World
Texas man kills 5 neighbors after they complained of gunfire
A Texas man went next door with a rifle and fatally shot five of his neighbors, including an 8-year-old boy, after they asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard because they were trying to sleep, authorities said Saturday.
The suspect, identified as 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza, remained at large more than 18 hours after the shooting and authorities warned that he might still be armed. The attack happened just before midnight Friday near the town of Cleveland, north of Houston, on a street where some residents say it is not uncommon to hear neighbors unwind by firing off guns.
San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said Oropeza used an AR-style rifle, and as the search for him dragged into Saturday evening, authorities had widened their efforts to as far as “10 to 20 miles" from the murder scene. He said Oropeza may still have a weapon but that he believes authorities have the rifle used in the shooting.
Capers said they found clothes and a phone while combing a rural area that includes dense layers of forest but that tracking dogs had lost the scent.
Also Read: Police: 5 people killed in shooting at home north of Houston
“He could be anywhere now,” Capers said.
Capers said the victims were between the ages of 8 and 31 years old and that all were believed to be from Honduras. All were shot “from the neck up," he said.
The attack was the latest act of gun violence in what has been a record pace of mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, some of which have also involved semiautomatic rifles.
The mass killings have played out in a variety of places — a Nashville school, a Kentucky bank, a Southern California dance hall, and now a rural Texas neighborhood inside a single-story home.
Capers said there were 10 people in the house — some of whom had just moved there earlier in the week — but that that no one else was injured. He said two of the victims were found in a bedroom laying over two children in an apparent attempt to shield them.
A total of three children found covered in blood in the home were taken to a hospital but found to be uninjured, Capers said.
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FBI spokesperson Christina Garza said investigators do not believe everyone at the home were members of a single family. The victims were identified as Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso, 8.
The confrontation followed the neighbors walking up to the fence and asking the suspect to stop shooting rounds, Capers said. The suspect responded by telling them that it was his property, Capers said, and one person in the house got a video of the suspect walking up to the front door with the rifle.
The shooting took place on a rural pothole-riddled street where single-story homes sit on wide 1-acre lots and are surrounded by a thick canopy of trees. A horse could be seen behind the victim's home, while in the front yard of Oropeza's house a dog and chickens wandered.
Rene Arevalo Sr., who lives a few houses down, said he heard gunshots around midnight but didn't think anything of it.
“It's a normal thing people do around here, especially on Fridays after work,” Arevalo said. “They get home and start drinking in their backyards and shooting out there.”
Capers said his deputies had been to Oropeza's home at least once before and spoken with him about “shooting his gun in the yard.” It was not clear whether any action was taken at the time. At a news conference Saturday evening, the sheriff said firing a gun on your own property can be illegal, but he did not say whether Oropeza had previously broken the law.
Capers said the new arrivals in the home had moved from Houston earlier in the week, but he said he did not know whether they were planning to stay there.
Across the U.S. since Jan. 1, there have been at least 18 shootings that left four or more people dead, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today, in partnership with Northeastern University. The violence is sparked by a range of motives: murder-suicides and domestic violence; gang retaliation; school shootings; and workplace vendettas.
Texas has confronted multiple mass shootings in recent years, including last year's attack at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde; a racist attack at an El Paso Walmart in 2019; and a gunman opening fire at a church in the tiny town of Sutherland Springs in 2017.
Republican leaders in Texas have continually rejected calls for new firearm restrictions, including this year over the protests of several families whose children were killed in Uvalde.
A few months ago, Arevalo said Oropeza threatened to kill his dog after it got loose in the neighborhood and chased the pit bull in his truck.
“I tell my wife all the time, ‘Stay away from the neighbors. Don’t argue with them. You never know how they're going to react,'” Arevalo said. “I tell her that because Texas is a state where you don't know who has a gun and who is going to react that way.”
