The United States has canceled the planned deployment of 4,000 soldiers to Poland, US officials said Friday, as Washington reorganises its forces in Europe after announcing it would withdraw thousands of troops from Germany.

The head of US European Command “received the instructions on the force reduction,” General Christopher LaNeve, the acting chief of staff of the US Army, said during a congressional hearing when asked about the canceled deployment.

“I’ve worked with him in close consultation on what that force unit would be, and it… made the most sense for that brigade to not do its deployment in theater,” LaNeve said, referring to the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team.

Some elements of the unit had already been sent overseas and its equipment was in transit, the general said.

Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, testifying alongside LaNeve, said the unit’s planned deployment was canceled “a couple days ago.”

At the beginning of this month, the Pentagon announced that Washington would pull 5,000 troops from Germany, with spokesman Sean Parnell saying the withdrawal was expected “to be completed over the next six to twelve months.”

That announcement came during a heated dispute between Donald Trump and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the US-Israeli war against Iran, and the US president subsequently said the troop reduction would be “a lot further than 5,000,” without providing details.

Poland’s defense minister, Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, suggested Friday that the cancellation of the deployment to his country could be related to the removal of troops from Germany.

“If a brigade other than the one originally planned is sent to Poland – maybe the one from Germany – and 5,000 soldiers leave Germany for Poland…there is no change to the security guarantees,” Kosiniak-Kamysz told reporters.

Trump has threatened to slash US troop numbers in Germany and other European allies during both his White House terms, saying he wants Europe to take on greater responsibility for its defense rather than depending on Washington.

He now appears determined to punish allies who have failed to back the Middle East war or contribute to a peacekeeping force in the crucial Strait of Hormuz waterway, which Tehran’s forces have effectively closed.

A NATO official told AFP on Friday that “we know that the US is working to adjust its posture in Europe.”

“A focus on rotational forces would not impact NATO’s deterrence and defense plans. And we’re already seeing increasing presence on the eastern flank from Canada and Germany — all of which contributes to a stronger NATO overall,” the official added.

While Donald Trump and Xi Jinping were hailing their friendship for the cameras, it was less amicable for the rival Chinese and US security services.

From a standoff over a US Secret Service agent’s weapon to a US staffer trampled during a melee, tensions bubbled to the surface throughout Trump’s visit to Beijing.

The mutual distrust was underscored when US officials made the staffers and media, including an AFP reporter, board Air Force One, hand over all badges and pins given to them by the Chinese side.

Along with “burner” phones from the US delegation, the confiscated items were tossed in a trash can at the bottom of the stairs of the presidential jet.

For all Xi’s warm words about being “partners not rivals,” this was always a summit between two superpowers with a long history of suspicion.

As they vie for supremacy without tipping over into conflict, both sides are taking their espionage and counterintelligence efforts to new heights.

The result in Beijing verged at times towards collective paranoia.

US officials and journalists travelling to China to cover the summit were advised to use phones and laptops that could be wiped or disposed of back home to preserve cybersecurity.

The frictions also played out on the ground in Beijing as US and Chinese officials appeared to be having their own shadow superpower battle.

‘Don’t run over anybody’

Two incidents made headlines, including when Chinese officials blocked US officials and journalists in a room during Trump and Xi’s visit to the Temple of Heaven.

“We’re in the motorcade with the president. Do you not understand that?” said one journalist, in scenes witnessed by an AFP reporter.

A Chinese official replied, “The security of our side does not allow you.” Voices were raised and the US group ended up pushing past the Chinese team to get to their vans in Trump’s motorcade before it left.

“US press, we are going,” a US official said. “Be gentle but we are going. Don’t run over anybody, do not do what they did to us.”

That appeared to refer to an earlier incident at the Great Hall of the People, in which a US staffer fell and had her ankle trodden on as officials from both sides tried to corral journalists rushing to film the start of the Trump-Xi talks.

Earlier at the temple, US and Chinese officials had clashed over whether a US Secret Service agent should be allowed to bring his weapon into the complex.

For nearly half an hour under the sun on Beijing’s hottest day of the year, they had increasingly intense discussions as unyielding Chinese officials insisted the agent could not pass.

At almost every turn, there appeared to be diplomatic arm-wrestling between US and China over timings, positions and alleged last-minute schedule changes.

US and Chinese officials like to talk about the principle of “reciprocity” in their relationship, particularly when it comes to confidence-building measures.

But it can cut both ways — and Xi is now due to visit the White House in September.

At one point in the Temple of Heaven standoff, an official could be heard talking about what would happen on that trip.

