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13/06/2025

Big Station Global News

Hossein Salami, Iran's Revolutionary Guards chief, killed by Israel

Kelly Ng - BBC News

Hossein Salami, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed in Israel's strikes early on Friday, the most senior Iranian leader to die in the attacks.

Salami, who was 65, was known for taking a hardline stance against Iran's rivals, including Israel and the US. Just last month, he had warned that Tehran would "open the gates of hell" if attacked by either country.

Israel launched widescale strikes against Iran, saying it targeted nuclear facilities, ballistic missile factories and military commanders, despite US President Donald Trump warning its ally against scuppering talks on a potential nuclear deal.

Tehran has warned that Israel and the US - which denies being involved - will pay a "heavy price" for the attacks, raising concerns that this will lead an already fragile region into full-scale war.

Israel's strikes also killed Mohammad Bagheri, Chief of Staff of the country's armed forces, Gholamali Rashid, the deputy commander of the Iranian armed forces, and several nuclear scientists.

Just a day before the strikes, Salami had said that Iran was "fully ready for any scenarios, situations, and circumstances".

"The enemy thinks it can fight Iran the same way it fights defenceless Palestinians who are under an Israeli siege," he said. "We are war-tested and experienced."

Salami first joined the Revolutionary Guards - a powerful branch of the Iranian armed forces - in 1980 during the Iran-Iraq war and became deputy commander in 2009, then commander a decade later.

Since the 2000s, he has been sanctioned by the UN Security Council and the US for his involvement in Iran's nuclear and military programmes.

Salami had boasted of Iran's military capabilities, at one point declaring that the country was "on the verge of becoming a words super power

He had welcomed the prospect of military conflict with Israel and the US. Following an Israeli strike against Iranian targets in Syria in 2019, Salami vowed to "wipe the Zionist regime" off the political map.

Following another strike in April last year on the Iranian embassy in Syria, which killed seven members of the Revolutionary Guards including two generals, Salami issued a similar warning: "Our brave men will punish the Zionist regime."

Iran and Israel were allies until a 1979 revolution in Iran, which brought in a regime that has used opposing Israel as a key part of its ideology.

The Iranian regime today does not recognise Israel's right to exist. The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called Israel a "cancerous tumour" that "will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed".

Israel says Tehran's rhetoric makes Iran an existential threat. Israel and its allies have also criticised Iran's build-up of proxy forces in the region, including the Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah that are sworn to Israel's destruction.

Salami and other senior officers of the Revolutionary Guards routinely advise Iran's supreme leader.

Iran's clerical leader set up the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps 40 years ago to defend the country's Islamic system and to provide a counterweight to the regular armed forces, which they did not trust.

With more than 190,000 active personnel and boasting of its own ground, navy and air forces, the Revolutionary Guards is one of the country's most powerful - and most feared - military and political groups.

While Iran's army guards the country's territory, the Revolutionary Guards was set up to protect the regime itself.

As the group reports directly to the supreme leader, its power is not easily checked by other institutions.

It oversees Iran's strategic weapons and controls the paramilitary Basij Resistance Force, which has often been used to suppress domestic dissent.

The Revolutionary Guards is also thought to control around a third of Iran's economy through a series of subsidiaries and trusts. It also holds billions of dollars in construction and engineering contracts.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the group exerts influence by providing money, weapons, technology, training and advice to allied governments.

Some of the Revolutionary Guards' most elite members operate its shadowy overseas operations arm, the Quds Force, which has ties with armed groups in the region, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Yemen.

Former Revolutionary Guards officers continue to occupy influential positions in government, parliament and other political bodies. They include former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani.

13/06/2025

So far 40 year old Ramesh Viswashkumar survives India Air Crash

NEW DELHI, June 12 (Reuters)

Family in Britain have been in touch with
Ramesh Viswashkumar, the only known survivor out of the 242 people onboard an Air India plane that crashed in Ahmedabad on Thursday, had been sitting near an emergency exit of the London-bound flight and managed to jump out, police said.

Speaking from his hospital bed, the 40-year-old told Indian media that he was a British national and was travelling to Britain with his brother after visiting family in India.

