Pakistan conducts second missile test
Pakistan conducts second missile test
Pakistan conducted its first training launch of a surface-to-surface missile on Saturday. File photo: Inter-Services Public Relations
Jamie Clarke reports
Pakistan conducted a second missile test and India ordered civil defence drills in an escalating stand-off over contested Kashmir that the UN said on Monday has brought the two nations to the brink of war.
New Delhi blames Islamabad for backing an attack on tourists last month - the deadliest against civilians on the Indian-administered side of the Himalayan territory for years - sparking a series of heated threats and diplomatic tit-for-tat measures.
Pakistan rejects the accusations, and the two sides have exchanged nightly gunfire since April 24 along the de facto border in Kashmir, the militarised Line of Control, according to the Indian army.
UN chief Antonio Guterres on Monday said relations between Pakistan and India had reached a "boiling point", warning that "now is the time for maximum restraint and stepping back from the brink" of war.
The Pakistani military said on Monday it had tested a surface-to-surface missile with a range of 120 kilometres, a launch "aimed at ensuring the operational readiness of troops".
The missile test comes as Iran's top diplomat Abbas Araghchi was in Islamabad for talks with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Monday, ahead of a visit to India on Thursday.
Tehran has offered to mediate between the two nuclear-armed neighbours, and Araghchi will be the first senior foreign diplomat to visit both countries since the April 22 attack sent relations into a tailspin.
"We will spare no effort to help de-escalate the situation between the two countries," Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei said.
Pakistan announced a previous test on Saturday of a surface-to-surface missile with a range of 450 kilometres - about the distance from the Pakistan border to New Delhi.
It has not said where either of the tests took place.
Sharif, who cancelled a visit to Malaysia scheduled for Friday, said the launch "clearly shows that Pakistan's defence is in strong hands".
Indian information ministry officials said that several civil defence "mock drills" would take place on Wednesday, preparing people to "protect themselves in the event of a hostile attack".
Muslim-majority Kashmir, a region of around 15 million people, is divided between Pakistan and India but claimed in full by both.
No group has claimed responsibility for the April 22 killing of 26 mainly Hindu men in the tourist hotspot of Pahalgam, but Indian police are seeking at least two Pakistani citizens they say are among the alleged gunmen. (AFP)
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Asia Times
an hour ago
- Asia Times
South Korea reckons with decades of the foreign adoption scandal
Kim Tak-un was four years old when he was adopted by a Swedish family in 1974. Originally from South Korea, Tak-un had lived with his single father, a laborer who moved frequently for work. One day in the summer of 1974, while staying with his aunt, Tak-un wandered outside and disappeared. Local police considered him abandoned and referred him to an adoption agency, which arranged his adoption to Sweden within five months. When his father realized his son was missing, he searched everywhere, only to discover – too late – that Tak-un had already been sent overseas. Devastated, he demanded Tak-un's return. When the adoption agency failed to respond, he went public with the story. In March 2025, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released initial findings from its investigation into the country's 72-year-old international adoption program. The full report is expected in the next few weeks as the investigation is now completed. Based on more than 360 cases submitted by Korean adoptees from 11 countries, the commission uncovered widespread human rights violations, including falsified documents, lack of parental consent and cases of child switching – shaking up adoptees and their families. Since the end of the Korean War (1950–1953), South Korea has sent over 200,000 children abroad, becoming the world's largest country for adoption even as it grew into an advanced economy. Existing studies have shown that international adoption from South Korea began as a response to the large number of mixed-heritage children born to Korean mothers and US soldiers during the war. It is estimated that thousands of such children were born and South Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee, ordered their overseas placement on the grounds that they were 'unfit' for a nation imagined as ethnically homogeneous. However, international adoption did not end once this perceived 'emergency' was over. From the mid-1960s onward, it expanded to include children from other vulnerable backgrounds, including those affected by poverty, family breakdown and out-of-wedlock births. This, and the role of international adoption, is explored in my upcoming book. This was closely tied to the policies pursued by South Korea's military regimes. The most important figure was Park Chung Hee, a military general who came to power through a 1961 coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979. His