Both sides are known for ensuring that when limitations are placed on numbers for officials or journalists, tit-for-tat measures are taken when the other country makes a return visit.

One senior US official in the administration of President Joe Biden was even reportedly denied breakfast after their counterpart did not get their morning meal.

With Trump and Xi eyeing three more meetings in 2026, it could be a long year for their staff.

Indian billionaire industrialist Gautam Adani has agreed to pay a multi-million-dollar settlement in a US civil court case linked to corruption without admitting guilt, his company said on Friday.

The November 2024 indictment in New York accused the industrialist and multiple subordinates of deliberately misleading international investors as part of a vast bribery scheme.

Adani was accused of having participated in an estimated $250 million scheme to bribe Indian officials for lucrative solar energy supply contracts.

Adani, along with his nephew Sagar Adani, agreed to the “payment of a civil penalty” totalling $18 million, while noting that it came “without admitting or denying the allegations made in the civil complaint,” a letter from Adani Green Energy to the Mumbai stock exchange read.

The penalty payment comes as US prosecutors are reported to be set to drop charges against Adani, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

The Adani letter, which noted that the final judgement of the US court is still awaited, stressed that the “company is not a party to this proceeding, and no charges have been brought against it.”

The New York Times said the move to abandon the charges, brought under US president Joe Biden’s administration, came after Adani hired a new legal team led by Robert Giuffra, one of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyers.

With a business empire spanning coal, airports, cement and media, the chairman of Adani Group has been rocked in recent years by corporate fraud allegations and a stock crash.

Adani, a close ally of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was born in Ahmedabad in Gujarat state to a middle-class family but dropped out of school at 16.

He moved to India’s financial capital, Mumbai, to find work in the city’s lucrative gem trade.

In 1988, after a short stint in his brother’s plastics business, he launched the flagship family conglomerate that bears his name by branching out into the export trade.

His big break came seven years later with a contract to build and operate a commercial shipping port in Gujarat.

US President Donald Trump’s summit with China’s leader Xi Jinping in Beijing this week was the latest in decades of high-level diplomatic encounters between the two countries marked by drama, tension and surprising breakthroughs.

Here are some of the most notable visits by US presidents to China:

Cold War summit

The US cut ties with China when the Communist Party (CCP) took over the country in 1949.

Over two decades later, in February 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon flew to China to break the ice.

Nixon met with Chairman Mao Zedong as well as premier Zhou Enlai, with whom he famously raised glasses of the fiery Chinese spirit baijiu.

At a banquet in the Great Hall of the People, Nixon declared “there is no reason for us to be enemies”.

A secret visit by national security adviser Henry Kissinger the year before laid the groundwork for the presidential trip, alongside reciprocal visits of table tennis teams termed “ping-pong diplomacy”.

Nixon’s visit kicked off formal contacts that led to full diplomatic ties in January 1979.

The landmark trip is widely seen as a catalyst for China’s emergence from decades of isolation.

Ill-fated barbecue

George H W Bush’s February 1989 visit was overshadowed by growing calls for democratic reform in China that would culminate in massive protests and a bloody crackdown later that year.

A Texas-style barbecue hosted by Bush at a Beijing hotel during his visit sparked a small diplomatic crisis after the Chinese government objected to the inclusion of astrophysicist and dissident Fang Lizhi on the guest list.

Officials attempted to block Fang multiple times on his way to the banquet.

Bush later expressed regret to the Chinese over the incident.

In June that year, Fang played a key role in the pro-democracy Tiananmen protests that were violently crushed by the Chinese government.

Televised debate

Bill Clinton’s nine-day tour of China in 1998 marked a thaw in relations after the US slapped sanctions on Beijing in the aftermath of the 1989 protests.

The visit’s highlight was a surprise decision by Chinese President Jiang Zemin to allow a live broadcast of a press conference with Clinton.

In an extraordinary scene, the two presidents sparred on national television about the usually off-limits subjects of human rights and the Tiananmen crackdown.

“I did not anticipate being able to have that sort of open, sweeping communication with the Chinese people,” Clinton said at the time.

Olympics opening

George W Bush attended the spectacular opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a highly symbolic display of ambition by an ascendant China.

Bush trod a delicate diplomatic line during his August 2008 trip, as human rights groups called for a tough stance on China’s rule of Tibet, arrests of dissidents and Internet censorship.

The president made subdued calls for greater freedom of expression and religion while in China.

