BEIJNG (Dispatches) - China is developing a next-generation long-range stealth bomber capable of carrying out nuclear strikes on U.S. targets in Guam and beyond, The South China Morning Post has reported. The Chinese state defense company, Norinco, has released new computer-generated images of the Xian H-20 strategic bomber, providing the first look at the warplane that has been in production for years. The bomber appears to have a missile bay, two adjustable tail wings, an airborne radar, and two air intakes on either side of the cockpit, identical to the USAF B-2 Spirit, which first flew in the late 1990s.

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GOMA, DRC (Reuters) - More than 20,000 people are homeless and 40 still missing in the aftermath of Saturday evening’s eruption, which unleashed rivers of lava flowing toward Goma, killing at least 31 people and destroying more than 3,000 homes, the U.N. said. The lava from Mount Nyiragongo stopped just 300 meters short of Goma airport, the main hub for aid operations in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The U.N. will temporarily relocate around 250 non-essential staff and about 1,500 of their dependents to the city of Bukavu, around 50 km (30 miles) south, said Diego Zorrilla, the U.N.’s deputy humanitarian coordinator in Congo. “If we thought there was going to be an imminent explosion in Goma I wouldn’t be sitting here calmly. We don’t have any data to show there’s a major risk for the city,” Zorrilla told Reuters. “But we are also in a situation where volcanologists are not calling the event off, so 72 hours after the main event we took a decision to, given the uncertainty, take out people who don’t have a good reason to be here.”

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TOKYO (Dispatches) - A Japanese fishing boat collided with a Russian ship off the northern island of Hokkaido on Wednesday, killing three crew members, Tokyo said. Japan’s coast guard was informed that five crew members from the fishing boat were recovered by a Russian cargo ship, government spokesman Katsunobu Kato told reporters. “We have been told that three were confirmed dead, while the remaining two suffered non-life threatening injuries,” he added. Japan and Russia are locked in a sovereignty dispute over four islands administered by Moscow, which refers to them as the southern Kurils. Tokyo claims the islands, which it calls the Northern Territories, and the dispute has prevented the two countries from signing a formal peace treaty since World War II.

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LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was disastrously slow to impose a lockdown in 2020 because he thought COVID-19 was a scare story and even considered getting injected with coronavirus on live television to show it was benign, his former chief adviser said. Johnson subsequently caught COVID-19 early in the pandemic and was so ill that he was moved to intensive care at a London hospital where he received liters of oxygen. He later said plans had been prepared to announce his death. In a blistering attack on the British state, Dominic Cummings told lawmakers that the government was completely unprepared for the worst public health crisis in decades and that ministers, including the prime minister, were on holiday in February 2020, some skiing. Such was Johnson’s skepticism about COVID-19, he even told officials he was considering getting the government’s chief medical advisor to inject him with the novel coronavirus to show the public it was not a big threat, Cummings said.

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MINSK (Dispatches) - Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has said that his government responded adequately and lawfully to protect his people in diverting a Ryanair flight to Minsk, pursuant to receiving a bomb threat against the passenger airliner from Switzerland. “The message that there was a bomb on board that plane came from Switzerland,” Lukashenko was quoted as saying, according to TASS. ”How should we have acted, especially amid a cascade of bomb threats targeting our facilities? You live in Belarus and know that either schools or universities or enterprises receive bomb threats every day. Even airliners receive such messages from IP-addresses in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia,” the state-run BelTA news agency quoted the Belarusian president as saying during his speech at a parliamentary session on Wednesday.