World

N. Korea fires 23 missiles, one landing off South Korean coast for first time

Published

3 years ago

November 3, 2022

North Korea fired at least 23 missiles into the sea on Wednesday, including one that landed less than 60 km (40 miles) off South Korea’s coast, which South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol described as “territorial encroachment” and Washington denounced as “reckless”, Reuters reported.

It was the first time a ballistic missile had landed near the South’s waters since the peninsula was divided in 1945, and the most missiles fired by the North in a single day. South Korea issued rare air raid warnings and launched its own missiles in response.

According to Reuters the launches came just hours after Pyongyang demanded that the United States and South Korea stop large-scale military exercises, saying such “military rashness and provocation can be no longer tolerated”.

In Washington, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby called the North Korean launches “reckless” and said the United States would make sure it had the military capabilities in place to defend its treaty allies South Korea and Japan.

The missile landed outside South Korea’s territorial waters, but south of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a disputed inter-Korean maritime border.

South Korean warplanes fired three air-to-ground missiles into the sea north across the NLL in response, the South’s military said. An official said the weapons used included an AGM-84H/K SLAM-ER, which is a U.S.-made “stand-off” precision attack weapon that can fly for up to 270 km (170 miles) with a 360-kg (800-lb) warhead, read the report.

The South’s launches came after Yoon’s office vowed a “swift and firm response”.

“President Yoon Suk-yeol noted North Korea’s provocation today was an effective act of territorial encroachment by a missile intruding the NLL for the first time since (the two Koreas’) division,” his office said.

When asked whether the missile was flying towards the South’s territory and should have been intercepted, a senior presidential official said, “Strictly speaking, it did not land in our territory but in the Exclusive Economic Zone under our jurisdiction, therefore it was not subject to interception”.

According to Reuters North Korea has continuously been launching missiles over the past year in violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said.

“It’s unprecedented in the sense that there were so many,” she said of Wednesday’s launches.

Kirby told his news briefing that the United States has information that indicates North Korea is covertly supplying Russia with a “significant” number of artillery shells for its war in Ukraine and that Washington would consult with the United Nations on accountability issues over the shipments.

Kirby said North Korea was attempting to obscure the shipments by funnelling them through countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

North Korea said in September it had never supplied weapons or ammunition to Russia and has no plans to do so, Reuters reported.

The missile that crossed the NLL was one of three short-range ballistic missiles fired from the North Korean coastal area of Wonsan into the sea, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said. The JCS later said as many as 14 other missiles of various types had been fired from North Korea’s east and west coasts.

The JCS said at least one landed 26 km south of the NLL, 57 km from the South Korean city of Sokcho, on the east coast, and 167 km from the island of Ulleung, where air raid warnings were sounded.

“We heard the siren at around 8:55 a.m. and all of us in the building went down to the evacuation place in the basement,” an Ulleung county official told Reuters. “We stayed there until we came upstairs at around 9:15 after hearing that the projectile fell into the high seas.”

The North also fired more than 100 rounds of artillery from its east coast into a military buffer zone, South Korea’s military said. The firing violated a 2018 military agreement banning hostile acts in border areas, the JCS said.

North and South Korea are technically still at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, read the report.

Nuclear-armed North Korea has tested a record number of missiles this year, and officials in Seoul and Washington say the North has completed technical preparations to conduct a nuclear weapon test for the first time since 2017.

Despite Yoon’s declaring a national week of mourning after more than 150 people were killed in a weekend crowd surge in Seoul, the United States and South Korea began one of their largest combined military air drills on Monday. Dubbed Vigilant Storm, the exercises involve hundreds of warplanes from both sides staging mock attacks 24 hours a day.

North Korea, which for years has pursued missile and nuclear programmes in defiance of U.N. sanctions, had said that a recent flurry of launches were in response to allied drills, Reuters reported.

Pak Jong Chon, secretary of the Central Committee of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, said in a statement on Wednesday that the number of warplanes involved in Vigilant Storm proved the exercise was “aggressive and provocative” and specifically targeted North Korea. He said even its name imitated the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in the 1990s.

U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price said that the drills were purely defensive and harboured no hostile intent. Price added that Washington and its allies had also made clear that there would be “profound costs and profound consequences” if North Korea resumed nuclear testing. He did not elaborate.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a regular briefing in Beijing that safeguarding peace and stability on the peninsula was in everyone’s interest.

“We hope that all parties concerned will stick to the direction of political settlement of the Peninsula issue, meet each other halfway, and prevent the situation from escalating,” he said.

South Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said that because of the launches, some air routes over the sea between North Korea and Japan would be closed until Thursday.

Related Topics:featured Missiles North Korea South Korea

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World

Trump plans expanded immigration crackdown in 2026 despite backlash

The plans come amid rising public unease over aggressive tactics, including neighborhood raids and the detention of some U.S. citizens.

Published

1 day ago

December 22, 2025

Ariana News

U.S. President Donald Trump is preparing to significantly expand his immigration crackdown in 2026, backed by billions of dollars in new funding, even as political opposition grows ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are set to receive an additional $170 billion through September 2029, enabling the administration to hire thousands of new agents, expand detention facilities and increase enforcement actions, including more workplace raids. While immigration agents have already been surged into major U.S. cities, many economically critical workplaces were largely spared in 2025.