“We’ve emphasised that being a global economic leader carries with it the duty to act responsibly on matters from energy to the environment to development in Africa,” Bush said at the time.

Tarmac tension

Barack Obama’s last visit to China as president threw a spotlight on the country’s growing assertiveness and mounting rivalry with Washington.

Obama made an awkward landing in September 2016 when there was no staircase provided for Air Force One at Hangzhou airport.

He was forced to use the plane’s own staircase, only to step out onto the tarmac rather than a red carpet, prompting speculation of a snub.

The president later played down the moment, as well as an exchange where a Chinese official shouted at a White House staffer: “This is our country! This is our airport!”

Xi and Obama discussed Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea during the visit, an issue that has continued to set the region on edge.

Trump 1.0

In contrast, Trump was given “state visit plus” treatment when he arrived in Beijing during his first term in November 2017.

The bitter trade war Trump launched in 2018 was still months away, and the US leader enjoyed a Chinese opera performance and a private tour of Beijing’s Forbidden City with Xi.

Trump showed Xi videos of his granddaughter singing in Mandarin and reciting classical Chinese poetry, to which Xi responded that the girl deserved an “A+”.

Trump’s second state visit, which wrapped up Friday, was far more subdued.

The US president had said he expected a “big hug” from Xi, but the Chinese leader stopped short of reciprocating Trump’s heavy praise for his “friend”.

Still, Trump said “a lot of good” had come out of the meetings, after a walk with Xi among the rosebushes in central leadership compound Zhongnanhai.

Xi promised to send Trump some seeds for the White House rose garden.

A new idea for combatting America’s horrific problem of school shootings is to unleash an unarmed drone to confront the attacker, like a giant buzzing insect.

It is the brainchild of a company called Campus Guardian Angel, which has pilot programmes using the technology in Georgia and Florida, with growing interest in Texas. These drones have not yet been battle-tested, however.

The approach seems to reflect that part of America which says the way to address recurrent school shootings — part of the country’s broader gun violence epidemic — is not with stricter gun control laws but rather with weaponry, such as giving teachers guns.

The company says the new approach would work like this: when a potential shooter enters a school, a teacher hits an alarm on their cell phone to alert the police and as officers rush to the scene, a drone is activated from a pre-established position inside the school as a first line of defence.

These small, black, roughly square drones weighing about two pounds (one kilo) are piloted by humans in the Texas state capital Austin and can actually buzz around inside the school by navigating 3D maps that Campus Guardian Angel will have made beforehand.

The drones do not shoot bullets or any other kind of projectile. Rather, they are designed to disable the attacker by flying right into him or her or spraying them with pepper gel.

Khristof Oborski, Campus Guardian Angel’s director of tactical operations, said the firm’s CEO Bill King observed that small drones were highly effective in attacks on the battlefield in the war in Ukraine.

“So he started thinking about how can you introduce this type of system to be able to combat a growing problem in the United States, with school shootings,” Oborski said.

Oborski explained that what the drone actually does depends on what the shooter or potential shooter does.

If a child with a gun is walking in a school corridor, the drone has a two-way radio so human operators can talk to the attacker and try to persuade him or her to put down the weapon, Oborski said.

The operators are in constant contact with police so officers can, say, be guided to where the attacker is.

If the assailant is actually shooting people, “we go straight to either kinetic impacts or we use our less lethal JPX pepper gel on the suspect,” Oborski said.

In 2025, US schools endured 233 incidents involving firearms, according to a database called IntelliSee.

One of the worst recent school shootings was in Uvalde, Texas in 2022, with 19 children and two teachers shot and killed. It took police 77 minutes to move in close enough to kill the attacker.

‘To be the nerd’

Campus Guardian Angel offers its services with yearly contracts, the fee depending on the size of the school and how many buildings it has.

Besides the pilot programmes in Florida and Georgia, the company says some parents in Houston are interested in getting the drones set up in their kids’ schools.

“The best-case scenario is we put this in every single school in America and then never have to use it, right? Because it’s got a deterrent quality to it,” said King, a former Navy SEAL.

He said he is often asked if the drones are operated by artificial intelligence and the answer is no, which King said people find reassuring.

Alex Campbell, a 30-year-old operator in this system and professional drone-racing competitor, describes himself as more of a nerd than a soldier.

“To be the nerd behind the scenes, to help the heroes on this Earth saving us from the bad things happening, it’s really fulfilling to be able to have a hand in that,” Campbell said.