regime prioritized rapid economic growth, relegating social welfare to the lowest priority. Childcare was treated as an individual, not a state, responsibility. As I point out in my earlier research, public systems to categorize and care for children – whether abandoned, lost, or runaway – were extremely limited, and authorities largely placed the burden on parents to retrieve their separated children. This is probably why, after only cursory checks, authorities referred Tak-un to an adoption agency. Tak-un's case attracted media attention in Sweden as well. However, in an interview with Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish national board of health and welfare – which oversaw the Korean adoption program – dismissed the claims, stating they were '99 percent certain' the story was false and insisting that Korean social workers had followed proper procedures. The trust that Swedish authorities placed in South Korean adoption procedures may have been because of the way the Korean social workers presented their work. As the first generation of Koreans trained in US-style professional social work, they framed international adoption as being about the child, the importance of a family, and emotional wellbeing. The research for my upcoming book shows that while they may have genuinely believed in international adoption as a valid form of child welfare, there were also practical reasons why this happened. With virtually no public funding for child welfare, many saw international adoption – where adoptive parents covered the costs of care – as an ideal way to apply their training. In interviews with me, now-retired social workers acknowledged flaws in South Korea's broader child welfare system, such as the inability to verify a child's true status. Yet, without public resources to build a reliable system or prioritize family reunification, they often treated international adoption as a first, rather than a last, resort. Moreover, the prevailing belief at the time that 'normal' middle-class families offered the most stable environment for a child's development provided further moral justification for sending children abroad. Western authorities often interpreted Korean social workers' professionalism as evidence of shared liberal child welfare values and placed strong trust in their procedures. When serious flaws surfaced – as in Tak-un's case – they were frequently dismissed as exceptions rather than signs of deeper systemic problems. Even when the facts were confirmed in 1975, Swedish authorities still refused to return the child. The Swedish consul-general in Seoul at the time, Lars Berg, argued that it was in Tak-un's 'best interest' to remain in Sweden, rather than be sent back to 'an uncertain fate of the father without work and residence.' This reflected, in part, Sweden's domestic realities: Like many Western societies at the time, Sweden faced a shortage of adoptable children, and international adoption had become an important way to meet the wishes of prospective parents. In the early 1970s, nearly half of all internationally adopted children arriving in Sweden came from South Korea. This meant that when issues like Tak-un's emerged, Swedish authorities prioritized the rights of adoptive parents, framing their defense in the language of child welfare. Sweden's Adoption Commission has just released its own report on June 2, examining the country's international adoption practices, including those involving South Korea. Echoing my research findings, it recommended an end to allowing Swedes to adopt children from abroad. So, what became of Tak-un? Ultimately, South Korean officials acquiesced to the Swedish authorities, and the Korean adoption agency was cleared of any wrongdoing. Tak-un never returned. The last trace in the archives is his birth father's plea to hear from him. I located Tak-un, who now goes by his Swedish name and lives in a small town in Sweden. Despite attempts to reach him, he didn't respond. It remains uncertain whether his father's message ever reached him or if he knows anything about his early life in Korea. This silence is not merely personal. A system that claimed to act for the child's welfare instead routinely erased adopted children's pasts, ignored their birth families and decided their futures for them. Tak-un's story isn't just a painful exception – it is a haunting reminder of what was lost in the name of care. Youngeun Koo is an assistant professor at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Asia Times
2 hours ago
- Asia Times
US lethality not enough to counter China's malign influence
