Missing Navy aviators declared dead, Israel threatens to target Beirut, and one of last remaining Code Talkers passes away.
1. Two Navy aviators who were flying an EA-18G Growler jet in Washington state when it crashed Tuesday were declared dead on Sunday, the service said in a statement. The announcement came after days of searching and efforts to reach the wreckage in a remote mountainous area west of Yakima. The Navy said the names of the two aviators will not be released until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified, and that the cause of the crash is under investigation.
2. Israel’s military announced Sunday it is now taking aim at the Lebanon-based Hezbollah’s financial arm and will attack a “large number of targets” in Beirut and elsewhere. Explosions began in Beirut’s southern suburbs about an hour later. Evacuation warnings affected southern Beirut, the eastern Bekaa valley and parts of southern Lebanon. AP video showed strikes near Lebanon’s only airport but it continued to operate. The strikes will target al-Qard al-Hassan “all over Lebanon,” a senior Israeli intelligence official said. Al-Qard al-Hassan is a Hezbollah unit that’s used to pay operatives of the Iran-backed militant group and help buy arms, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with army regulations.
3. John Kinsel Sr., one of the last remaining Navajo Code Talkers who transmitted messages during World War II based on the tribe’s native language, has died. He was 107. Navajo Nation officials in Window Rock announced Kinsel’s death on Saturday. Tribal President Buu Nygren has ordered all flags on the reservation to be flown at half-staff until Oct. 27 at sunset to honor Kinsel. “Mr. Kinsel was a Marine who bravely and selflessly fought for all of us in the most terrifying circumstances with the greatest responsibility as a Navajo Code Talker,” Nygren said in a statement Sunday.
4. A Canadian frigate joined a U.S. Navy warship for a trip through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, less than a week after China concluded a large-scale military exercise around Taiwan. The guided-missile destroyer USS Higgins and the frigate HMCS Vancouver cruised southwest through the 110-mile-wide waterway that separates Taiwan from mainland China as part of a routine transit, the U.S. 7th Fleet said in a news release Monday. “As part of normal operations, the ships were conducting a transit of the Taiwan Strait from the South China Sea to the East China Sea in accordance with international law,” 7th Fleet spokesman Lt. Victor Murkowski told Stars and Stripes by email Monday.
5. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin arrived in Kyiv on an unannounced visit Monday, hours after a Russian drone attack on the Ukrainian capital and as Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy pushes Western partners to keep providing military support for the war. Austin said on the X platform that his fourth visit shows “that the United States, alongside the international community, continues to stand by Ukraine.” Ukraine is having difficulty holding back a ferocious Russian campaign along the eastern front that is gradually compelling Kyiv’s forces to give up a series of towns, villages and hamlets.
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