by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
Washington : US President Donald Trump signed into law the $717 billion annual defence policy bill, the earliest in the year the bill has become law in more than four decades.
“The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the most significant investment in our military and our warfighters in modern history, and I am very proud to be a big, big part of it,” Trump said before signing the bill on Monday.
“It was not very hard. You know, I went to Congress, I said let’s do it, we got to do it. We’re going to strengthen our military like never, ever before, and that’s what we did,” he said.
Trump signed the bill during a visit to Fort Drum, New York, where he was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, Deputy Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford, reports The Hill.
This year’s NDAA authorizes about $639 billion for the base budget of the Pentagon and defence programmes of the Energy Department.
It also allows for another $69 billion for a war fund known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account.
It fulfils several of the administration’s priorities to bulk up the military, including adding 15,600 troops across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.
The bill also follows the administration’s request for 77 F-35 fighter jets and goes beyond the its request for Navy ships, authorizing a total of 13 new vessels.
“We will replace aging tanks, aging planes and ships with the most advanced and lethal technology ever developed, and hopefully we’ll be so strong we’ll never have to use them,” Trump said.
The bill also gives troops a 2.6 per cent pay raise, the highest in nine years, The Hill reported.
On Monday, Trump made no mention of the bill’s namesake.
With the NDAA signed into law, Congress now turns its attention to passing a defence spending bill to make the dollar amounts authorized by the NDAA a reality.
The House passed a Pentagon spending bill in June, while the Senate is expected to start considering its version as soon as this week.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Washington : US military institutions are struggling to fill the 66 slots they had kept aside for officers from Pakistan for the next academic year, as President Donald Trump’s administration refused to provide funds for their training, official sources said.
The fund for training Pakistani officers came from the US government’s International Military Education and Training Programme (IMET) but no funds were made available for Pakistan for the next academic year, Dawn online reported on Saturday quoting the sources as saying.
Dawn first learned about the suspension from the US National Defence University (NDU), Washington, which has had reserved seats for Pakistani officers for more than a decade now.
The outgoing Pakistani officers, however, were told that the university has been asked to fill the positions for the next year with officers from other nations.
The NDU is one of several US military institutions that train officers from Pakistan.
The Trump administration announced early this year that it was suspending security assistance to Pakistan over differences on Afghanistan but indicated that training programmes for military officers will continue.
The cancellation of slots kept aside for Pakistani officers, however, shows that the suspension now also applies to training programmes.
Pakistani officers have been receiving military training and education in the US since early 1960s, which were suspended in the 1990s but restored after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | World
File photos of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
Washington : The US is set to impose more sanctions on Moscow over the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter using a Soviet-era nerve agent in the UK earlier this year, the State Department announced here.
In a statement on Wednesday, Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the US had made this decision on Monday and accused Russia of violating international law, reports CNN.
The statement anticipated that the sanctions would go into effect around August 22 in line with the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991.
Sanctions under this Act have been applied in the past against Syria for its 2013 use of chemical weapons and against North Korea for its use of VX nerve agent during the assassination of Kim Jong-un’s half brother in Malaysia.
Sergei Skripal, the former Russian spy, and his daughter Yulia were hospitalised and treated for the nerve-agent attack in March. Yulia was discharged from the hospital in April, and her father in May.
The State Department notified Congress on Wednesday of the first of two potential tranches of sanctions required under the 1991 law.
Unless Russia takes certain steps, a second set of penalties — more stringent than this first round — must follow, according to the law.
The first set of sanctions target certain items the US exports to Russia that could have military uses — so-called dual use technologies. These are sensitive goods that normally would go through a case-by-case review before they are exported.
With these sanctions, the exports will be presumptively denied.
The items to be included in the second tranche are yet to be confirmed.
Dmitry Polyanskiy, first deputy permanent representative of Russia to the UN, dismissed the sanctions in a tweet late Wednesday responding to the news, CNN reported.
“The theater of absurd continues. No proofs, no clues, no logic, no presumption of innocense, just highly-liklies. Only one rule: blame everything on Russia, no matter how absurd and fake it is. Let us welcome the United Sanctions of America!” Polyanskiy tweeted.
The UK welcomed the move.
In a short statement, a government spokesperson said: “The strong international response to the use of a chemical weapon on the streets of Salisbury sends an unequivocal message to Russia that its provocative, reckless behaviour will not go unchallenged.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously denied that Russia was behind the Skripals’ poisonings, saying in March that it was “unthinkable that we would do such a thing”.
Later that month, Trump ordered 60 more Russian diplomats expelled from the US as part of a global response to the attack.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, World
San Francisco : Owing to severe decline in monthly page visits, from 8.5 billion to 4.7 billion in the last two years, Facebook is set to cede its long-held second position among the top websites in the US to YouTube, according to a new study.
Although Facebook’s app traffic has grown, it is not enough to make up for that loss, CNBC reported on Wednesday citing the study by market research firm SimilarWeb.
Facebook earlier reported that in the second quarter of this year, its number of daily active users remained flat in North America and went down in Europe.
Owned by Google parent Alphabet, YouTube, on the other hand, has seen increased traffic and rise in viewership, said the study that found Google’s position as the biggest website in the US remaining unshaken.
The researchers projects that Amazon is set to overtake Yahoo as the fourth most-visited website in the US in the next couple of months.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Media, World
Singapore : US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday called for the immediate release of two Reuters reporters detained in Myanmar for probing the persecution of the ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state.
Pompeo said on Twitter that he spoke to Myanmar’s Foreign Minister Kyaw Tin during a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) and its partners in Singapore, reports Efe news.
“Today at @ASEAN ministerials, I spoke with #Burma’s Minister Kyaw Tin and raised US concerns about 2 @Reuters reporters detained in Burma for doing their job. They should be released immediately,” Pompeo tweeted.
Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been charged with securing state secrets illegally, for which they could face up to 14 years in prison.
The reporters were detained in December and a Myanmar court officially charged them on July 9 for breaching the archaic Official Secrets Act of 1923.
The reporters were investigating systematic attacks by the Myanmar army on Rohingya villages since August last year.
The offensive – that began after a series of attacks on government posts in the region by Rohingya rebels – had led to the exodus of 700,000 members of the community to Bangladesh, where they currently live in overcrowded refugee camps.
—IANS