Header image: A drone fires inert gas at a mannequin, during a demonstration on how to neutralise a shooter in a school, held at the headquarters of the startup “Campus Guardian Angel” on May 8, 2026, in Austin, Texas. — AFP

Israel on Thursday threatened to take The New York Times to court over a piece it published denouncing allegedly widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian detainees.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Saar have ordered the “initiation of a defamation lawsuit against The New York Times”, according to a joint statement issued by their offices.

The offices said that the piece by Nicholas Kristof, a prominent opinion columnist, was “one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published against the State of Israel in the modern press, which also received the backing of the newspaper”.

Kristof’s investigation is based on testimonies gathered in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 14 men and women who said that they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces.

The report described “a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards”.

The New York Times responded that any legal claim over the “deeply reported opinion column” lacked merit.

“This threat, similar to one made last year, is part of a well-worn political playbook that aims to undermine independent reporting and stifle journalism that does not fit a specific narrative,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the newspaper, said in a statement.

Kristof’s piece said there was no evidence that Israeli leaders ordered rapes.

The Israeli foreign ministry claimed that Kristof had based his piece “on unverified sources tied to Hamas-linked networks”.

It also accused the paper of deliberately timing the publication to “undermine” an independent Israeli report on alleged Hamas sexual violence perpetrated during its October 7, 2023 attack, which was published on the same day.

Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank since Hamas’s 2023 attack, which triggered Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

The United States has high protections for journalistic expression, with libel suits needing to prove that information was purposefully untrue and with harmful intent.

US President Donald Trump and his allies have nonetheless filed a number of lawsuits against media outlets, some of which have reached settlements rather than risk repercussions from his administration.

NEW DELHI: India’s main opposition party Congress named the chief minister for the southern state of Kerala on Thursday, after a rare decisive election victory.

The Congress party, led by Rahul Gandhi, was a dominant force for decades — but has dramatically lost ground to the Hindu-nationalist Bhara­tiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and now directly controls just four states.

The win was the lone bright spot for Congress in the state elections held in April and May, which saw Modi’s BJP consolidate its dominance after setbacks in the 2024 national parliamentary election.

Congress lawmakers chose 61-year-old veteran leader V.D. Satheesan to lead the relatively prosperous state of approximately 36 million people, state party leader Deepa Dasmunshi told reporters in New Delhi.

Party chooses 61-year-old Satheesan to lead relatively prosperous state

In Kerala, a Congress-led alliance defeated the Left Democratic Front after two consecutive terms, winning 102 of 140 seats and ending India’s last Communist-led state government.

Congress now controls four states — Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana in the south, and the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh in the north.

Modi’s BJP celebrated a landmark victory in West Bengal this month, expanding its dominance beyond the Hindi-speaking heartland of north and central India, into the largely Bengali-speaking state of more than 100 million.

Analysts say the BJP’s victory is one of its most significant since Modi was first elected prime minister in 2014.

In West Bengal, the BJP defeated Mamata Banerjee, leader of the regional All India Trinamool Congress, a key figure in India’s wider Congress-led opposition alliance.

And in Tamil Nadu, M.K. Stalin was defeated — another powerful member of that opposition alliance — with film star C. Joseph Vijay’s two-year-old Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam party taking the largest share of seats.

Vijay was sworn in as chief minister with the support of the Congress party.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2026

WASHINGTON: A US jud­­ge has imposed a temporary injunction on sanctions imp­osed last year by Washington on a United Nations expert on the occupied Palestinian territories.

UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Fran­ce­sca Albanese was sanctioned in July 2025 after she publicly criticised Washington’s policy on Gaza.

In announcing the sanctions, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio slammed the UN expert’s criticism of the United States and said she re­­commended to the Inter­nat­ional Criminal Court that ar­­rest warrants be issued agai­nst Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Italian-born expert, who assumed her mandate in 2022, has faced harsh criticism by Israel and some of its allies over her relentless criticism and long-standing ac­­cusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.

Francesca Albanese was sanctioned after she publicly criticised Washington’s policy on Gaza

In his court order on Wed­nesday, US District Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction against the sanctions, according to a court filing seen by AFP.

“Protecting the freedom of speech is ‘always’ in the public interest,” Leon wrote in an opinion accompanying the order.

Albanese, who said the US sanctions were “calculated to weaken my mission” when they were first imposed, celebrated the ruling on social media.

“Thanks to my daughter and my husband for stepping up to defend me, and everyone who has helped so far,” Albanese said in a statement on X. “Together we are one.”

UN special rapporteurs like Albanese are independent experts who are appoi­nted by the UN rights council, but do not speak on behalf of the United Nations.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2026