"When I got up, there were bodies all around me. I was scared. I stood up and ran. There were pieces of the plane all around me. Someone grabbed hold of me and put me in an ambulance and brought me to the hospital," Viswashkumar told the Hindustan Times.
It was not clear whether Viswashkumar managed to jump out before the plane made impact.

Social media footage shown on Indian news channels showed a man in a bloodstained white t-shirt and dark pants limping on a street and being helped by a medic. The man had bruises on his face and a goatee beard, resembling photographs of Viswashkumar in hospital after the crash that were published by local media.

Reuters could not immediately verify the video, in which people gathered around the man and asked him where were the other passengers, to which he replied "they're all inside".
A photo of Viswashkumar's boarding pass shown online by the Hindustan Times showed that he was seated in seat 11A of the plane bound for Gatwick Airport.

He told the paper his brother Ajay had been seated in a different row on the plane and asked for help to find him.

"He was near the emergency exit and managed to escape by jumping out the emergency door," said Vidhi Chaudhary, a senior police officer in Ahmedabad, speaking about Viswashkumar.
A member of Viswashkumar's family based in Britain, who requested anonymity, told Reuters over the phone that he had survived and that the family was in touch with him, but declined to share further details.

Ajay Valgi, a cousin of Viswashkumar who lives in Leicester, central England, told the BBC that Viswashkumar spoke by phone to confirm he was all right. "He only said that he was fine, nothing else," Valgi said

Valgi said the family had not heard anything about his brother. "We're not doing well. We're all upset," he said.
Viswashkumar is married with one child, a boy, he added.

The aircraft came down in a residential area, crashing into a medical college hostel outside the airport during lunch time, in the world's worst aviation disaster in a decade.

More than 240 people were killed in the crash. The dead included some on the ground. Police said a previously shared death toll of 294 was wrong due to some double-counted body parts.

12/06/2025

Business News

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12/06/2025

Air India Jet With 242 On Board Crashes Bear Ahmedabad Airport

More than 200 people were killed when an Air India flight crashed shortly after taking off in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad on Thursday, the city police commissioner said.

City police commissioner has revealed that there appear to be no survivors from Air India airliner that crashed.

Of the 242 passengers, 169 were Indian nationals, 53 British, 1 Canadian and 7 Portuguese, Air India has said.

08/06/2025

08/06/2025

Petersen Zagaze writes........

We bid farewell not only to a former Head of State, but to a man who was loved by many. A leader who made us laugh, whether we supported him as a politician or not, he managed to make us just look at him and smile. We annoyed him, offended him, loved him, called him names, saluted him, but he still remained that man who will go jogging at 15hrs, with the African sun brightly blazing, singing songs and making people laugh.

President Edgar Chagwa Lungu will be remembered as a man who many notable people depended on, for security, for survival, others even for their everyday livelihood; a true servant of the people—one who chose the path of unity over division, and peace over pride, even in moments of personal loss and political transition. A man who could not be shaken by politics, hatred or tricks; evidently so, from Mulungushi rock of authority, through the transition from Acting President Guy Scott, to actually taking on power.

In a time when many might cling to power, he chose instead to uphold the dignity of democracy, and in doing so, safeguarded the peace that Zambia is known for. His graceful acceptance of change became a quiet but powerful lesson in leadership—one that will echo through generations.

Now, as we mourn the loss of a father, a husband, and a son of the soil, a leader some of us chose to oppose, we also honor the legacy he leaves behind. A legacy of calm in the storm. A legacy of strength through service. A legacy of a man who loved his country enough to put her people before himself.

Losing a leader is hard. Losing the only surviving former head of this republic and father of the nation is even harder. But we take comfort in knowing that his name will be spoken with respect, his memory kept with pride, and his impact felt for years to come.

Rest in peace, President Edgar Chagwa Lungu.
Your race is run, your work is done, and your legacy lives on.

08/06/2025

Today in History on the Dusty Drawers Show ( 14:00hrs - 18:00hrs)

June 8, 1968 - James Earl Ray, an escaped American convict, is arrested in London, England, and charged with the assassination of African American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, King was fatally wounded by a sniper’s bullet while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Motel Lorraine. That evening, a Re*****on .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was relatively easy.