The plans come amid rising public unease over aggressive tactics, including neighborhood raids and the detention of some U.S. citizens. Trump’s approval rating on immigration has fallen from 50% in March to 41% in mid-December, according to recent polling.

The administration has also revoked temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian, Venezuelan and Afghan migrants, expanding the pool of people eligible for deportation.

About 622,000 immigrants have been deported since Trump took office in January, short of his goal of 1 million deportations per year.

White House border czar Tom Homan said arrests will increase sharply next year as staffing and detention capacity grow. Critics warn that expanded workplace enforcement could raise labor costs and deepen political and economic backlash ahead of the elections.

World

US, Russian officials meet in Florida for more Ukraine talks

Kyiv says it will not cede land that Moscow’s forces have failed to capture in nearly four years of war.

Published

2 days ago

December 21, 2025

Ariana News

U.S. negotiators met Russian officials in Florida on Saturday for the latest talks aimed at ending Russia’s war in Ukraine, as President Donald Trump’s administration tries to coax an agreement out of both sides to end the conflict, Reuters reported.

The Miami meeting followed U.S. talks on Friday with Ukrainian and European officials, the latest discussions of a peace plan that has sparked some hope of a resolution to the conflict that began when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy Kirill Dmitriev told reporters after meeting U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner that the talks were constructive and would continue on Sunday. A White House official said the talks had concluded for the day.

“The discussions are proceeding constructively. They began earlier and will continue today, and will also continue tomorrow,” Dmitriev said.

Marco Rubio, Trump’s top diplomat and national security advisor, had said he might also join the talks.

U.S., Ukrainian and European officials earlier this week reported progress on security guarantees for Kyiv as part of the talks to end the war, but it remains unclear if those terms will be acceptable to Moscow.

A Russian source told Reuters that any meeting between Dmitriev and the Ukrainian negotiators had been ruled out.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Saturday that Ukraine would back a U.S. proposal for three-sided talks with the United States and Russia if it facilitated more exchanges of prisoners and paved the way for meetings of national leaders.

“America is now proposing a trilateral meeting with national security advisers — America Ukraine, Russia,” Zelenskiy told local journalists in Kyiv.

U.S. intelligence reports continue to warn that Putin intends to capture all of Ukraine, sources familiar with the intelligence said, contradicting some U.S. officials’ assertions that Moscow is ready for peace.

Putin offered no compromise during his annual press conference in Moscow, insisting that Russia’s terms for ending the war had not changed since June 2024, when he demanded Ukraine abandon its ambition to join NATO and withdraw entirely from four Ukrainian regions Russia claims as its own territory, Reuters reported.

Kyiv says it will not cede land that Moscow’s forces have failed to capture in nearly four years of war.

Ukraine’s top negotiator Rustem Umerov said U.S. and European teams on Friday held talks and agreed to pursue their joint efforts.

“We agreed with our American partners on further steps and on continuing our joint work in the near future,” Umerov wrote on Telegram of the discussions in the United States, adding that he had informed Zelenskiy of the outcome of the talks.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rubio told reporters on Friday that progress has been made in discussions to end the war but there is still a way to go.

“The role we’re trying to play is a role of figuring out whether there’s any overlap here that they can agree to, and that’s what we’ve invested a lot of time and energy and continue to do so. That may not be possible. I hope it is. I hope it can get done this month before the end of the year.”

World

US hits Daesh in Syria with large retaliatory strikes, officials say

Published

3 days ago

December 20, 2025

Ariana News

The U.S. military launched large-scale strikes against dozens of Daesh targets in Syria on Friday in retaliation for an attack on American personnel, U.S. officials said.

A U.S.-led coalition has been carrying out airstrikes and ground operations in Syria targeting Islamic State suspects in recent months, often with the involvement of Syria’s security forces, Reuters reported.

President Donald Trump had vowed to retaliate after a suspected ISIS attack killed U.S. personnel last weekend in Syria.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the strikes targeted “ISIS fighters, infrastructure, and weapons sites” and that the operation was “OPERATION HAWKEYE STRIKE.”

“This is not the beginning of a war — it is a declaration of vengeance,” Hegseth said. “Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue,” he added.

Trump said on social media that the Syrian government fully supported the strikes and that the U.S. was inflicting “very serious retaliation.”

U.S. Central Command said the strikes hit more than 70 targets across central Syria, adding that Jordanian fighter jets supported the operation.

One U.S. official said the strikes were carried out by U.S. F-15 and A-10 jets, along with Apache helicopters and HIMARS rocket systems.

Syria reiterated its steadfast commitment to fighting Daesh and ensuring that it has “no safe havens on Syrian territory,” according to a statement by the foreign ministry.

Two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed on Saturday in the central Syrian town of Palmyra by an attacker who targeted a convoy of American and Syrian forces before being shot dead, according to the U.S. military. Three other U.S. soldiers were also wounded in the attack.

About 1,000 U.S. troops remain in Syria.

The Syrian Interior Ministry has described the attacker as a member of the Syrian security forces suspected of sympathizing with Daesh.

Syria’s government is led by former rebels who toppled leader Bashar al-Assad last year after a 13-year civil war, and includes members of Syria’s former Al Qaeda branch who broke with the group and clashed with Daesh.

Syria has been cooperating with a U.S.-led coalition against Daesh, reaching an agreement last month when President Ahmed al-Sharaa visited the White House.