Russian official: Ukrainian drones strike Crimea oil depot
A massive fire erupted at an oil depot in Crimea after it was hit by two of Ukraine's drones, a Russia-appointed official there reported Saturday, the latest in a series of attacks on the annexed peninsula as Russia braces for an expected Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, a port city in Crimea, posted videos and photos of the blaze on his Telegram channel.
Razvozhayev said the fire at the city's harbor was assigned the highest ranking in terms of how complicated it will be to extinguish. However, he reported that the open blaze had been contained.
Razvozhayev said the oil depot was attacked by “two enemy drones," and four oil tanks burned down. A third drone was shot down from the sky, and one more was deactivated through radio-electronic means, according to Crimea's Moscow-appointed governor, Sergei Aksyonov.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world considered illegal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview this week that his country will seeking to reclaim the peninsula in the upcoming counteroffensive.
Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Crimea last month to mark the ninth anniversary of the Black Sea peninsula’s annexation from Ukraine. Putin's visit took place the day after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the Russian leader accusing him of war crimes.
The attack reported in Sevastopol comes a day after Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles and two drones at Ukraine, killing at least 23 people. Almost all of the victims died when two missiles slammed into an apartment building in the city of Uman, located in central Ukraine.
Six children were among the dead, Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said Saturday, adding that 22 of the 23 bodies recovered have been identified. Two women remained missing, Klymenko said.
Russian forces launched more drones at Ukraine overnight. Ukraine's Air Force Command said two Iranian-made self-exploding Shahed drones were intercepted, and a reconnaissance drone was shot down on Saturday morning.
Razvozhayev said the oil depot fire did not cause any casualties and would not hinder fuel supplies in Sevastopol. The city has been subject to regular attack attempts with drones, especially in recent weeks.
Earlier this week, Razvozhayev reported that the Russian military destroyed a Ukrainian sea drone that attempted to attack the harbor and another one blew up, shattering windows in several apartment buildings, but not inflicting any other damage.
Ukraine's military intelligence spokesperson, Andriy Yusov, told the RBC Ukraine news site on Saturday that the oil depot fire was “God's punishment” for “the murdered civilians in Uman, including five children.”
He said that more than 10 tanks containing oil products for Russia's Black Sea Fleet were destroyed in Sevastopol, but stopped short of acknowledging Ukraine's responsibility for a drone attack. The difference between the number of tanks Yusov and Razvozhayev gave could not be immediately reconciled.
After previous attacks on Crimea, Kyiv also wouldn't openly claim responsibility, but emphasized that the country had the right to strike any target in response to Russian aggression.
Elsewhere, Ukrainian forces shelled the city of Nova Kakhovka, according to Moscow-installed authorities in the Russian-occupied part of southern Ukraine's Kherson province. “Severe artillery fire” cut off power in the city, the officials said.
The Ukrainian-controlled part of the province also came under fire on Saturday. Russian shelling in the area of the village of Bilozerka killed one person and wounded another, according to the Kherson prosecutor’s office.
As battle for Sudan continues, civilian deaths top 400
Gunfire and heavy artillery fire persisted Saturday in parts of Sudan’s capital Khartoum, residents said, despite the extension of a cease-fire between the country’s two top generals, whose battle for power has killed hundreds and sent thousands fleeing for their lives.
The civilian death toll jumped Saturday to 411 people, according to the Sudan Doctors' Syndicate, which monitors casualties. The fighting has wounded another 2,023 civilians so far, the group added. In the city of Genena, the provincial capital of war-ravaged West Darfur, intensified violence has killed 89 people. Fighters have moved into homes and taken over stores and hospitals as they battle in the densely populated streets, the syndicate said.
Khartoum, a city of some 5 million people, has been transformed into a front line in the grinding conflict between Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, the commander of Sudan’s military, and Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces, which has dashed once-euphoric hopes of Sudan's democratic transition.
Foreign countries continued to evacuate diplomatic staff and nationals while thousands of Sudanese fled across borders. Britain said it was ending its evacuation flights Saturday, after demand for spots on the planes had declined.
