Following police’s runover and the death of a man during anti-government protests, Indonesia’s president has urged caution. After learning that lawmakers receive benefits that were nearly 20 times the typical monthly salary, demonstrators discovered that they were taking to the streets of Jakarta.
According to the Colombian Ombudsman’s Office, 33 Colombian soldiers have been freed after three days of confinement in a remote Amazonian village dominated by armed rebel groups and drug crops.
As troops were led out of the rural community in Guaviare province on Thursday, Iris Marin, the head of the Ombudsman’s Office, said, “At this moment, soldiers are withdrawing from the village Nueva York.”
At least ten people were killed in clashes with an armed group on Monday, which led to the soldiers’ arrest.
In what the government of President Gustavo Petro called a kidnapping, villagers then blocked roads, preventing the soldiers from leaving. Marin continued, “We urge people to refrain from stigmatizing the community.”
Negotiations led by government, Ombudsman’s Office, and UN officials resulted in the soldiers’ release. Initial reports indicated 34 troops were detained, but later that number was increased to 33.
In Colombia’s southern regions, where the state has a limited presence and armed groups frequently have control over communities, mass detentions of security forces have become a common practice.
The attorney general’s office has received a formal complaint about the incident from the army. Recontractors were deployed “to prevent any attacks in this hostile environment,” according to military commander Admiral Francisco Cubides, who claimed locals were “being manipulated” by rebel factions.
Ivaan Mordisco, a former leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who spearheaded the dissident group, rejected a 2016 peace agreement that sought to end the nation’s six-decade armed conflict, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 450, 000 people.
In the southwest of Cali, Mordisco-linked fighters detonated a truck bomb last week, injuring more than 60 people and killing six people.
Authorities accuse his organization of recruiting children and using intimidation to thwart state security forces.
The soldiers’ detention area in the Amazonian corridor is a major hub for drug trafficking, with extensive coca plantations being the main ingredient in cocaine production.
Four employees, including two who took part in a sit-in this week at the company’s president’s office, have been fired from the company due to their involvement in protests on company grounds.
No Azure for Apartheid, a protest group, announced in a statement on Wednesday that Anna Hattle and Riki Fameli had received voicemails telling them they were fired.
The company reported on the firings of two more employees, Julius Shan and Nisreen Jaradat, on Thursday.
They were one of the demonstrators who had recently set up camps outside Microsoft’s headquarters to protest its support for Israel in the Gaza war.
According to Microsoft, the terminations occurred as a result of serious company policies violations. It claimed that recent on-site demonstrations had “created significant safety concerns” in a statement released on Thursday.
No Azure for Apartheid demanded that Microsoft’s Azure software be discontinued and Palestinians be compensated. The name refers to Microsoft’s Azure software.
In a statement, Hattle said, “We are here because Microsoft continues to gaslight and mislead its own employees about this reality.”
Seven protesters were detained on Tuesday after occupying company President Brad Smith’s office, including Hattle and Fameli. The remaining five were employees of Microsoft and non-profits.
According to Smith, Microsoft upheld “freedom of expression that everyone in this country enjoys as long as they do it lawfully.”
A joint media investigation this month discovered that a Palestinian-occupied West Bank and Gaza-based military surveillance agency was using Microsoft’s Azure software to store a sizable amount of phone calls recorded in the region.
According to the investigation, Israel relyed on Microsoft cloud for extensive Palestinian surveillance, which was carried out by The Guardian, + 972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.
Microsoft responded by requesting a review from law firm Covington &, Burling LLP.
Other Microsoft employees have voiced their opposition to the company’s ties to Israel.
An employee who was protesting the company’s ties to Israel during the technology company’s 50th anniversary celebration interrupted the remarks made by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman in April. Following that, that employee and another protesting employee both lost their jobs.
As the humanitarian crisis in Gaza from Israel’s military assault has grown, and images of starving Palestinians, including children, have sparked outrage worldwide, businesses and educational institutions have been tipped over ties to Israel.
In response to China’s growing military threat, two senior Republican senators have arrived in Taipei to discuss security.
Senators Deb Fischer and Roger Wicker, the head of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, both stated on Friday that their visit was intended to strengthen and emphasize Taiwan’s “great partnership.”
Before meeting with President William Lai Ching-te and other government officials, Wicker told reporters, “We stand here again to reiterate the partnership and the security and friendship that the United States has had with Taiwan for a while.”
The US Senate will consider the nearly $1 trillion bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, as it prepares to consider it next week.
Wicker, who provided no further information, claimed that the NDAA this year would “add to the provisions again” when it came to Taiwan.
