. “So, Donald Trump, since I know you’re watching, I have four words for you: turn the volume up.”

Given the intense rhetoric Trump has used against Mamdani in recent months, including calling him a “communist lunatic”, the White House meeting was highly anticipated and expected to be contentious. Instead, it produced warm words, with Trump even saying, “I feel very confident that he can do a good job” and adding, “I think he’s going to surprise some conservative people, actually.”

31/10/2025

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has condemned calls by United States President Donald Trump for the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, calling the move both “regressive” and irresponsible”.

“Having rebranded its ‘Department of Defense’ as the ‘Department of War,’ a nuclear-armed bully is resuming testing of atomic weapons,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X late Thursday.

“The same bully has been demonising Iran’s peaceful nuclear program and threatening further strikes on our safeguarded nuclear facilities, all in blatant violation of international law,” he said.

Trump made the surprise announcement in a Truth Social post on Thursday shortly before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

Trump said he had instructed the Pentagon to immediately resume nuclear weapons testing “on an equal basis” with other countries like Russia and China, whose nuclear weapons arsenal will match the US in “five years”, according to Trump.

Ankit Panda, a nuclear security expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s decision was likely a response to recent actions by Russia and China rather than Washington’s ongoing dispute with Iran over its nuclear programme.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Moscow had tested its Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo, after separately testing new Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missiles earlier in the month, according to the Reuters news agency.

27/10/2025

Hello and welcome to the working week.

Donald Trump is certainly getting his use out of Air Force One. The US president’s week starts at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit in Kuala Lumpur, before he flies to Tokyo to meet Japan’s newly installed Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

But this is only the first leg. The big event comes at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, where Trump is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping on Thursday for a critical powwow that could determine if the US and China can resolve their trade tensions. The US president is in his pomp, reshaping the world’s geopolitics, as Ed Luce explains in his FT magazine profile of the commander-in-chief.

Talking of populist surges, the Netherlands holds parliamentary elections on Wednesday. The country’s far-right leader Geert Wilders has a winning strategy, which involves, er, not winning elections, but setting the country’s political agenda from opposition. His PVV party is leaving government having failed to compromise. Polls predict it will remain the biggest party, winning a fifth of the vote, but as FT columnist Simon Kuper (who grew up in the Netherlands) notes, Wilders will let the shrunken mainstream parties try to cobble together a coalition.

Away from politics, it's a troika of monetary policy decisions this week with the US, Japanese and European central bankers all setting interest rates.

Economists and traders are predicting that the European Central Bank will keep interest rates unchanged at 2 per cent for the third meeting in a row on Wednesday. This follows September’s rise in the Eurozone inflation rate to 2.2 per cent, the first time since April it had breached the ECB’s 2 per cent target rate.

Senior Federal Reserve officials have signalled that they think they have enough evidence to cut the US rates by a quarter point for the second consecutive meeting.

26/10/2025

BEIRUT – Israel once again violated the ceasefire agreement by launching a drone strike in southern Lebanon, killing a senior Hezbollah commander. According to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), Abbas Hassan Kurki, the logistics commander of Hezbollah’s southern front, was martyred when an Israeli drone targeted his vehicle near the village of Toul, close to Nabatieh.

The agency reported that Kurki was hit by a guided missile fired from the drone while he was driving along a rural road. Hezbollah later confirmed his death, identifying him as a key logistics figure responsible for managing supply routes in the southern command. The Israeli military, in a statement, claimed responsibility for the strike, saying it targeted Hezbollah’s “southern front logistics commander, Abbas Hassan Kurki.”

24/10/2025

Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, Türkiye, Republic of Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Republic of The Gambia, the State of Palestine, Qatar, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Egypt, Nigeria, the League of Arab States, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, have condemned in the strongest terms the approval of Israeli Knesset of two draft laws.

These draft laws aim to impose a so called "Israeli sovereignty" over the occupied West Bank, and on Israeli illegal colonial settlements.