Over 50,000 refugees — mostly women and children — have crossed over the western border to Chad, Egypt, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, the United Nations said, raising fears of wider instability. Ethnic fighting and turmoil has scarred South Sudan and the Central African Republic while Chad's own democratic transition has stalled after a coup.
Those who escape Khartoum face more obstacles on their way to safety. The overland journey to Port Sudan, where ships then evacuate people via the Red Sea, has proven long and risky. Hatim el-Madani, a former journalist, said that paramilitary fighters were refugees at roadblocks out of the capital, demanding they hand over their phones and valuables. stopping
“There's an outlaw, bandit-like nature to the RSF militia,” he said, referring to the Rapid Support Forces. “It indicates they don't have a supply line in place and that could get worse in the coming days.”
Airlifts from the country have also posed challenges, with a Turkish evacuation plane hit by gunfire outside Khartoum on Friday.
On Saturday — despite a cease-fire extended under heavy international pressure by 72 hours early Friday — clashes continued around the presidential palace, headquarters of the state broadcaster and a military base in Khartoum, residents said. The battles sent thick columns of black smoke billowing over the city skyline.
In a few areas near the capital, including in Omdurman, residents reported that some shops were reopening as the scale of fighting dwindled amid the tenuous cease-fire. But in other areas, residents sheltering at home as explosions thundered around them said fighters were going from house to house, terrifying people and stealing whatever they could find.
Now in its third week, the fighting has left swaths of Khartoum without electricity and running water. The Sudanese Health Ministry put the latest overall death toll at 528, with 4,500 wounded.
Those sheltering at home say they're running out of food and basic supplies. Residents on Saturday in the city of Omdurman, west of Khartoum, said they'd been waiting three days to get fuel — complicating their escape plans.
The U.N. relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said that U.N. offices in Khartoum, as well as the cities of Genena and Nyala in Darfur had been attacked and looted. “This is unacceptable — and prohibited under international law,” he said.
Genena's main hospital was also leveled in the fighting, said Sudan’s health ministry.
Over the past 15 days of pummeling each other, the generals have each failed to deal a decisive blow to the other in their struggle for control of Africa’s third largest nation. The military has appeared to have the upper hand in the fighting, with its monopoly on air power, but it has been impossible to confirm its claims of advances.
"Soon, the Sudanese state with its well-grounded institutions will rise as victorious, and attempts to hijack our country will be aborted forever,” the Sudanese military said Saturday.
Both sides in the conflict have a long history of human rights abuses. The RSF was born out of the Janjaweed militias, which were accused of widespread atrocities when the government deployed them to put down a rebellion in Sudan’s western Darfur region in the early 2000s.
A unit of Sudan's armed forces, known as the Central Reserve Police, have also been sanctioned by the U.S. for grave human rights violations against Sudan’s pro-democracy protesters.
Accusations of rape, torture and other abuses against demonstrators carried out by the unit first surfaced in 2021, after Burhan and Dagalo joined forces in a military coup that ousted a civilian government. The Sudanese Interior Ministry confirmed the deployment of the widely criticized Central Reserve Police in Khartoum on Saturday, posting photos of the fighters riding with heavy machine guns mounted on pickup trucks.
Former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, who was ousted in the 2021 coup, appealed to the international community from a conference in Nairobi, Kenya, to push for an immediate halt to the conflict. He warned that a full-blown civil war in the strategically located country would have consequences not just in Sudan but for the world.
“God forbid if Sudan is to reach a proper civil war ... it is a huge country and very diverse ... it would be a nightmare for the world,” he said.
But the generals have so far rejected attempts at a compromise, and regional mediators have been unable to travel to Khartoum because of the chaotic fighting.
Still, African Union Chairperson Moussa Faki said he would help initiate a “Sudanese-led” political process and try to send peacekeepers to the country.
“I’m ready myself to go there, even by road," Faki said. “We ask the two generals to create the conditions for us to go to Khartoum.”