Senator Fischer stated in a statement prior to the trip that she was looking forward to the visit “to see firsthand how we can strengthen our posture in the region in order to safeguard American interests and our allies.”
Fischer is also a member of the powerful Armed Services Committee, which oversees US military legislation.
Wicker and other lawmakers were urged by the Chinese Embassy to postpone travel to Taiwan last month.
Beijing frequently denounces any demonstrations of support for Taipei from Washington, which views the island as its own territory.
In recent years, China has increased its military presence in Taiwan, including hosting war games, and Beijing has never abandoned the use of force to enslave Taiwan.
As some members of Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, expressed concern that US President Donald Trump is underscoring security issues as he works to reach an agreement on trade with China, leading to the senators’ trip.
After Beijing objected, the Trump administration reportedly denied Taiwan’s Lai’s request to transit through New York as part of a planned official trip to Latin America. The trip was then reportedly cancelled by Lai.
Trump’s continued commitment to Asia-Pacific security issues as he pursues his trade agenda, good personal relationships with Xi Jinping, according to administration officials.
Despite having no formal diplomatic ties, the US is Taiwan’s most significant international supporter and supplier of weapons.
In order to strengthen its military supply chains and promote mobility across the Asia Pacific, the US announced on Saturday that it was considering opening new locations in Palau and Australia for the West Pacific’s stockpiling equipment.
Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir — Forty-year-old Ruksana wails as she looks at her home, a desolate one-storey structure stripped of windows and doors next to the raging Tawi river in Jammu’s rundown neighbourhood of Gujar Nagar. A coarse coating of mud drips down the outer walls of the house.
“My husband is handicapped, and I have built this home by working at people’s homes,” she wails. “I could only rescue my two children and husband. Everything else, their clothes, their books, food has been lost.”
For dozens of families, the loss is even graver. At least 40 people have died and scores have been injured as torrential rains in Indian-administered Kashmir triggered major landslides this week, with flash floods sweeping away homes and knocking down telecommunication networks and powerlines.
The majority of those killed were pilgrims travelling to the Vaishno Devi temple in Jammu’s Katra. The shrine, one of the most popular Hindu pilgrimage spots, is located about 60km from Jammu city. Devotees trek about 12–13km uphill from the base camp to reach it.
“There was chaos. Death had never seemed [so] close. Some people are still missing,” said Rakesh Kumar, 42, who had come to Katra from Madhya Pradesh, a central Indian state. “The internet and phones were dead, which created a lot of panic.”
Jammu recorded its heaviest-ever 24-hour rainfall on Tuesday – 380mm, compared with the previous record of 270.4mm in 1988 – triggering widespread devastation across the region. Some of the deceased pilgrims visiting the Vaishno Devi shrine have been identified as residents of Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh states.
Mohan Das, another devotee from the state of Uttar Pradesh, said that he was looking for five friends who were missing. “We don’t know where they are. It has been 12 hours since we last saw them,” Das said.
Jammu abuts the mountains that girdle the Kashmir Valley. The latest crisis came days after a series of flash floods in the remote regions of Kishtwar and Kathua districts killed dozens in Indian-administered Kashmir.
The regional administration has set up relief camps and announced compensation for affected families. The region’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and the federally appointed Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha have toured the worst-hit areas. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised the central government’s assistance, and the authorities said they evacuated more than 5,000 people stranded in the floods.
In Jammu, the floods surged through the city and swept away bridges on the Tawi, a major lifeline for the region. Images showed policemen in Jammu desperately trying to halt traffic approaching a damaged bridge before a side of it collapsed.
Along the steep mountainous routes that trace a winding path through the craggy hills of Jammu, roads caved in under landslides, forcing the only land route from the rest of India to the region to shut temporarily. The Indian government also mobilised a fleet of military transport aircraft to fast-track the delivery of aid and other essential supplies into the region, where air traffic was closed on Tuesday before operations resumed the following day.
Bashash Mahmood, 23, a university law student, was abruptly awakened by a midnight call while sleeping at his hotel in Srinagar. On the line was his cousin, calling from Anantnag—58 kilometres away.
Floodwaters on Wednesday knocked down mobile and electricity towers and severed optical fibre cables, crippling the region’s entire telecommunications infrastructure.
So Bashash could only hear a jumble of crackling words as he tried to make sense of what his cousin was saying. He finally managed to catch an urgent SOS message: floodwaters had surged outside his home in Bijbehara, Anantnag, and his family was in danger.