Originally published by Pacific Forum, this article is republished with permission. The Trump administration, particularly Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, correctly identifies the People's Republic of China (PRC) as the primary threat to regional security, especially its stated ambitions for Taiwan. Were the PRC to seize Taiwan militarily without US intervention, Beijing could dictate the terms of trade past the island, project power farther into the Pacific and cause Washington's allies in East Asia and emerging partners on the Indian subcontinent to question US willingness to stand up for them. Hegseth has called for a defense budget increase, and the Pentagon is currently drafting its new national security strategy, due in August. He has also made clear that the United States would be ready to respond if Taiwan were attacked. Yet he also notes, correctly, the need to deter such a conflict. The effects of a war over Taiwan would be so catastrophic that neither side could win – not the United States, whose aircraft carriers would be vulnerable to Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles; not China, whose troops would be vulnerable during the initial strait crossing and whose economy might contract as much as 25%; not Taiwan, which might see its miraculous economic growth erased even if it survived as an autonomous entity. And not the world, which is ever more dependent on the technology-fueled growth enabled by the semiconductors that Taiwan plays the leading role in fabricating. Hegseth is signaling that the United States will prioritize countering an invasion and mobilize the necessary resources to do so, including reviving the industrial base and investing in shipyards. He also noted that deterring conflict with the PRC is not America's role alone, and his remarks at the Shangri-la Dialogue last month demonstrated a keen interest in working with US partners in the region in that endeavor. He called upon them to make a similar investment in their defense and combat readiness. Hegseth has emphasized the need to prioritize the 'lethality' of America's armed forces, also using similar descriptors like 'warfighting' and 'readiness.' It would appear that this administration views hard power as the key to keeping the PRC from achieving its aims for the region. However, do the Pentagon and its sister agencies have a plan to prevent China from winning without war? It has been easy in recent years for the PRC's critics to mock its political shortcomings as Beijing's prickliness over issues it considers core strategic areas has overridden its diplomatic professionalism, leading to it alienating previously ambivalent partners. In 2011, China took the step of withholding rare-earth exports to Japan during a territorial dispute; within a decade, Japanese leaders would openly discuss defending Taiwan as a national security priority despite Tokyo's pacifist constitution. From 2016-2022, China enjoyed warm relations with the Philippines under the Duterte administration – which considered ending their hosting of US bases – only for public outrage over Chinese aggression in the South China Sea to prompt a course change by Duterte and the election of a pro-US administration in 2022. South Koreans, who had long seen China as essential not only for economic growth but for a resolution to inter-Korean division, now have among the world's most negative views of China following years of PRC enabling of North Korea plus the spread of Covid-19 and sanctions imposed on the country following THAAD deployment. Taiwan, which until 2016 had leadership that desired to deepen cooperation with the PRC and eventually achieve unification, now has elected three successive administrations supportive of independence, and the PRC's response has been a series of punitive measures that have only deepened the public's antipathy toward Beijing. It must be stressed, again, that those 'wins' for Washington were the product of PRC actions taken in defense of what Beijing considers core interests – whether concerning territorial rights, defense of the Chinese mainland or the credibility of Communist Party rule – and had little to do with US messaging or improvements to the American reputation in the region. And political successes in these countries may not be as durable as they appear. Taiwan's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party recently launched a sweeping set of measures designed to counter PRC influence, but its pro-unification opposition still finds much success in local elections and now holds the majority in the Legislative Yuan, where it has used that majority to fight the defense budget increases the Trump administration wants to see, and even civil defense-bolstering programs. The current leadership of the Philippines has been strident in its support for the US alliance and has done the most among ASEAN nations to shine a light on the PRC's coercive tactics in the South China Sea. Yet the former president, who enjoyed a much friendlier relationship with China, remains a popular figure despite his recent arrest by the International Criminal Court. Duterte's party did very well in recent Senate elections, increasing the chances that his daughter, the current vice president, will survive upcoming impeachment proceedings and run for president herself in 2028. South Korea, after three years of close cooperation with the United States and Japan, just elected a candidate much more open to cooperation with China. Even Japan, where the success of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party is rarely in doubt, currently labors through a period of weak governance that makes the formulation of effective defense policy difficult, especially in terms of overcoming its post-war pacifism and insularity and preparing for an operation as risky as the defense of Taiwan. If the United States is to remain engaged in the Indo-Pacific and