Pelosi says Ukraine, democracy 'must win'
“We thought we could die.”
The Russian invasion had just begun when Nancy Pelosi made a surprise visit to Ukraine, the House speaker then the highest-ranking elected U.S. official to lead a congressional delegation to Kyiv.
Pelosi and the lawmakers were ushered under the cloak of secrecy into the capital city, an undisclosed passage that even to this day she will not divulge.
“It was very, it was dangerous,” Pelosi told The Associated Press before Sunday’s one-year anniversary of that trip.
“We never feared about it, but we thought we could die because we’re visiting a serious, serious war zone,” Pelosi said. “We had great protection, but nonetheless, a war — theater of war.”
Pelosi's visit was as unusual as it was historic, opening a fresh diplomatic channel between the U.S. and Ukraine that has only deepened with the prolonged war. In the year since, a long list of congressional leaders, senators and chairs of powerful committees, both Democrats and Republicans, followed her lead, punctuated by President Joe Biden's own visit this year.
The steady stream of arrivals in Kyiv has served to amplify a political and military partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine for the world to see, one that will be tested anew when Congress is again expected this year to help fund the war to defeat Russia.
“We must win. We must bring this to a positive conclusion — for the people of Ukraine and for our country,” Pelosi said.
“There is a fight in the world now between democracy and autocracy, its manifestation at the time is in Ukraine.”
With a new Republican majority in the House whose Trump-aligned members have balked at overseas investments, Pelosi, a Democrat, remains confident the Congress will continue backing Ukraine as part of a broader U.S. commitment to democracy abroad in the face of authoritarian aggression.
“Support for Ukraine has been bipartisan and bicameral, in both houses of Congress by both parties, and the American people support democracy in Ukraine,” Pelosi told AP. “I believe that we will continue to support as long as we need to support democracy... as long as it takes to win."
Now the speaker emerita, an honorary title bestowed by Democrats, Pelosi is circumspect about her role as a U.S. emissary abroad. Having visited 87 countries during her time in office, many as the trailblazing first woman to be the House speaker, she set a new standard for pointing the gavel outward as she focused attention on the world beyond U.S. shores.
In her office tucked away at the Capitol, Pelosi shared many of the honors and mementos she has received from abroad, including the honorary passport she was given on her trip to Ukraine, among her final stops as speaker.
It’s a signature political style, building on Pelosi’s decades of work on the House Intelligence committee, but one that a new generation of House leaders may — or may not — chose to emulate.
The new Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library this month, the Republican leader’s first foray as leader into foreign affairs.
Democrat Hakeem Jeffries took his own first trip abroad to as House minority leader, leading congressional delegations last week to Ghana and Israel.
Pelosi said it’s up to the new leaders what they will do on the global stage.
“Other speakers have understood our national security — we take an oath to protect and defend — and so we have to reach out with our values and our strength to make sure that happens,” she said.
“I just want to say that this, for me, was the most logical thing to do,” Pelosi said.
When Pelosi arrived in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stood outside to meet the U.S. officials, a photo that ricocheted around the world a show of support for the young democracy fighting Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion.
“The courage of the president in greeting us on the street rather than us just meeting him in his office was yet again another symbol of the courage of the people of Ukraine,” she said.
Pelosi told Zelenskyy in a video released at the time “your fight is a fight for everyone.”
A year on, with no end to the war in sight, Pelosi said: “I would have hoped that it would have been over by now.”
Pelosi’s travel abroad has not been without political challenges, and controversy. During the Trump era she acted as an alternative emissary overseas, reassuring allies that the U.S. remained a partner despite the Republican president’s “America First” neo-isolationist approach to foreign policy.
Last year, in one of her final trips as speaker, Pelosi touched down with a delegation in Taipei, crowds lining the streets to cheer her arrival, a visit with the Taiwanese president that drew a sharp rebuke from Beijing, which counts the island as its own.
“Cowardly,” she said about the military exercises China launched in the aftermath of her trip.
