Category World News

Myanmar’s military has acknowledged it conducted an air strike on a hospital in the western state of Rakhine that killed 33 people, whom it accused of being armed members of opposition groups and their supporters, but not civilians.

Witnesses, aid workers, rebel groups and the United Nations have said the victims were civilians at the hospital.

In a statement published by the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper on Saturday, the military’s information office said armed groups, including the ethnic Arakan Army and the People’s Defence Force, used the hospital as their base.

It said the military carried out necessary security measures and launched a counterterrorism operation against the general hospital in Mrauk-U township on Wednesday.

However, the United Nations on Thursday condemned the attack on the facility providing emergency care, obstetrics and surgical services in the area, saying that it was part of a broader pattern of strikes causing harm to civilians and civilian objects that are devastating communities across the country.

UN rights chief Volker Turk condemned the attacks “in [the] strongest possible terms” and demanded an investigation. “Such attacks may amount to a war crime. I call for investigations and those responsible to be held to account. The fighting must stop now,” he wrote on X.

World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “appalled”. “At least 33 people have been killed … including health workers, patients and family members. Hospital infrastructure was severely damaged, with operating rooms and the main inpatient ward completely destroyed,” he wrote on X.

Myanmar has been gripped by attritional fighting in a raging civil war.

Mrauk-U, located 530km (326 miles) northwest of Yangon, the country’s largest city, was captured by the Arakan Army in February 2024.

The Arakan Army is the well-trained and well-armed military wing of the Rakhine ethnic minority movement, which seeks autonomy from Myanmar’s central government. It began its offensive in Rakhine in November 2023 and has seized a strategically important regional army headquarters and 14 of Rakhine’s 17 townships.

Rakhine, formerly known as Arakan, was the site of a brutal army counterinsurgency operation in 2017 that drove about 740,000 Muslim-majority Rohingya to seek safety across the border in Bangladesh. There is still ethnic tension between the Buddhist Rakhine and the Rohingya.

The Arakan Army pledged in a statement on Thursday to pursue accountability for the air strike in cooperation with global organisations to ensure justice and take “strong and decisive action” against the military.

The military government has stepped up air strikes ahead of planned December 28 elections. Opponents of military rule charge that the polls will be neither free nor fair and are mainly an effort to legitimise the army retaining power.

Sang is one of hundreds of thousands of unwanted and discriminated children left behind by the US soldiers after the Vietnam War. When his lifelong dream of finding his father comes true, Sang’s only mission is to race against time to meet his ailing dad and break the cycle of war trauma that has plagued generations.

After a long and challenging journey, Sang can finally go to the US, but without his wife, daughter, and beloved grandson. Reuniting with his father is a healing experience for both, but far from easy. Even though 50 years have passed since the last US soldier left Vietnam, many wounds remain open.

A Bolivian judge has ordered former President Luis Arce to remain in detention for five months while prosecutors investigate allegations he embezzled millions of dollars from a fund meant for Indigenous communities.

Arce, who left office just a month ago, appeared before Judge Elmer Laura in a virtual hearing on Friday, two days after his arrest on the streets of La Paz.

The judge rejected appeals from Arce’s legal team for his release and ruled he must await trial in one of the capital’s largest prisons, citing the seriousness of charges that “directly affect state assets and resources allocated to vulnerable sectors”.

No trial date has been set.

The accusations centre on Arce’s time as economy minister under former President Evo Morales between 2006 and 2017, when authorities say he oversaw the diversion of approximately $700m from a state fund created to channel natural gas revenues into development projects for Indigenous peoples and peasant farmers.

Interior minister of the new right-wing government, Marco Antonio Oviedo, has described the 62-year-old former president as “the principal person responsible” for approving transfers of large sums into personal accounts of government officials for projects that were never completed.

Arce maintained his innocence during Friday’s hearing, saying he had no personal involvement in managing the fund and dismissing the case as politically motivated. “I’m a scapegoat,” he told the judge. “The accusations are politically motivated.”

His defence lawyers had requested his release on health grounds, noting his previous battle with kidney cancer.

However, Judge Laura denied the appeal and exceeded the prosecution’s request of three months’ detention by ordering five months in a state prison rather than a juvenile facility.

The case first emerged almost a decade ago in 2015 when the Indigenous fund was shut down amid corruption allegations, but investigations stalled during the years of Movement Toward Socialism governance.

The probe was revived after conservative President Rodrigo Paz took office last month, ending nearly two decades of left-wing rule in Bolivia.

Paz campaigned on promises to root out corruption at the highest levels as Bolivia grapples with its worst economic crisis in 40 years. His vice president, Edmand Lara, celebrated Arce’s arrest on social media, declaring that “everyone who has stolen from this country will return every last cent”.

Former ministers in Arce’s administration have condemned the arrest as an abuse of power and political persecution against the Movement Toward Socialism party.

China has held a low-key memorial ceremony for the Nanjing Massacre, as a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan continues to simmer.

President Xi Jinping did not attend the ceremony on Saturday commemorating the 1937 attack, in which China says Imperial Japan’s troops slaughtered 300,000 people in the eastern city of Nanjing.

A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll at 142,000, but some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars have denied that a massacre took place at all. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has infuriated Beijing after her remarks last month in which she projected that a hypothetical Chinese attack on the self-governed island of Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan.

Doves flew over the national memorial centre in Nanjing after the ceremony, which was completed in less than half an hour, in front of an audience that included police officers and schoolchildren.

Shi Taifeng, head of the ruling Communist Party’s powerful organisation department, made far less combative remarks than recent rhetoric from Chinese government officials.

“History has proven and will continue to prove that any attempt to revive militarism, challenge the post-war international order, or undermine world peace and stability will never be tolerated by all peace-loving and justice-seeking peoples around the world and is doomed to fail.”

He did not mention Takaichi but alluded to China’s previous assertions that the Japanese leader seeks to revive the country’s history of militarism.

On Saturday, the Eastern Theatre Command of China’s People’s Liberation Army put out a picture on its social media accounts of a large bloody sword, of the type used by many Chinese soldiers during the war, chopping off the head of a skeleton wearing a Japanese army cap.

“For nearly 1,000 years, the eastern dwarves have brought calamity; the sea of blood and deep hatred are still before our very eyes,” it said, using an old expression for Japan.

Dispute over Taiwan

Last month, Japan’s Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi announced that Tokyo was moving forward with plans to deploy a missile system on Yonaguni, the country’s westernmost island located 110km (68 miles) off Taiwan’s east coast, which has hosted a Japanese military base since 2016.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs blasted the announcement, describing Japan’s plan as a “deliberate attempt to create regional tension and provoke military confrontation”. Koizumi pushed back, saying the Type 03 guided missile system was purely defensive and “intended to counter aircraft and missiles invading our nation”.

Beijing views Taiwan as its own territory and has promised to unite the island with the Chinese mainland, an aspiration that Taipei says infringes on its sovereignty and that only Taiwan’s citizens can decide their future.

Both countries have since traded quarrelsome accusations, with Japan summoning China’s ambassador earlier this month over an incident in which Chinese military aircraft allegedly twice locked fire-control radar onto Japanese fighter jets.

Illuminating aircraft with radar signals a potential attack that could force targeted planes to take evasive measures, making it among the most threatening actions a military aircraft can take.

For its part, the Chinese embassy denied Tokyo’s claims, saying in a statement that “China solemnly demands that Japan stop smearing and slandering, strictly restrain its frontline actions, and prevent similar incidents from happening again”.