Globalsecurity.org

Officials in Afghanistan say a car bomb went off in Kabul on Sunday, killing at least nine people and injuring 20 others.

As many as 74 Taliban* militants have died during clashes with the Afghan armed forces in Kandahar province, the Afghan Ministry of Defence said on Sunday.

A car bomb attack has claimed the lives of at least nine Afghan people and injured many others in Kabul, in the latest of a series of deadly attacks to rock the Afghan capital.

Afghan authorities say a car bombing targeting a member of parliament killed at least nine people in the capital, Kabul.

The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy's second aircraft carrier, the Shandong, sailed through the Taiwan Straits on Sunday toward the south in a combat group of four other PLA warships media reported.

An outspoken pro-establishment LegCo lawmaker Junius Ho Kwan-yiu plans to establish a center for national security education with 8 million Hong Kong dollar ($1.03 million), aiming to supervise reforms of liberal studies subjects at local schools while reporting public opinion to the new national security committee and other relevant authorities to further implement the national security law for Hong Kong.

China unveiled new rules for reviewing foreign investment on security grounds over the weekend in a major move to align with global practice in regulating foreign investment in the military, key energy and information technology sectors, and financial services.

In the special year of 2020 shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, China has fulfilled its responsibilities as a major country in the world while safeguarding its national interests and dignity.

A massive gas reservoir with expected reserves of over 100 billion cubic meters was found in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to PetroChina's local branch.

On Friday, the US Commerce Department announced that it will put China's Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) and 60 other Chinese companies on a trade blacklist in order "to protect US national security".

China is firmly opposed to the United States adding 59 Chinese entities to its "entity list" of export controls, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce said Saturday.

A Belarusian human rights group says security forces have detained more than people during protests calling on strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka to step down.

In Turkey, more than 900 minors, including 264 between the ages of 12 and 14, have appeared before the court in a span of six years for "insulting" President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a report says.

Beijing previously slammed the US for sending one of its destroyers through the strait, which serves as a buffer between mainland China and Taiwan, an island that Beijing considers to be an inalienable part of its territory.

Taiwan has deployed navy and air force after a Chinese aircraft carrier group led by the country's newest carrier, the Shandong, sailed through the Taiwan Strait just one day after the US sent a warship to the sensitive waterway.

China's first indigenous aircraft carrier, the Shandong, transited through the Taiwan Strait on Sunday, prompting Taiwan to dispatch military assets to monitor the voyage, according to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense (MND).

"The US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin sailed through the Taiwan Strait on the night of December 18. The naval and aerial forces under the Chinese PLA Eastern Theater Command have tracked and monitored the US destroyer throughout the whole process," said Air Force Senior Colonel Zhang Chunhui, spokesperson for the PLA Eastern Theater Command, in a written statement published on Saturday.

The German government has brought home three women and 12 children from refugee camps that hold families of Islamic State (IS) fighters in northeastern Syria.

China's Chang'e-5 probe retrieved about 1,731 grams of samples from the moon, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).

On December 18, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Moderna COVID-19 (mRNA-1273) vaccine (ModernaTX, Inc; Cambridge, Massachusetts), a lipid nanoparticle-encapsulated, nucleoside-modified mRNA vaccine encoding the stabilized prefusion spike glycoprotein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (1).