Pelosi offered rare praise for McCarthy’s own meeting with Tsai, particularly its bipartisan nature and the choice of venue the historic Reagan library.
“That was really quite a message and quite an optic to be there. And so I salute what he did,” she said.
In one of her closing acts as House speaker in December, Pelosi hosted Zelenskyy for a joint address to Congress. The visit evoked the one made by Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain, at Christmastime in 1941 to speak to Congress in the Senate chamber of a “long and hard war” at the start of World War II.
Zelenskyy presented to Congress a Ukrainian flag signed by frontline troops that Pelosi said will eventually be displayed at the U.S. Capitol.
The world has changed much since Pelosi joined Congress — one of her first trips abroad was in 1991, when she dared to unfurl a pro-democracy banner in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square shortly after the student demonstrations that ended in massacre.
After the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s again Russia and China that remain front of her mind.
“The role of Putin in terms of Russia that is a bigger threat than it was when I came to Congress,” she said. A decade after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, she said, Putin went up.
“That’s where the fight for democracy is taking place,” she said.
And, she said, despite the work she and others in Congress have done to point out the concerns over China’s military and economic rise, and its human rights record, “that has only gotten worse.”
Often mentioned as someone who could become an actual ambassador — there have been musings that Biden could nominate her to Rome or beyond — Pelosi said she is focused on her two-year term in office, no longer the House speaker, but the representative from San Francisco.
“Right now my plan is to serve my constituents,” Pelosi said. “I like having 750,000 bosses, rather than one.”
Police: 5 people killed in shooting at home north of Houston
A Texas man went next door with a rifle and began shooting his neighbors, killing an 8-year-old and four others inside the house, after the family asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard because they were trying to sleep, authorities said Saturday.
San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said authorities were still searching for the 39-year-old suspect following the overnight shooting in the town of Cleveland, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of Houston. He said the suspect, whom he did not identify, used an AR-style rifle in the shooting.
“Everyone that was shot was shot from the neck up, almost execution-style,” Capers said during a news conference at the scene.
Capers said there were 10 people in the house and that no one else was injured. He said two of the victims, all believed to be from Honduras, were found laying over two children inside.
“The Honduran ladies that were laying over these children were doing it in such an effort as to protect the child,” according to Capers, who said a total of three blood-covered children were found in the home but were determined to be uninjured after being taken to a hospital.
Capers said two other people were examined at the scene and released.
The confrontation followed family members walking up to the fence and asking the suspect to stop shooting rounds, Capers said. The suspect responded by telling them that it was his property, according to Capers, and that one person in the house got a video of the suspect walking up to the front door with the rifle.
Three of the victims were women and one was a man. Their names were not released. Capers said the victims were between the ages of 8 and about 40 years old.
Authorities have previously been to the suspect's home, according to Capers. “Deputies have come over and spoke with him about him shooting his gun in the yard,” he said.
Capers said some of those in the house had just moved from Houston earlier in the week, but he did not know whether they were planning to stay there.
The U.S. is setting a record pace for mass killings in 2023. The violence is sparked by a range of motives: murder-suicides and domestic violence; gang retaliation; school shootings and workplace vendettas. All have taken the lives of four or more people at once since Jan. 1.
US ex-security adviser calls for closer ties with Taiwan
A former U.S. national security adviser called for deeper interaction between his country and Taiwan during a visit Saturday to the self-ruled island, which has seen increasing military threats from China.
John Bolton, a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024, said at a pro-Taiwan independence event in Taipei that national security teams from both sides must develop contingency plans on how to respond to actions Beijing might take, warning it would be too late once an attack occurs.
“And we have to tell China and Russia what the consequences are if they take actions against Taiwan. Not just in the immediate response, but over the longer term, to basically excommunicate China from the international economic system if it did take military actions against Taiwan or attempt to throw a blockade around it," Bolton said.