He took his car and raced along empty roads in the middle of the night, past the Indian army garrison at Badambagh, and through the sprawling saffron fields of Pampore.
When he arrived at Sangam, a canyon where two major rivers in Anantnag join, he rolled down his windows, the rain pelting against his face. “I realised that water had risen dangerously close to the embankment.”
Once he reached home, Bashash got to work and carried household items such as a fridge, furniture and utensils to the second storey of their house, emptying the ground floor.
In the morning, videos went viral showing people paddling rafts through the streets, as water had submerged large parts of South Kashmir, especially Anantnag district.
In Srinagar, the region’s biggest city, panic reached a crescendo on Wednesday afternoon – reinforced by public memories of apocalyptic floods that had struck in 2014.
Back then, floodwaters from swollen rivers had breached the banks, burying large parts of the Kashmir valley. As Bashash recalls, when the waters finally receded 11 years ago, the floods had left two feet of sludge residue that locals scooped up with their bare hands before cleaning their homes to make them livable again. “Just the thought of how hard it was for us to defecate terrifies me. We would rather refuse to eat anything to get ourselves constipated because there were no toilets,” he says.
Haunted by those memories, residents across Kashmir were seen assembling sandbags and plugging gaps to prevent breaches through which the swelling river might come. If it was the Tawi in Jammu, it was the Jhelum river – also a lifeline-turned-threat – that poses the danger in Kashmir. The river crisscrosses its way through the entire length of the Kashmir valley before crossing over into Pakistan.
On Wednesday, residents rushed to relocate or move their household goods to higher storeys in their homes in a bid to avoid a repeat of 2014. The family of Nazir Wani, a 70-year-old man suffering from a chronic pulmonary disorder that requires him to continuously have oxygen connected, said they were moving to a different neighbourhood, some 14km away, at a higher altitude.
“Where would we go if the waters rise and we get stuck? Where will we get the oxygen supply from? We are not taking any chances,” said Nousheen Wani, his daughter. The family bundled the old man into a large sports car, his eyebags sagging, as he took heavy breaths. They hauled five cylinders and two oxygen concentrators and slid them between the boot space and the rear seats, before driving away.
These floods have hit Kashmir amid crippling economic woes.
Six years ago, the Indian government stripped the region’s historic special status and demoted it from a state to a federally governed region, a move that escalated tensions with archrival Pakistan. To prevent protests, India imposed a major lockdown, suspending telecommunications and jailing thousands of people. The lockdown strangled the region’s economy, with an estimated economic loss worth $1.5bn.
Echoes of those measures continue to be felt across the region even today. According to the latest Indian government statistics, youth unemployment stands at 17.4 percent, much higher than the national average of 10.2 percent.
The floods threaten to compound that crisis. Abdullah, the elected chief minister in the disputed province, drew parallels with the aftermath of the 2014 floods. Back then, too, he was in the same role, but at the time, Indian-administered Kashmir had semiautonomous status, giving Abdullah, in some ways, more power than other Indian state leaders.
In a post on X, he complained about the failure of authorities to learn from the lessons of 2014. “What flood mitigation measures were implemented since Oct (sic) 2014?” he asked, criticising those who ruled between his two tenures, including Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, a coalition partner in the provincial government between 2015 and 2018. “These are all questions that the elected government will seek answers to because the last 48 hours have been a shocking eye-opener.”
While extreme weather events continue to occur regularly across India, environmental experts in Kashmir say poor natural resource management and a flurry of reckless developmental projects have amplified threats.
“In the last five years, the authorities have felled up to a million trees for what they call their pasture land retrieval programmes,” explained Raja Muzaffar Bhat, a Srinagar-based activist.
In 2020, authorities in Kashmir began evicting forest-dwelling tribal communities from their homes by cutting down their orchards. Authorities accused the communities of having “encroached” on forest land. However, the “tribals” insist they have been cultivating the land for generations.
Major construction projects, including tunnels bored through mountains, also added to the dangers of ecological collapse, Bhat suggested.
He cited the example of a 61km road project that aims to skirt past traffic-congested Srinagar city and ease access between other districts of Kashmir. The road is being built on floodplains that historically have absorbed surging waters, saving Srinagar from flooding. Instead, Bhat said, it could have been built on elevated pillars.
Tonnes of soil were extracted from precious elevated tablelands called karewas for laying the foundations on which these roads have been built, and they will pass through the floodplains of Kandizal (between the districts of Srinagar and Pulwama), Muzaffar said. The floodplains had an important role as they absorbed the water surge and prevented Srinagar city from being flooded.