According to Foreign Office, these countries, in a joint statement, denounced the move as a blatant violation of international law, and of United Nations Security Council resolutions particularly Resolution 2334.

The Resolution 2334 condemns all Israeli measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character, and status of the occupied Palestinian territory since 1967, including East Jerusalem.

These countries also reaffirmed that Israel has no sovereignty over the occupied Palestinian territory.

On the other hand, they welcomed the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice of 22 October 2025 on Israel's Obligations in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The Court reaffirmed Israel's obligation, under international humanitarian law to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Gaza, has the essential supplies of daily life, and to agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population, including through the United Nations and its entities, particularly the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

The Court confirmed Israel's obligation to respect the prohibition on the use of starvation, recalling Israel's blocking of aid into the Gaza Strip and reaffirmed the prohibition of mass forcible transfer and deportation, recalling that this also includes inflicting conditions of life that are intolerable.

22/10/2025

BEIJING: Chinese Vice President Han Zheng said on Tuesday that China and the United States can and should become partners and friends, since they share broad common interests and promising cooperation prospects.

Han made the remark during a meeting in Beijing with Rob Wagner, president of the Oregon State Senate in the United States.

He noted that a series of important consensuses have been reached between the two countries’ leaders during phone talks held since the beginning of the year.

Han expressed hope that the U.S. side would work with China in a spirit of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation to jointly find the right way for the two major countries to interact in the new era, benefiting both nations and the world.

Oregon has maintained friendly, cooperative relations with China for a long time, he said. China hopes that Oregon State Senate President Wagner and his fellow senators will continue to enhance communication and exchange between the two sides, deepen people-to-people relations and play an exemplary role in promoting subnational China-U.S. cooperation.

Wagner expressed his hopes for the success of the fourth plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, adding that U.S.-China cooperation at the subnational level is very important and that Oregon has passed a bill to continue strengthening its friendly cooperation with China.

20/10/2025

JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said two soldiers were killed in combat in southern Gaza on Sunday, as it carried out a series of strikes in the area, accusing Hamas of violating the ceasefire.

Major Yaniv Kula, 26, and Staff Sergeant Itay Yavetz, 21, “fell during combat in the southern Gaza Strip,” the military said, the first Israeli fatalities since the ceasefire took effect on October 10.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had resumed enforcing a ceasefire in Gaza.

“In accordance with the directive of the political echelon, and following a series of significant strikes in response to Hamas’ violations, the IDF has begun the renewed enforcement of the ceasefire,” the military said in a statement.

“The IDF will continue to uphold the ceasefire agreement and will respond firmly to any violation of it.”

15/10/2025

The United States and China on Tuesday began charging additional port fees on ocean shipping firms that move everything from holiday toys to crude oil, making the high seas a key front in the trade war between the world's two largest economies.

A return to an all-out trade war appeared imminent last week, after China announced a major expansion of its rare earths export controls and President Donald Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Chinese goods to triple-digits.

But after the weekend, both sides sought to reassure traders and investors, highlighting cooperation between their negotiating teams and the possibility they could find a way forward

China said it had started to collect the special charges on US-owned, operated, built, or flagged vessels but clarified that Chinese-built ships would be exempted from the levies.

In details published by state broadcaster CCTV, China spelled out specific provisions on exemptions, which also include empty ships entering Chinese shipyards for repair.

The China-imposed extra port fees would be collected at the first port of entry on a single voyage or for the first five voyages within a year, following an annual billing cycle beginning on April 17.

Early this year, US President Donald Trump's administration announced plans to levy the fees on China-linked ships to loosen the country's grip on the global maritime industry and bolster US shipbuilding.

An investigation during former President Joe Biden's administration concluded China uses unfair policies and practices to dominate the global maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors, clearing the way for those penalties.

China hit back last week, saying it would impose its own port fees on US-linked vessels from the same day the US fees took effect.

Analysts expect China-owned container carrier COSCO to be most affected, shouldering nearly half of that segment's expected $3.2 billion cost from those fees in 2026.
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