prevent PRC domination, it faces obstacles that cannot be solved by lethality alone. The PRC currently wages a campaign that lethality cannot counter. As Xi Jinping continues to purge high-ranking officers, the PRC would seem to lack the capability to direct an invasion even if it has the manpower and equipment to wage one. Therefore, its assaults on these locations will remain more subtle. These will include: seeking to co-opt the target countries' politicians, academics, media and social media personalities with paid trips to China, directing and controlling diaspora communities through the presence of overseas 'police stations' that some countries are not legally equipped to counteract, buying up crucial assets and establishing partnerships to ensure deference from business communities, and spreading narratives through official and unofficial channels that the United States is unreliable, untrustworthy and unable to counter the inevitability of China's rise. If the United States is not engaged in countering such influence, in the next five years Taiwan could again have a pro-unification leadership – or, at least, gridlock could prevent it from adequately prepping its defenses – while Manila could turn against hosting US military bases, Seoul could vow neutrality in a Taiwan contingency and Tokyo might not have made any meaningful preparations to counter PRC ambitions in the region. Under such circumstances, even if the defense secretary does get the most lethal US military in history, the US armed forces may be rendered helpless by politics in partner countries. The recent departure of Elon Musk, the Department of Government Efficiency's founder, from the US government is an opportunity to begin rebuilding soft power organs – USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and the Bureau of Human Rights, Democracy and Labor at the State Department – that were targeted by spending cuts. The Defense Department should be part of broader, whole-of-government efforts – including State, Commerce, Energy, Treasury and others – not just to counter the PRC, but also to erode its influence. The lethality of US forces should not merely be enhanced; partners should know the United States will use it to good ends, including their defense against unprovoked aggression. The Trump administration need not worry about empowering political leaders who do not share its vision – political parties of the right are leading the charge against Chinese influence in Manila, Seoul, Tokyo and elsewhere and, despite its name, Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party is a big tent more committed to Taipei's autonomy than to political progressivism. Nor should such moves be seen as interference in the domestic affairs of partners; Washington has worked with unlikely partners in countries where politicians have campaigned on skepticism of the United States – until they, and the constituencies that elected them, saw what the alternative to the United States was. But before the United States can convince these countries that they should arm themselves, Washington must first convince regional countries that there is a threat to prepare for and that the United States is the reliable partner it claims to be. A trillion dollars in lethal weapons systems, by itself, will not buy that. Rob York ( rob@ ) is director for regional affairs at Pacific Forum International. He is the editor of Pacific Forum publications and spearheads Pacific Forum outreach to the Korean Peninsula and South Asia, as well as programming on countering malign influence in US partners. He earned his PhD in Korean history in December 2023.
RTHK
3 hours ago
- RTHK
Trump channels US residency gambit through new website
Trump channels US residency gambit through new website Donald Trump shows off a sample of his US$5 million Gold Card back in April. File photo: AFP US President Donald Trump has touted a new website for his planned US$5 million US residency permit, saying the waiting list for the golden visa has opened on "Thousands have been calling and asking how they can sign up to ride a beautiful road in gaining access to the Greatest Country and Market anywhere in the World," Trump wrote in a social media post on Wednesday. Trump unveiled the first such visa aboard Air Force One in April, holding a golden prototype that bore his face and promising the special permit would probably be available "in less than two weeks". The visas are not available yet, but the website announced on Wednesday allows those who are interested to submit their name, desired visa and email address under a header that says "The Trump Card is Coming". Trump previously said the new visa, a high-price version of the traditional green card, would bring in job creators and could be used to reduce the US national deficit. The announcement comes as deportation raids are being ramped up across the country, prompting protests, and as Trump's administration faces ongoing lawsuits and accusations of rights violations over its anti-immigration blitz. Trump has said the new card would be a route to highly prized US citizenship. He said in February that his administration hoped to sell "maybe a million" of the cards and did not rule out that Russian oligarchs may be eligible. (AFP)
