NORTH KOREA – North Korea has claimed it fired a new intermediate-range ballistic missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead which “will reliably contain any rivals in the Pacific region”. The launch on Monday – Pyongyang’s first in two months – came as US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, was in Seoul for talks with some of South Korea’s key leaders. Hypersonic weapons are more difficult to track and shoot down, as they are able to travel at more than five times the speed of sound.

North Korea is claiming their missile flew 12 times the speed of sound, for about 1,500km. South Korea’s military earlier said the missile flew 1,100km before falling into the sea, adding that it “strongly condemns” this “clear act of provocation”. North Korea has previously test-fired hypersonic missiles. Pictures published by KCNA showed that Monday’s missile resembled one that was launched in April last year. But Pyongyang claims its new hypersonic missile features a new “flight and guidance control system” and a new engine made of carbon fibre.

The country’s leader Kim Jong Un said Monday’s launch “clearly showed the rivals what we are doing and that we are fully ready to use even any means to defend our legitimate interests”, state news agency KCNA said on Tuesday. Ankit Panda, a nuclear weapons specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the launch of a new weapon is “unsurprising”.

“We’ve known that North Korea has been working with composite materials for use in missiles for a number of years now. “The appeal of these materials is to broadly improve the performance and reliability of the payload… Better materials can increase the odds of their survival to the target,” he told the BBC. (BBC)

CHINA – Jamaica‘s health officials are keeping a close watch on happenings in China where a virus is causing overcrowding in hospitals and is reported to have spread to India, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan.

The human metapneumovirus (HMPV) has seen a spike in cases across northern China, affecting children in particular. Photos and videos of people wearing masks in hospitals have so far emerged on social media platforms. On Monday, the Jamaica Observer spoke to the island’s Minister of Health and Wellness,
Dr Christopher Tufton, just before he and officials of his ministry went into a meeting on the matter. “Coming out of that meeting I will get a better brief. What we can say is that we are monitoring the situation. We are not yet in a position to give more than what we are picking up through that monitoring process and the conversations we are having with our multilateral partners — the World Health Organization (WHO) and PAHO (Pan American Health Organization) in particular. That’s normally where some of those decisions are taken based on their extensive reach in these jurisdictions and the conversations that they have with respective governments,” Tufton said. “We will have more to say later this week. We’re not yet in a position to issue any adverse warning except that it is being monitored and we’ll get more particulars and comment later,” he added. “For now we are really monitoring, consulting, and preparing, just in case, but this is not an advisory that represents any kind of emergency scenario — not as yet. (Jamaicaobserver)

SAN DIEGO – With less than two weeks before president- elect Donald J Trump is sworn into office as the next president of the United States (US), a Haitian group in the US is urging the incumbent Joe Biden administration to halt the deportation of Haitians.

The Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) has strongly condemned the administration for what it described as the “blatant violation of international and domestic laws through the continued deportation of asylum seekers to the Republic of Haiti”.

HBA said that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been deporting Haitian nationals who are seeking asylum. “These actions undermine the United States’ long-standing commitment to human rights, due process, and international obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1980 Refugee Act,” said HBA’s Executive Director, Guerline Jozef.

She said the recent wave of deportations, including vulnerable Haitian families fleeing violence, persecution and immense violence, “demonstrates a disturbing disregard for legal protections guaranteed to asylum seekers under US and international law”. Jozef noted that in Haiti more than 700,000 Haitians have been displaced due to gang violence and more than 4,000 have been murdered.

He said that, for the past several years, the United States Department of State has designated the French-speaking Caribbean Community (Caricom) country as a “level 4 — do not travel destination due to extreme violence”.

Furthermore, Jozef said Washington has evacuated most of its personnel including US citizens from the Caribbean country, adding that the violence has been so severe that on December 9, 2024, American Airlines announced that it had indefinitely suspended all flights to Haiti.

“Deporting individuals to countries in turmoil, such as Haiti, where political violence, insecurity and humanitarian crises prevail, contravenes the principle non-refoulement, which prohibits returning individuals to places where their lives or freedom would be threatened,” Jozef said. (Jamaicaobserver)

Photo: HBA executive director, Guerline Jozef. Photo (CMC)

CALIFORNIA  –  Meta is abandoning the use of third party fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram and will replace it with X-style “community notes”, where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users. In a video posted alongside a blog post by the company on Tuesday, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said “it’s time to get back to our roots around free expression”. Joel Kaplan, who is replacing Sir Nick Clegg as Meta’s head of global affairs, wrote that the company’s reliance on independent moderators was “well-intentioned” but had gone too far.

“Too much harmless content gets censored” he wrote, adding Meta was “too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.” The move to a community notes system will be phased in “in the US first” over the coming months, the tech giant says – it has not spelt out when or if it will be introduced elsewhere. The system – which Meta says it has seen “work on X” – sees people of different viewpoints agree on notes which add context or clarifications to controversial posts. The company’s blog post said it would also “undo the mission creep” of rules and policies – highlighting removal of restrictions on subjects including “immigration, gender and gender identity” – saying these have stemmed political discussion and debate.

“We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” it says. “It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms”. The changes come as technology firms and their executives prepare for President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20 January. Trump has previously been a vocal critic of Meta and its approach to content moderation. He called Facebook “an enemy of the people” in March 2024.

But relations between the two men have since improved – Mr Zuckerberg dined at Trump’s Florida estate in Mar-a-Lago in November.

Meta has also donated $1m to an inauguration fund for Trump. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising free speech,” said Mr Zuckerberg in Tuesday’s video. Mr Kaplan replacing Sir Nick Clegg – a former Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister – as the company’s president of global affairs has also been interpreted by many analysts as a signal of the firm’s shifting approach to moderation and its changing political priorities. In a statement announcing he would step down on 2 January, Sir Nick said his successor was “quite clearly the right person for the right job at the right time”. (BBC/Getty Images)