Indian Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai confirmed on Tuesday that India had authorised 31 district magistrates in nine states to grant citizenship to minorities from its neighbouring countries. Resultingly, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and Christians from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will be eligible under the recent direction. Surprisingly, India will be granting citizenship under the 1995 Citizenship Act instead of the controversial 2019 Citizenship (Amendment) Act, which had spurred country-wide protests.
A new report by Nature warns that a rapidly growing number of Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs) have put 15 million people at risk. The High-mountain Asia region is the hardest hit, with one million people exposed. India, Pakistan, Peru, and China are home to over half of those affected.
Former US President Donald Trump slammed incumbent President Joe Biden on Tuesday in a pre-taped response to the latter’s State of the Union address, calling him the “most corrupt president in American history” and accusing him of “leading [the US] to the brink of World War III” over his handling of the Ukraine war. Trump also condemned Biden for the state of the economy, arguing that the Biden administration’s policies had resulted in the “worst inflation in half a century.”
On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army on Tuesday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un expressed his wish to strengthen the country’s military. “For the strengthening and development of our armed forces, let us all double our efforts and do more for the prosperous development of the socialist motherland,” he said during a speech.
Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has been criticised for publishing a cartoon mocking the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria on Monday. The cartoon showed remains of the earthquakes and said, “Tanks are no longer needed.” Social media users shunned the publication for being “insensitive” and dehumanising the death of Muslim victims. The disaster’s death toll has already surged to 8,000 and caused tens of thousands of injuries and mass infrastructural losses.
Brigadier General Pat Ryder, a spokesperson for the US Department of Defence said Tuesday that China rejected the Pentagon’s request for a secure call on Saturday, after the US shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon. The spokesperson added that Washington’s “commitment to open lines of communication will continue.”
In a meeting with his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis last summer, Saudi Arabian PM and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) offered to “fully underwrite the costs” for building new football stadiums in Egypt and Greece, if they agreed to host the 2030 football World Cup along with Riyadh, sources revealed. The sources added that MBS’ only condition was that 75% of the football matches would be hosted in Saudi Arabia.
US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla met with Iraqi PM Mohammed Shia Al Sudani to assess Iraq’s fight against ISIS on Tuesday. Kurilla acknowledged that while ISIS has been defeated territorially, its ideology still poses a threat, requiring continued effort by the US, Iraq, and their allies to defeat it.
Myanmar state media reported Tuesday that Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the head of the military junta, met with the director general of the Russian State Atomic Energy Corp. (Rosatom), Alexey Evgenievich Likhachev, at the recently inaugurated Nuclear Technology Information Centre in Yangon, on Monday, to discuss nuclear development. Myanmar and Rosatom had signed a preliminary agreement in 2015, and an MoU in Moscow in July 2022 on “nuclear energy, training, and promotion of public understanding of atomic power.”