List of All Articles with Tag 'sons'

Kim Jong Un’s security team scrupulously inspected his chair and wiped it down with disinfectant before he could sit at Putin’s summit. Video footage published by te Kommersant newspaper on Thursday showed a North Korean security official in white gloves attentively wiping down Kim’s black chair and spraying an unidentified substance. The North Korean sprayed and wiped down the seat, the hands, the legs and even the area around the chair as a Kremlin bodyguard looked on in a slightly bemused way. Another North Korean guard then gave some sort of order to the guard doing the disinfecting. The nature of the order was unclear. “The chair turned out to be the subject of the greatest concern of the North Korean side,” wrote Kommersant’s Kremlin correspondent, Andrei Kolesnikov. According to reports, Kim’s security team of 100 people were unhappy with the first chair provided and demanded another one, the Kommersant said.“ Then a North Korean employee wiped the chair intended for Kim Jong Un for several minutes without stopping, wearing white gloves: judging by the smell he disinfected it,” said Kommersant, one of Russia’s leading newspapers. Others have speculated the security team also carried out a vigrous check to ensure the chair could handle the North Korean’s weigh and that one guard used a metal detector to check the seat for booby traps and angerous devices. Putin and Kim discussed military matters, the war in Ukraine and possible Russian help for North Korea’s satellite programme. Read More Ukraine-Russia war – live: UK Storm Shadow missiles used in attack on Putin’s Crimea fleet Russian pilot ‘believed he had permission to shoot down RAF spy plane’ Boris Johnson takes swipe at Rishi Sunak over ‘slow’ response to Ukraine weapons pleas

As he looks to break through in the 2024 GOP primary, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott rolled out an economic plan on Thursday that takes aim at President Joe Biden's policies and calls for making permanent former President Donald Trump's tax cuts.

Elon Musk has been told Taiwan is “not for sale” by the island’s foreign minister after the tech mogul said Taiwan was an integral part of China. Speaking to the All-In Summit in Los Angeles uploaded to YouTube this week, Musk attracted criticism when he said: “Their [Beijing’s] policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because … the US Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force,” he said. Taiwan foreign minister Joseph Wu, posted on Twitter/X in response, saying that he hoped Musk could ask China to “open @X to its people“. China blocks X, along with other major western social media like Facebook. "Perhaps he thinks banning it is a good policy, like turning off @Starlink to thwart Ukraine’s counterstrike against Russia,” Wu added, referring to Musk’s refusing a Ukrainian request to activate his Starlink satellite network in Crimea’s port city of Sevastopol last year to aid an attack on Russia’s fleet there. “Listen up, Taiwan is not part of the PRC & certainly not for sale!” Wu said, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China. This is not the first time Musk has annoyed Taiwan, which Xi Jinping wants to annex, claiming it is a province of China. Last October, he suggested that tensions between China and Taiwan could be resolved by handing over some control of Taiwan to Beijing. Meanwhile, this week has seen the largest scale Chinese military activity near Taiwan since major drills in April. On Thursday Taiwan’s defence ministry said it had detected 68 aircraft and 10 ships around Taiwan in the previous 24 hours, including 40 aerial crossings of the median line, prompting rumours of suspected military exercises, which have not been announced by China. Meanwhile, on Wednesday Chen Binhua, a spokesperson for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, accused the US and Taiwan of collusion to strengthen Taiwan’s defense capabilities. Maybe Musk should stay out of international relations and stick to Twitter/X. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

President Joe Biden is expected to deploy new attacks on Republicans in an economic speech on Thursday, just weeks ahead of a deadline to keep the government open past the end of the month.

A former Austrian minister who announced recently that she was moving to Russia to lead a think tank, reportedly flew in her ponies to Moscow on a military plane. Karin Kneissl will move to St Petersburg to work at the Geopolitical Observatory for Russia’s Key Issues [GORKI], she told the Russian TASS news agency recently. Last week Ms Kneissl brought two of her ponies to St Petersburg on a military aircraft from the Russian air base at Hmeimim in Syria following a diversion from its intended mission of transporting troops. The Insider reported that Fighterbomber Z-channel confirmed that an Il-76 military transport aircraft was used to carry the animals. Ms Kneissl, 58, received a lot of notoriety for inviting Russian presidentVladimir Putin to her wedding in 2018. She co-founded the GORKI centre which she set up with St Petersburg University in June to “help define the policies for the Russian Federation” with a focus on the Near and Middle East. She said: “Since there is a lot of work and it requires a lot of attention, I can’t do it in passing, I decided to move to St Petersburg for this work.” It was reported that the Russian aircraft used to bring her two ponies belonged to the 224th flight detachment of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation which in May came under US and Ukrainian sanctions for transporting equipment and mercenaries of the Wagner Group. Ms Kneissl – who is a former foreign minister – relocated to France in September 2020 and took on the role of a guest columnist for Russia Today, an outlet often perceived as a propagandistic mouthpiece of the Kremlin. Her invitation to Mr Putin drew widespread criticism. It occurred just months after several EU countries, excluding Austria, had expelled numerous Russian diplomats in response to the nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. On Wednesday, the former Austrian minister expressed shock over her move to Russia turning “political”. In a Telegram post, she said that she had moved her “books, clothes and ponies from Marseille to Beirut via DHL” in June 2022. Ms Kneissl had been living in Lebanon after leaving Austria in 2020 amidst a political scandal. However, Lebanon served as a temporary arrangement, she explained, and she would travel to Russia every six weeks for work. “Due to sanctions there are neither flights nor DHL [for her move to Russia],” she wrote. “I therefore had the option of accompanying a Russian transport flight from Syria to Russia, for which I am very grateful.” Ms Kneissl held the position of Austrian foreign affairs minister from 2017 to 2019. Meanwhile, the website of the Department of Veterinary Medicine of the Leningrad Region stated on 9 September that veterinarians carried out “all the necessary measures when importing animals into the territory of the Russian Federation”. “Specialists conducted a clinical examination of the ponies, took blood samples, and also quarantined them. Domestic horses are healthy”. Read More A flotilla of migrant boats from Tunisia overwhelms an Italian island and tests Meloni's policy Complex Napoleon: how Bonaparte’s unrivalled ambition built an empire and left a tangled legacy Weapons, spy satellites and nuclear ambitions: what we learned from Putin’s summit with Kim Jong-un in Russia The Body in the Woods | An Independent TV Original Documentary The harrowing discovery at centre of The Independent’s new documentary

By Jeff Mason WASHINGTON Chief executives from a wide array of U.S. companies will meet White House Chief

MOSCOW North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's security detail spent several minutes disinfecting the chair that Kim sat

By Nandita Bose WASHINGTON U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday will address the impact of federal budget cuts

Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding over the Georgia 2020 election subversion case, is set to hold a hearing on Thursday to address a series of legal requests submitted by two of former President Donald Trump's co-defendants ahead of their trial next month.

President Joe Biden's aides privately acknowledge a rematch with Donald Trump in 2024 could be his best path to reelection, but they are terrified by what would happen if he lost -- which operatives on his campaign and throughout the Democratic Party worry is a very real possibility.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally gave his conference the green light to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Now the harder work begins.

Gordon Ramsay has received a whopping 17 Michelin stars so far