"South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms," reports Ars Technica:


The goal is to make drones a "universal combat tool" for all troops by training them to use drones like a "second personal weapon," said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea's Minister of National Defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons.

Meanwhile, South Korea's former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times. The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies... Ukraine's use of drones and military robots as a force multiplier to offset its numerical disadvantage on the battlefield versus Russia's larger military may carry special resonance for South Korea, given that the South Korean military's current active-duty strength of 450,000 personnel faces a numerical disadvantage against North Korea's active-duty military consisting of more than 1.2 million soldiers...

The defense ministry is starting out by providing 11,000 "training drones" to military personnel this year, with the goal of eventually deploying 60,000 drones across the military by 2029. An additional complication comes from the South Korean military looking to procure drones with 100 percent domestically produced components and no Chinese components due to security concerns, according to the defense minister's comments reported by Reuters... South Korean companies are building new military attack drones, but the defense ministry may struggle to find enough commercial drones made without Chinese components to train hundreds of thousands of military conscripts, said Min-Cheol Jung, a cofounder of the Team Retriever counter-drone red team based in South Korea, in a War on the Rocks article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carl Rinsch requested $11m for never-finished sci-fi series but diverted money to personal account, prosecutors said

Hollywood writer-director Carl Rinsch was sentenced Monday to two-and-a-half years in prison after being convicted of defrauding Netflix out of $11m for a never-finished sci-fi series. Supporters including Keanu Reeves had asked the court to show him leniency.

Rinsch, best known for the 2013 samurai fantasy film 47 Ronin, was convicted in December of federal wire fraud and other charges. According to prosecutors and trial testimony, he told Netflix he needed $11m to finish a show called White Horse but diverted the money into a personal account and ultimately spent whopping sums on luxury cars, watches, clothes and household goods, including $638,000 on two mattresses.

Continue reading...

Ukrainian president says Kremlin leader has repeatedly set and deferred timelines to fully capture eastern Donbas area. What we know on day 1,588

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has mocked Russia’s military drive, saying the Kremlin has set and put off 15 deadlines to ⁠capture Ukraine’s eastern Donbas ⁠region across four years. The Ukrainian president’s was responding to Vladimir Putin’s rejection a day earlier of what the Russian leader said was a Ukrainian proposal to abandon long-range strikes and ⁠scale down the fighting. He said Putin’s comments showed he was out of touch with the feelings of Russians who faced queues at petrol stations, linked to a Ukrainian campaign of ⁠strikes on oil industry targets. “Even an oil-producing state – a ‘gas station’ as Russia has often been called – is now facing ​fuel shortages,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Monday. “This ‌is a direct consequence of ‌the war; one of many consequences. It is also one example of how Ukraine responds – with precision, not through ‌terrorism.”

Zelenskyy also said the Kremlin had set – and later put back – 15 deadlines over the course of more than four years to capture four regions in eastern Ukraine: Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas, and Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. “Russia’s political leadership remains obsessed with Donbas,” he said. “If Russia does not end the war, it will have to postpone that deadline once again.” Putin on Sunday said Russian forces would press ahead with their battlefield aim of ⁠fully capturing the four regions.

Russian attacks across Ukraine killed 10 people and wounded ⁠dozens on Monday, authorities said, with strikes continuing into the afternoon as the death toll climbed. A missile attack in ⁠the south-eastern city ⁠of Dnipro ​killed six people and wounded 29, the regional governor said. Zelenskyy said the strike targeted infrastructure and that rescue ⁠rescue operations were under way. A Russian drone attack on a passenger ‌minibus in Zaporizhzhia killed two men and a woman and injured eight others, including a seven-year-old boy, regional officials said. A glide bomb also hit ​the north-eastern city of Kharkiv, killing a 23-year-old woman and wounding 10 others, according to officials there.

A Russian court has said it jailed three bar workers for participating in the “international LGBT community”, in the first such case since Moscow labelled the community “extremist” in 2023. Russia has for years targeted LGBTQ+ organisations but has become even more hostile since invading Ukraine in 2022. A court in Orenburg, a city bordering Kazakhstan, said on Monday its verdict was in the “first criminal case” for “organising and participating in the activities of an extremist organisation – the international LGBT movement”. It said the owner, the administrator and art director of the Pose bar in Orenburg were found guilty of organising “events united by the theme of demonstrating solidarity with people of non-traditional sexual orientation” – the Russian legal term for LGBTQ+ people. The three would serve between two and seven years in jail and the owner would have to pay a 1m rouble ($13,000) fine, the court said.

Ukraine’s energy grid was buckling under temperatures in excess of 36C on Monday amid the European heatwave. Authorities in the western Rivne region introduced emergency power outages to ease pressure on the grid, while the central Khmelnytsky region also announced temporary outages. Five other regions – from Ivano-Frankivsk in the west to Zaporizhzhia on the frontline in the south – warned households and businesses to be prepared for blackouts on Tuesday.

A Russian army veteran who threatened Vladimir Putin with mutiny has been convicted of displaying “extremist” symbols and jailed, according to his Telegram account and court documents. The former soldier, who had reportedly served on the frontline against Ukraine, posted videos on Instagram last week calling for a meeting with Putin – alleging that many soldiers were being tortured for refusing “mindless, suicidal orders” – and threatening an army mutiny, attracting millions of views. The Kremlin said on Friday it had not yet seen the video but that it appeared to have “strange wording”. The court on Monday published only limited information confirming the case, without giving the sentence, but the soldier’s Telegram account said he was jailed for 11 days.

Continue reading...

Guardian investigation exposes full links between a US business linked to baby deaths around the world and Australian ‘birth keeper’ Emily Lal, the central witness at the inquest into the death of a Melbourne wellness influencer

• How a Melbourne woman’s death is shining light on the dangers of non-medical births – Full Story podcast

• Find more from The birth keepers series here

During her time at the helm of a multimillion-dollar organisation linked to baby deaths around the world, Emilee Saldaya has always avowed one thing: she’s never heard of a woman dying after a freebirth.

“I’ve never heard of a mother dying in childbirth in the sovereign birth world,” the Free Birth Society founder said in a December 2024 appearance on The Way Forward podcast, adding: “In the sovereign birth world we aren’t losing mothers.”

Continue reading...

Archive

Een opmerkelijk moment bij de volksliederen zojuist: Noa Lang stond bij Marokko.

Uit volle borst zong de Nederlandse aanvaller de Hymne Cherifien mee. Hand op z’n hart, de blik strak vooruit. Pas bij het handenschudden had hij door bij het verkeerde team te staan: hij stond ineens oog in oog met Virgil van Dijk.

Noa Lang zit inmiddels netjes op de bank tussen Matts Wieffer en Robin Roefs.

​

&