Russia has said it successfully launched a hypersonic missile described by Vladimir Putin as an ideal weapon when he unveiled new armaments earlier this month. The Kinzhal missile was launched from a MiG-31 aircraft that took off from an airfield in south-western Russia, the defence ministry said.

“The launch went according to plan: the hypersonic missile hit its target,” the ministry said. It released footage of two pilots preparing for a flight and then running towards a jet carrying a large missile. Set to rousing, patriotic music, the video showed a missile detaching from the airborne plane and gliding across the sky, leaving a fiery trail.

The Kinzhal missile was one of the weapons the Russian president unveiled in his state of the nation address earlier this month, ahead of a presidential election on 18 March that he is all but guaranteed to win. The US defence secretary, James Mattis, said that nothing Putin showed off changed anything from the Pentagon’s perspective, as he spoke to reporters as he travelled to Oman.(theguardian)…[+]

The relatives of 89 previously unidentified Argentinian soldiers killed during the 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands will travel there this month to put names on their graves. Their identification has been made possible due to painstaking DNA testing and the humanitarian initiative of a British captain who in 1982 gathered more than 120 dead soldiers, with their effects, and placed them in graves each marked with the words “Argentine soldier known only to God”.

The testing of the exhumed bodies by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was agreed by the British and Argentinian governments in 2016 after a campaign led by both British and Argentinian veterans. Key figures behind the campaign, including forensic experts from the ICRC, Roger Waters from the band Pink Floyd, and relatives of the unidentified soldiers, met on Friday at the Argentinian embassy in London to celebrate their joint act of reconciliation. Osvaldo Ardiles, the former Tottenham Hotspur footballer whose cousin was a pilot killed in the war, was also present.(theguardian)…[+]

Hundreds of people who visited the pub and the restaurant in Salisbury where the Russian spy Sergei Skripal may have been poisoned have been told to wash their clothes and possessions. The advice from Public Health England is aimed at as many as 500 customers who ate at Zizzi restaurant or were in the Mill pub last Sunday and Monday.

The public health notice says that although the risk is very low, repeated contact with clothing or items exposed to the nerve agent could be a danger. Dr Jenny Harries, PHE’s regional director for the south of England, said at a press conference on Sunday: “We have learned that there has been a limited contamination in both the Mill pub and in Zizzi restaurant in Salisbury. “The immediate risk to the general public, on the evidence we have, remains low … The news today doesn’t alter the general risk at all.”(theguardian)…[+]