
North Korea tests cruise missile system, vows ‘toughest’ response to U.S.-South Korea military drills; last Afghan special immigrant via applicants at Rhine Ordnance Barracks depart; and 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation to be marked today.
1. North Korea said Sunday it tested a cruise missile system, its third known weapons display this year, and vowed “the toughest” response to what it called the escalation of U.S.-South Korean military drills that target the North. The moves suggested North Korea will likely maintain its run of weapons tests and its confrontational stance against the U.S. for now, even though President Donald Trump said he intends to reach out to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. The official Korean Central News Agency said Kim observed the test of sea-to-surface strategic cruise guided weapons on Saturday.
2. The last Afghan special immigrant visa applicants housed at Rhine Ordnance Barracks have departed, effectively ending the involvement of the U.S. military in Germany in their resettlement, according to an American advocate with knowledge of the situation. The advocate, who was granted anonymity to speak about sensitive matters, said the Army base in the sprawling Kaiserslautern Military Community shed its role in the process before President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20. Afghan assistance efforts at ROB were winding down anyway, with a contract between the Pentagon and KBR Services, a U.S.-based firm that handles logistics and coordination for evacuating Afghans through Germany, due to expire Feb. 15.
3. The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked on Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony that is widely being treated as the last major observance that any notable number of survivors will be able to attend. Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but also Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, gay people and others who were targeted for elimination in the Nazi racial ideology.
4. Russia on Sunday claimed its troops had captured a strategically important town in eastern Ukraine as part of a grinding campaign to weaken Kyiv’s grip on the country’s industrial heartland, while uncertainty over the continued flow of U.S. funding has reportedly halted the work of some Ukrainian NGOs, including those helping war veterans. Russia’s Defense Ministry announced the fall of Velyka Novosilka, which had around 5,000 residents before the war, following a monthslong battle. Its statement could not be independently verified, and Ukraine claimed its troops had only strategically withdrawn from certain areas.
5. Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed into the most heavily destroyed part of the Gaza Strip on Monday as Israel lifted its closure of the north for the first time since the early weeks of the 15-month war with Hamas in accordance with a fragile ceasefire. Massive crowds of people walking with their belongings stretched along a main road running next to the coast in a stunning reversal of the mass exodus from the north at the start of the war that many Palestinians had feared Israel would make permanent. Palestinians who have been sheltering in squalid tent camps and schools-turned-shelters for over a year are eager to return to their homes — even though they have likely been damaged or destroyed.
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