Bolton, former President Donald Trump's hawkish national security adviser, started his week-long trip to Taiwan on Wednesday. The visit reflects the importance of the island's democracy as an issue in the U.S. presidential election next year amid heightened tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Taiwan and China split in 1949 following a civil war that ended with the Communist Party in control of the mainland. The island has never been part of the People’s Republic of China, but Beijing says it must unite with the mainland, by force if necessary.
The U.S. remains Taiwan’s closest military and political ally, despite the lack of formal diplomatic ties between them. U.S. law requires Washington to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern,” though it remains ambiguous over whether American forces would be dispatched to help defend the island.
Bolton said the backlog of U.S. military sales to Taiwan is estimated to be $19 billion and it needs to be resolved.
“Part of that is a U.S. problem. Our defense industrial base is not as strong as it used to be. We need to improve that for global reasons, but particularly for Taiwan,” he said.
On Friday, the Taiwanese Defense Ministry said China’s military flew 38 fighter jets and other warplanes near Taiwan. That was the biggest such flight display since the large military exercise in which it simulated sealing off the island after the sensitive April 5 meeting between Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. China opposes any exchanges at the official level between Taiwan and other governments.
Later Friday, China’s People’s Liberation Army also issued a protest over the flight of a United States Navy P-8A Poseidon anti-submarine patrol aircraft through the Taiwan Strait, calling it a provocation that the U.S. “openly hyped up." But the U.S. 7th Fleet said Thursday’s flight was in accordance with international law and “demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”
Bolton is scheduled to join a banquet on Monday organized by the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, a pro-independence organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. Tsai will also attend the event.
Ukraine welcomes EU deal on continued farm exports
Ukraine on Saturday welcomed the European Union’s hard-fought deal to keep farm exports flowing into and through the bloc to world markets, saying that the Middle East and Africa would specifically stand to benefit from it.
Late Friday, the 27-nation EU ended a damaging internal standoff over a destabilizing glut of Ukraine farm imports by granting five eastern member countries the right to temporarily ban the most problematic produce while allowing all farm products to transit onward.
Resolving the issue allows the EU to maintain a unified stance in the face of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor. “We welcome that we resolved this issue,” Ukrainian Finance Minister Sergii Marchenko said at a meeting of EU finance ministers in Stockholm.
Under the deal, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania can keep four farm products that make up the overwhelming mass of exports from Ukraine out of their local markets but must guarantee unfettered access to the rest of the bloc.
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine hampered Black Sea shipments of Ukrainian agricultural products, using the 27-nation bloc as a transportation route has been essential to getting the nation's prized cereal production on to the world.
"We found a wise decision that would help Ukraine to export necessary commodities, food commodities towards African countries, which is so necessary for them,” Marchenko said, adding Middle East nations would equally profit.
Under the deal, the bloc would basically accept the national bans on four of the five main products — wheat, maize, rapeseed, and sunflower seeds — that account for most imports. The EU would also assess whether other products, including sunflower oil, should also be included.
As an added sweetener, the EU provided 100 million euros ($113 million) more in special aid on top of on an initial support package of 56.3 million euros to help farmers in the affected countries.
On Friday, EU nations also tentatively agreed to lift tariffs on Ukraine's grains for another year. The EU lifted duties on Ukrainian grain to facilitate its transport to Africa and the Middle East by other routes after a Russian blockade kept cargo from leaving Ukraine's ports.
Overall, there was acceptance that the lifting of import tariffs had seriously skewed the local markets in nations closest to Ukraine. In Poland, wheat imports went from 2,375 tons in 2021 to 500,008 tons last year. Maize went from 5,863 tons to more than 1.8 million over the same period.
Similar huge increases were also evident in Hungary, Slovakia and Romania.
Drone causes fire at Crimea oil reservoir: Russian official
A massive fire erupted at an oil reservoir in Crimea after it was hit by a drone, a Russia-appointed official there reported Saturday.
Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of the Black Sea peninsula's port city of Sevastopol, posted videos and photos of the blaze on his Telegram channel.