On June 8, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. Ray was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) was at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March 1969 and pleaded guilty to King’s murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King’s assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named “Raoul” had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On April 4, 1968, however, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled for Canada. Ray’s motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years.

During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr., spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S. government and military. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists’ minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist influence. For the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by U.S. military intelligence, who may have been called to watch over King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967. Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new friends in the Cold War-era U.S. government.

Over the years, the assassination has been reexamined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the Shelby County, Tennessee, district attorney’s office, and three times by the U.S. Justice Department. All of these investigations have ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King Jr. The House committee acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, involving one or more accomplices to Ray, but uncovered no evidence to definitively prove this theory. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him, such as his fingerprints on the murder weapon and admitted presence at the rooming house on April 4, Ray had a definite motive in assassinating King: hatred. According to his family and friends, he was an outspoken racist who told them of his intent to kill King. Ray died in 1998.

02/10/2023

Today in History October 1, 1920

Scientific American reports that radio will soon be used to transmit music to the home

In an 1888 novel called Looking Backward: 2000-1887, author Edward Bellamy imagined a scene in which a time-traveler from 1887 reacts to a technological advance from the early 21st century that he describes as, "An arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will." In Bellamy's imagination, this astonishing feat was accomplished by a vast network of wires connecting individual homes with centrally located concert halls staffed round-the-clock with live performers. As it turned out, this vision of the year 2000 would come to pass far sooner than Bellamy imagined, and without all the pesky wires.

On October 1, 1920, Scientific American magazine reported that the rapidly developing medium of radio would soon be used to broadcast music. A revolution in the role of music in everyday life was about to be born.

"It has been well known for some years that by placing a form of telephone transmitter in a concert hall or at any point where music is being played the sound may be carried over telephone wires to an ordinary telephone receiver at a distant point," began the bulletin in the October 1, 1920 issue of the popular science monthly, "but it is only recently that a method of transmitting music by radio has been found possible."

Arguments about radio's origins persist to this day, but its basic workings had been understood for upwards of 20 years at the time of this announcement. It was only in the years immediately following World War I, however, that radio made the transition from scientific curiosity to practical technology. By late 1919, experiments had begun in Britain, the United States and elsewhere that would lead to the breakthrough use of radio not just as a replacement for the telegraph, but as a communications and entertainment medium.

Some of those experiments were taking place in the laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., where station WWV was established to test various means of radio transmission. Relying significantly on amateur radio operators in the local area for feedback on its experiments, the Bureau began successfully testing the transmission of music in late 1919 and early 1920. It was those experiments that led to the public announcement in Scientific American.

"Music can be performed at any place, radiated into the air through an ordinary radio transmitting set and received at any other place, even though hundreds of miles away," the report continued, noting that "the music received can be made as loud as desired by suitable operation of the receiving apparatus." "Experimental concerts are at present being conducted every Friday evening from 8:30 to 11:00 by the Radio Laboratory of the Bureau of Standards….The possibilities of such centralized radio concerts are great and extremely interesting."

28/04/2023

Kacibemba nensoni shabufi kanshi nika champion🏃🏃🏃🏃🏃

28/04/2023

This Day in History
April 26 2954: Geneva Conference to resolve problems in Asia begins

In an effort to resolve several problems in Asia, including the war between the French and Vietnamese nationalists in Indochina, representatives from the world’s powers meet in Geneva. The conference marked a turning point in the United States’ involvement in Vietnam.

Representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, France, and Great Britain came together in April 1954 to try to resolve several problems related to Asia. One of the most troubling concerns was the long and bloody battle between Vietnamese nationalist forces, under the leadership of the communist Ho Chi Minh, and the French, who were intent on continuing colonial control over Vietnam. Since 1946 the two sides had been hammering away at each other. By 1954, however, the French were tiring of the long and inclusive war that was draining both the national treasury and public patience. The United States had been supporting the French out of concern that a victory for Ho’s forces would be the first step in communist expansion throughout Southeast Asia. When America refused France’s requests for more direct intervention in the war, the French announced that they were including the Vietnam question in the agenda for the Geneva Conference.

