TALLINN (RIA Novosti) – NATO began planning to increase its presence along its Eastern flank “years” before Russia kicked off its operation in Ukraine, NATO Military Committee chairman Rob Bauer has revealed. “Military leaders have a common frame of reference for both alliance-wide threats and regional threats, and that we enhance the speed and effectiveness of our rapid deployable forces. We’re talking about the biggest overhaul of our military structures since 1949. The planning for that started several years ago, but now we’re implementing it,” Bauer said, speaking to reporters at a press conference at the NATO Military Committee Conference in Tallinn, Estonia. NATO defense chiefs discussed the need to “sustain” and “increase” “allied support to Ukraine”, at the meeting, Bauer continued. “The ammunition, equipment and training that allies and other nations are delivering are all making a real difference on the battlefield. With its successes on the ground and online, Ukraine has fundamentally changed modern warfare,” the officer stated. “NATO will support Ukraine for as long as it takes,” he noted.  NATO has undergone several waves of expansion between 1999 and 2020, swallowing up every former member of the defunct Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, three ex-Soviet republics and four republics from the former Yugoslavia. The expansion took place despite former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s verbal promise to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 not to expand the alliance “one inch” east of the territory of the former East Germany following that country’s annexation by the Federal Republic.

 

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TAIPEI (AFP) – A strong earthquake struck southeastern Taiwan on Sunday, bringing down at least one building in a small town. The quake hit at 2:44 pm (0644 GMT) about 50 kilometers north of the city of Taitung at a depth of 10 kilometers, the United States Geological Survey said. Its initial strength was given as magnitude 7.2 but USGS later downgraded it to a 6.9-magnitude quake. Taiwan’s weather bureau recorded it as 6.8-magnitude. Japan’s Meteorological Agency and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued tsunami advisories shortly after the quake, but both later sent updated bulletins saying there was no longer a threat of high waves. Live TV footage from the affected Japanese islands did not immediately show signs of high waves. In Taiwan, at least one building that hosted a convenience store on the ground floor collapsed in the town of Yuli, according to the island’s semi-official Central News Agency. Video footage posted by CNA showed panicked residents running towards the building, which had caved in and sent up a thick cloud of dust. Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) said a train derailed in Dongli station in Hualien after it was hit by concrete from an overhead canopy that came loose during the quake. Photographs shared on social media showed the train’s six carriages leaning at an angle in the station.

  

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BEIJING (AFP) – A bus crash killed 27 people in southwest China on Sunday, police said, the country’s deadliest road accident so far this year. The accident took place on a highway in rural Guizhou province when the vehicle carrying a total of 47 people “flipped onto its side”, Sandu county police said in a statement published on social media. The other 20 people were being treated for injuries and emergency responders were dispatched to the scene, police said, without providing any more details. The accident happened in Qiannan prefecture -- a poor, remote and mountainous part of Guizhou, home to several ethnic minorities. Two social media posts by the China Road Network monitoring service, that have since been deleted, said the accident occurred at around 2:40 am (1840 GMT on Saturday), according to screenshots circulating on the Twitter-like Weibo. Social media users angrily demanded why a passenger bus was travelling down a highway in the early hours of the morning, when many major roads in the province have been closed to regular traffic. “This feeling can’t simply be represented by lighting a candle and saying RIP,” read one Weibo post with more than 15,000 likes.

 

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DENVER (Reuters) – Three people were killed when two small planes collided in midair over Boulder County, Colorado, crashing into an open field and leaving two separate crash sites, local authorities said. Police “received multiple emergency phone calls” from witnesses who saw the two aircraft collide about 30 miles north of Denver, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. When first responders came across the first crash site, both people onboard the plane were dead, police said. The pilot of the second downed plane, who was the sole occupant, also was dead when emergency crews reached the wreckage, the sheriff’s office said. None of the victims were immediately identified. The two aircraft were a Cessna 172 and a Sonex Xenos, the National Transportation Safety Board said in a statement, adding that investigators are probing what led up to the accident.

 

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TUNIS (Anadolu) – The Tunisian government has hiked fuel prices again, marking the fourth increase this year. In a statement, the energy ministry said the price of cooking gas cylinders will be raised by 14% from 7.750 dinars ($2.42) to 8.800 dinars ($2.75) and gasoline by 3% from 2.330 dinars ($0.73) to 2.400 dinars ($0.75) per liter. The ministry attributed the new fuel hikes to the rise in global fuel prices as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The North African country is suffering its worst financial crisis as it tries to agree on a new financing program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The new fuel price hike is the fourth this year. Tunisian authorities raised fuel prices in February, March and April. Tunisia has been in the throes of a deep political crisis that aggravated the country’s economic conditions since last year, when President Kais Saied ousted the government and dissolved parliament. While Saied insists that his measures were meant to “save” the country, critics have accused him of orchestrating a coup.

 

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NAIROBI (AP) – Eritrea is mobilizing its armed forces and appears to be sending them to Ethiopia to aid its neighbor’s war in the Tigray region, according to activists and international authorities.  Eritrean rights activist Meron Estefanos told The Associated Press that her cousin was called up “and is somewhere in Ethiopia fighting and we don’t know if he is alive or not.” “It’s just a sad war, like our region has not seen enough blood for generations,” said Meron, director of the Eritrean Initiative on Refugee Rights. Eyewitnesses in Eritrea said that people including students and public servants are being rounded up across the nation. Eritrea, one of the most isolated countries in the world, mandates military service for all its citizens between the ages of 18 and 40. Rights groups say the practice, which lasts indefinitely in most cases, is driving thousands of Eritrean youths into exile. Eritreans make up a large number of the migrants attempting to cross to Europe, often dangerously by sea. Eritrean forces fought on the side of Ethiopian federal troops in the war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which shares a border with Eritrea, when that conflict broke out in November 2020. Eritrean forces were implicated in some of the worst atrocities committed in the war — charges they deny.