Razvozhayev said the fire was assigned the highest ranking in terms of how complicated it will be to extinguish.
He did not say whether the drone he cited as causing the fire was Ukrainian. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, a move that most of the world considered illegal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said his country is seeking to reclaim the peninsula during Russia's current full-scale invasion.
The incident comes a day after Russia fired more than 20 cruise missiles and two drones at Ukraine, killing at least 23 people. Almost all of the victims died when two missiles slammed into an apartment building. Three children were among the dead.
Razvozhayev said the oil reservoir fire did not cause any casualties and would not hinder fuel supplies in Sevastopol.
The city has been subject to regular attack attempts with drones, especially in recent weeks.
Earlier this week, Razvozhayev reported that the Russian military destroyed a Ukrainian sea drone that attempted to attack the harbor and another one blew up, shattering windows in several apartment buildings, but not inflicting any other damage.
Ukrainian officials did not immediately comment on the oil reservoir fire. After previous attacks on Crimea, Kyiv usually stopped short of openly claiming responsibility but emphasized that the country had the right to strike any target in response to Russian aggression.
Coastguards recover bodies of 41 migrants off Tunisian coast
Coastguards have recovered the dead of 41 migrants off the coast of Tunisia, as the number of people dying trying to reach Europe from Africa continues to rise.
According to a senior official, almost 200 people have drowned in the last ten days, reports BBC.
Tunisian morgues were running out of room, he said, and officials were struggling to keep up with the spike in attempted crossings.
"On Tuesday, we had more than 200 bodies, well beyond the capacity of the hospital, which creates a health problem," said Faouzi Masmoudi, justice official in the port city of Sfax where the central morgue for an area of around a million people is sited.
Also Read: At least 24 migrants die in waters off Tunisia over 2 days
"There is a problem with large numbers of corpses arriving on the shore. We don't know who they are or what shipwreck they came from and the number is increasing."
According the UN's migration agency, a total of roughly 300 individuals died during the previous week and a half, and 824 people have died this year, with those leaving from the Libyan coast are included.
Houssem Eddine Jebabli of the national guard told Reuters, the decomposed condition of the recovered bodies indicated that they had been submerged for several days.
According to him, the total number of fatalities in such a short period was unprecedented.
Tunisia has become a transit point for irregular migrants, primarily from Sub-Saharan Africa, attempting to reach Europe by sea.
The number of migrant deaths at sea has varied, with the UN's Missing Migrants Project reporting that 300 migrants died in the Central Mediterranean in the last 10 days alone.
N. Korea insults Biden, slams defense agreement with Seoul
The powerful sister of North Korea’s leader says her country would stage more provocative displays of its military might in response to a new U.S.-South Korean agreement to intensify nuclear deterrence to counter the North’s nuclear threat, which she insists shows their “extreme” hostility toward Pyongyang.
Kim Yo Jong also lobbed personal insults toward U.S. President Joe Biden, who after a summit with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Wednesday stated that any North Korean nuclear attack on the U.S. or its allies would “result in the end of whatever regime” took such action.
Biden’s meeting with Yoon in Washington came amid heightened tensions in the Korean Peninsula as the pace of both the North Korean weapons demonstrations and the combined U.S.-South Korean military exercises have increased in a cycle of tit-for-tat.
Since the start of 2022, North Korea has test-fired around 100 missiles, including multiple demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to reach the U.S. mainland and a slew of short-range launches the North described as simulated nuclear strikes on South Korea.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is widely expected to up the ante in coming weeks or months as he continues to accelerate a campaign aimed at cementing the North’s status as a nuclear power and eventually negotiating U.S. economic and security concessions from a position of strength.
Also read: U.S. envoy for DPRK to visit S. Korea, Japan amid tension
During their summit, Biden and Yoon announced new nuclear deterrence efforts that call for periodically docking U.S. nuclear-armed submarines in South Korea for the first time in decades and bolstering training between the two countries. They also committed to plans for bilateral presidential consultations in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack, the establishment of a nuclear consultative group and improved sharing of information on nuclear and strategic weapons operation plans.
