NKorea fires missile as US, SKorea prepare for military exercises
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Saturday fired a long-range missile from its capital into the sea off Japan, according to its neighbors, a day after it threatened to take strong measures against South Korea and the U.S. over their joint military exercises.
According to the South Korean and Japanese militaries, the missile was fired on a high angle, apparently to avoid reaching the neighbors’ territories, and traveled about 560 miles at a maximum altitude of 3,500 miles during an hourlong flight.
The details were similar to North Korea’s Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile test flight in November, which experts said demonstrated potential to reach the U.S. mainland if fired on a normal trajectory.
Japanese government spokesperson Hirokazu Matsuno said the missile landed within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, about 125 miles west of Oshima island off the western coast of the northernmost main island of Hokkaido.
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry on Friday threatened “unprecedently” strong action against its rivals after South Korea announced a series of military exercises with the United States aimed at sharpening their response to the North’s growing threats.
North Korea’s missile tests have been punctuated by threats of preemptive nuclear attacks against South Korea or the United States over what it perceives as a broad range of scenarios that put its leadership under threat.
The North Korean statement on Friday accused Washington and Seoul of planning more than 20 rounds of military drills this year, including largescale field exercises, and described its rivals as “the arch-criminals deliberately disrupting regional peace and stability.”
South Korea’s Defense Ministry officials told lawmakers earlier that Seoul and Washington will hold an annual computer-simulated combined training in mid-March. The 11-day training will reflect North Korea’s nuclear threats, as well as unspecified lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war, according to Heo Tae-keun, South Korea’s deputy minister of national defense policy. Heo said the countries will also conduct joint field exercises in midMarch that would be bigger than those held in the past few years.
Turkey quake survivors: A couple and their son were pulled alive from under a collapsed apartment building more than 12 days after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake ravaged parts of Turkey and Syria, although the child later died at a hospital, Turkish state media reported Saturday.
A foreign search team from Kyrgyzstan rescued Samir Muhammed Accar, 49, his wife, Ragda, 40, and their 12-year-old son while digging through the rubble of the apartment building in the southern Turkish city of Antakya, the state-run Anadolu news agency said.
One of the Kyrgyz rescuers said the team also found the bodies of two dead children. Anadolu later reported they also were the children of Samir Muhammad and Ragda Accar.
Bulgaria migrant deaths:
Authorities in Bulgaria have detained seven people in connection with an abandoned truck in which 18 people believed to be migrants were found dead, police said Saturday.
The bodies were discovered Friday in a secret compartment in the truck, which was left on a highway not far from Bulgaria’s capital, Sofia.
Borislav Sarafov, director of Bulgaria’s National Investigation Service, confirmed that all the victims had died of suffocation. He called the case the country’s deadliest involving smuggled migrants.
Police also found 34 survivors in the truck, most of them in very poor physical condition, Bulgarian Health Minister Assen Medzhidiev said.
All the passengers originally were from Afghanistan and had entered Bulgaria from Turkey while hoping to reach Western Europe, authorities said.
Israel protests: Tens of thousands of Israelis marched Saturday in several cities against judicial overhaul plans proposed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Netanyahu and his supporters, members of the most religious right-wing government in the country’s history, say the changes are needed to rein in a judiciary that wields too much power.
But critics, who include large sectors of Israeli society, say the overhauls would weaken Israel’s Supreme Court and damage the country’s fragile system of democratic checks and balances. They also say that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption charges, is motivated by a personal grudge against the legal system and has a deep conflict of interest. Netanyahu has said he is a victim of a witch hunt.
Deadly IS attack: The death toll from an attack by the Islamic State group against an army checkpoint and people collecting truffles in central Syria has risen to at least 53, most of them civilians, state media and an opposition war monitor reported Saturday.
The attack near the central town of Sukhna on Friday was the deadliest by the extremist group so far this year, said the Britainbased Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor.
The Observatory said the attack targeted a Syrian army checkpoint and people collecting wild truffles nearby, killing 68 people, including 61 civilians. It said IS fighters reached the area on motorcycles.
Iran critic moves to US: A Farsi-language satellite news channel based in London long critical of Iran’s theocractic government said Saturday it had moved its broadcasts to Washington “to protect the safety of its journalists” after being targeted by Tehran.
The targeting of Iran International comes as Tehran also has long harassed members of the BBC’s Persian service for their work
reporting on the country. However, the threats against Farsi-language networks broadcasting abroad have exponentially grown as they cover the nationwide protests that have rocked Iran since September.
Iran International described making the decision after London’s Metropolitan Police told it “about the existence of serious and immediate threats to the safety of Iranian journalists” working there, referring to a statement saying that “threats had grown to the point that it was felt it was no longer possible to protect the channel’s staff ” or the public around its studio in London.
The head of the Metropolitan Police’s counterterrorism unit, Assistant Commissioner Matt Jukes, said in a statement that police and the domestic intelligence service MI5 had foiled “15 plots since the start of 2022 to either kidnap or even kill British or U.K.based individuals perceived as enemies of the regime.”