IMF calls for 'urgent' action by India amid slowdown

Seoul, Jun 16: North Korea blew up an inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border on Tuesday, the South's Unification Ministry said, after days of increasingly virulent rhetoric from Pyongyang.

"North Korea blows up Kaesong Liaison Office at 14:49," the ministry, which handles inter-Korean relations, said in a one-line alert sent to reporters.

The statement came minutes after an explosion was heard and smoke seen rising from the long-shuttered joint industrial zone in Kaesong where the liaison office was located, Yonhap news agency reported citing unspecified sources.

Its destruction came after Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said at the weekend: "Before long, a tragic scene of the useless north-south joint liaison office completely collapsed would be seen."

Since early June, North Korea has issued a series of vitriolic condemnations of the South over activists sending anti-Pyongyang leaflets over the border -- something defectors do on a regular basis.

Last week it announced it was severing all official communication links with South Korea.

The leaflets -- usually attached to hot air balloons or floated in bottles -- criticise North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for human rights abuses and his nuclear ambitions.

Analysts say Pyongyang may be seeking to manufacture a crisis to increase pressure on Seoul while nuclear negotiations with Washington are at a standstill.

Earlier Tuesday, North Korea's army said it was "fully ready" to take action against the South, included re-entering areas that had been demilitarised under an inter-Korean agreement.

"North Korea is frustrated that the South has failed to offer an alternative plan to revive the US-North talks, let alone create a right atmosphere for the revival," said Cheong Seong-chang, a director of the Sejong Institute's Center for North Korean Studies.

"It has concluded the South has failed as a mediator in the process."

Jul 3: China under President Xi Jinping has stepped up its "aggressive" foreign policy toward India and "resisted" efforts to clarify the Line of Actual Control that prevented a lasting peace from being realised, according to a report released by a US Congress appointed commission.

The armies of India and China have been locked in a bitter standoff at multiple locations in eastern Ladakh for the last seven weeks, and the tension escalated after 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a violent clash in the Galwan Valley on June 15.

“Under General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Xi Jinping, Beijing has stepped up its aggressive foreign policy toward New Delhi. Since 2013, China has engaged in five major altercations with India along the Line of Actual Control (LAC),” said a brief issued by US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

"Beijing and New Delhi have signed a series of agreements and committed to confidence-building measures to stabilise their border, but China has resisted efforts to clarify the LAC, preventing a lasting peace from being realised,” said the report and was prepared at the request of the Commission to support its deliberations.

Authored by Will Green, a Policy Analyst on the Security and Foreign Affairs Team at the Commission, the report says that the Chinese government is particularly fearful of India’s growing relationship with the United States and its allies and partners.

“The latest border clash is part of a broader pattern in which Beijing seeks to warn New Delhi against aligning with Washington,” it said.

After Xi assumed power in 2012, there was a significant increase in clashes, despite the fact that he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi several times and Beijing and New Delhi have agreed to a series of confidence-building mechanisms designed to mitigate tensions.

Prior to 2013, the last major border clash was in 1987. The 1950s and 1960s were a particularly tense period, culminating in 1962 with a war that left thousands of soldiers dead on both sides, according to the records of China's People's Liberation Army, the report said.

“The 2020 skirmish is in line with Beijing’s increasingly assertive foreign policy. The clash came as Beijing was aggressively pressing its other expansive sovereignty claims in the Indo-Pacific region, such as over Taiwan and in the South and East China seas,” it said.

China is engaged in hotly contested territorial disputes in both the South China Sea and the East China Sea. Beijing has built up and militarised many of the islands and reefs it controls in the region. Both areas are stated to be rich in minerals, oil and other natural resources and are vital to global trade.

China claims almost all of the South China Sea. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims over the area.

Several weeks before the clash in the Galwan Valley, Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe called on Beijing to “use fighting to promote stability” as the country’s external security environment worsened, a potential indication of China’s intent to proactively initiate military tensions with its neighbours to project an image of strength, the report said.

Washington, Apr 17: A record number of 4,591 Americans have died in the last 24 hours due to the deadly novel coronavirus in the US, which has the highest number of COVID-19 casualties in the world.

According to the Johns Hopkins University data, by 8 pm on Thursday, as many as 4,591 Americans have died in the last 24 hours, The Wall Street Journal said.

The previous highest was 2,569 on Wednesday.

By Thursday, more than 662,000 Americans tested positive with the coronavirus.

The dreaded disease, which originated in Wuhan city in China in December last year, has so far claimed more than 144,000 lives and infected over 2.1 million people.

The virus has infected over 671,000 people and claimed more than 33,000 lives, the highest for any country in the world.

New York City and its adjoining areas, including New Jersey and Connecticut have emerged as the epicenter of the virus in the US.

New York alone accounts for 226,000 cases of infections and 16,106 deaths.

In New Jersey, as many as 3,518 people have died of the disease and 75,317 have tested positive.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, till April 14, four per cent of the Americans infected with COVID-19 were of Asian origin and nearly one-third (30 per cent) were African Americans.

US President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that experts and scientists report that his strategy to slow the spread of the virus has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Models predicted between 1.5 million and 2.2 million US deaths. If there was no mitigation, it could have even been higher than that and between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths with mitigation. It is looking like we will come far under even these lowest numbers, he said.

Noting that experts say the curve of the virus has flattened, and the peak in the new cases has passed, Trump said that nationwide, more than 850 counties or nearly 30 per cent of the country have reported no new cases in the last seven days.

Because of our early and aggressive action, we have avoided the tragedy of health care rationing and deadly shortfalls that have befallen in many other nations, nations which wherever possible we are helping, he said.

According to Trump, at least 35 clinical trials are already underway, including antiviral therapies, immune therapies, and blood therapies in the form of convalescent plasma. So far, more than 3.5 million tests have been carried out.