In her comments published on state media, Kim Yo Jong said the U.S.-South Korean agreement reflected the allies’ “most hostile and aggressive will of action” against the North and will push regional peace and security into “more serious danger.”
Kim, who is one of her brother’s top foreign policy officials, said the summit further strengthened the North’s conviction to enhance its nuclear arms capabilities. She said it would be especially important for the North to perfect the “second mission of the nuclear war deterrent,” in an apparent reference to the country’s escalatory nuclear doctrine that calls for preemptive nuclear strikes over a broad range of scenarios where it may perceive its leadership as under threat.
She lashed out at Biden over his blunt warning that North Korean nuclear aggression would result in the end of its regime, calling him senile and “too miscalculating and irresponsibly brave.” However, she said the North wouldn’t simply dismiss his words as a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage.”
“When we consider that this expression was personally used by the president of the U.S., our most hostile adversary, it is threatening rhetoric for which he should be prepared for far too great an after-storm,” she said.
“The more the enemies are dead set on staging nuclear war exercises, and the more nuclear assets they deploy in the vicinity of the Korean Peninsula, the stronger the exercise of our right to self-defense will become in direct proportion to them.”
She called Yoon a “fool” over his efforts to strengthen South Korea’s defense in conjunction with its alliance with the United States and bolster the South’s own conventional missile capabilities, saying he was putting his absolute trust in the U.S. despite getting only “nominal” promises in return.
“The pipe dream of the U.S. and (South) Korea will henceforth be faced with the entity of more powerful strength,” she said.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, described her comments as “absurd” and insisted that they convey the North’s “nervousness and frustration” over the allies’ efforts to strengthen nuclear deterrence.
Kim Yo Jong’s comments toward Biden were reminiscent of when her brother called former U.S. President Donald Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” while they exchanged verbal threats during a North Korean testing spree in 2017 that included flight tests of ICBMs and the North’s sixth nuclear test.
Kim Jong Un later shifted toward diplomacy and held his first summit with Trump in Singapore in June 2018, where they issued aspirational goals for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing when and how it would occur.
But their diplomacy never recovered from the collapse of their second summit in February 2019 in Vietnam, where the Americans rejected North Korean demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a limited surrender of their nuclear capabilities.
Kim Yo Jong did not specify the actions the North is planning to take in response to the outcome of the U.S.-South Korea summit.
Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the North will likely dial up military exercises involving its purported nuclear-capable missiles to demonstrate pre-emptive strike capabilities. The North may also stage tests of submarine-launched ballistic missile systems in response to the U.S. plans to send nuclear-armed submarines to the South, he said.
Kim Jong Un said this month that the country has built its first military spy satellite, which will be launched at an unspecified date. The launch would almost certainly be seen by its rivals as a banned test of long-range missile technology.
In March, he called for his nuclear scientists to increase production of weapons-grade material to make bombs to put on his increasing range of nuclear-capable missiles, as the North unveiled what appeared to be a new warhead possibly designed to fit on a variety of delivery systems. That raised questions on whether the North was moving closer to its next nuclear test, which U.S. and South Korean officials have been predicting for months.
North Korea has long described the United States’ regular military exercises with South Korea as invasion rehearsals, although the allies described those drills as defensive. Many experts say Kim likely uses his rivals’ military drills as a pretext to advance his weapons programs and solidify his domestic leadership amid economic troubles.
Facing growing North Korean threats, Yoon has been seeking stronger reassurances from the United States that it would swiftly and decisively use its nuclear weapons if the South comes under a North Korean nuclear attack.
His government has also been expanding military training with the U.S., which included the allies’ biggest field exercises in years last month and separate drills involving a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group and advanced warplanes, including nuclear-capable B-52 bombers and F-35 fighter jets.