Discussions on the Vietnam issue started at the conference just as France suffered its worst military defeat of the war, when Vietnamese forces captured the French base at Dien Bien Phu. In July 1954, the Geneva Agreements were signed. As part of the agreement, the French agreed to withdraw their troops from northern Vietnam. Vietnam would be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel, pending elections within two years to choose a president and reunite the country. During that two-year period, no foreign troops could enter Vietnam. Ho reluctantly signed off on the agreement though he believed that it cheated him out of the spoils of his victory. The non-communist puppet government set up by the French in southern Vietnam refused to sign, but without French support this was of little concern at the time. The United States also refused to sign, but did commit itself to abide by the agreement.

Privately, U.S. officials felt that the Geneva Agreements, if allowed to be put into action, were a disaster. They were convinced that national elections in Vietnam would result in an overwhelming victory for Ho, the man who had defeated the French colonialists. The U.S. government scrambled to develop a policy that would, at the least, save southern Vietnam from the communists. Within a year, the United States had helped establish a new anti-communist government in South Vietnam and began giving it financial and military assistance, the first fateful steps toward even greater U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

23/04/2023

This Day in History April 14 John Wilkes Booth shoots Abraham Lincoln

President Abraham Lincoln is shot in the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. The assassin, actor John Wilkes Booth, shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis! (Ever thus to tyrants!) The South is avenged,” as he jumped onto the stage and fled on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning.

Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital.

However, on March 20, 1865, the day of the planned kidnapping, the president failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. Two weeks later, Richmond fell to Union forces. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy.

Learning that Lincoln was to attend Laura Keene’s acclaimed performance in Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater on April 14, Booth plotted the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward. By murdering the president and two of his possible successors, Booth and his conspirators hoped to throw the U.S. government into a paralyzing disarray.

On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward’s home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled.

Meanwhile, just after 10 p.m., Booth entered Lincoln’s private theater box unnoticed, and shot the president with a single bullet in the back of his head. Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln’s box, he succeeded in escaping Washington.

The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford’s Theater. At about 7:22 the next morning, he died—the first U.S. president to be assassinated.

Booth was a well-regarded actor who was particularly loved in the South before the Civil War. During the war, he stayed in the North and became increasingly bitter when audiences weren’t as enamored of him as they were in Dixie. Along with friends Samuel Arnold, Michael O’Laughlin and John Surratt, Booth conspired to kidnap Lincoln and deliver him to the South.

On March 17, along with George Atzerodt, David Herold and Lewis Powell, the group met in a Washington bar to plot the abduction of the president three days later. However, when the president changed his plans, the scheme was scuttled. Shortly afterward, the South surrendered to the Union and the conspirators altered their plan. They decided to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward on the same evening.

When April 14 came around, Atzerodt backed out of his part to kill Johnson. Upset, Booth went to drink at a saloon near Ford’s Theatre. At about 10 p.m. he walked into the theater and up to the president’s box. Lincoln’s guard, John Parker, was not there because he had gotten bored with the play and left his post to get a beer. Booth easily slipped in and shot the president in the back of the head. The president’s friend, Major Rathbone, attempted to grab Booth but was slashed by Booth’s knife. Booth injured his leg badly when he jumped to the stage to escape, but he managed to hobble outside to his horse.

Meanwhile, Lewis Powell forced his way into William Seward’s house and stabbed the secretary of state several times before fleeing. Booth rode to Virginia with David Herold and stopped at the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who placed splints on Booth’s leg. They hid in a barn on Richard Garrett’s farm as thousands of Union troops combed the area looking for them. The other conspirators were captured, except for John Surratt, who fled to Canada.

When the troops finally caught up with Booth and Herold on April 26, they gave them the option of surrendering before the barn was burned down. Herold decided to surrender, but Booth remained in the barn as it went up in flames. Booth was then shot and killed in the burning barn by Corporal Boston Corbett. On July 7, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell, David Herold, and John Surratt’s mother, Mary, were hanged in Washington. The ex*****on of Mary Surratt is believed by some to have been a miscarriage of justice. Although there was proof of Surratt’s involvement in the original abduction conspiracy, it is clear that her deeds were minor compared to those of the others who were executed.

Her son John was eventually tracked down in Egypt and brought back to trial, but he managed, with the help of clever lawyers, to win an acquittal.