BAKHMUT, 02 January 2023, (TON): In the war-torn Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the chief of a small group of firefighters lines up his small team in front of the national flag, and wishes them a happy new year.

For the nine stationed permanently in the city centre fire station, it has been a year of war and fire. They are posted in the eastern region of Donetsk where Bakhmut has become the epicentre of fighting.

But their chief Oleksiy Migrin, jovial and good-natured, does not often complain.

“The year 2022 has been tough on a personal level, and tough for Ukraine,” he tells the team.

“Take care of yourself, remember that your families are waiting for you. Next year we will win.”

BOGOTA, 02 January 2023, (TON): Colombia’s government has agreed to a six-month ceasefire with the five largest armed groups operating in the country, President Gustavo Petro announced on New Year’s Eve.

The truce was the main objective of Petro’s total peace policy, which aims to end the country’s armed conflict, which has persisted despite the dissolution of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2017.

The armed groups still operating in Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, are locked in deadly disputes over drug trafficking revenues and other illegal businesses, according to the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz), an independent think tank.

Petro tweeted “we have agreed to a bilateral ceasefire with the ELN, the Second Marquetalia, the Central General Staff, the AGC and the Self-Defense Forces of the Sierra Nevada from January 1 to June 30, 2023, extendable depending on progress in the negotiations.”

DUBAI, 01 Janurary 2023, (TON): The semi-official Fars news agency said “Iran’s military launched a drone to warn off a reconnaissance plane trying to approach Iranian war games on the Gulf coast.”

The report did not specify the nationality of the reconnaissance aircraft, but Iranian forces have had repeated similar confrontations with US forces in the Gulf.

There was no immediate US reaction available.

Iran launched annual joint naval, air, and ground exercises in the Gulf on Friday near the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway.

KYIV, 01 Janurary 2023, (TON): Numerous blasts were heard in Kyiv and in other places around Ukraine and air raid sirens wailed across the country in the first couple hours after midnight on New Year’s Day.

Reuters witnesses reported “as the sirens wailed, some people in Kyiv shouted from their balconies, “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes.”

Fragments from a missile destroyed by Ukrainian air defense systems damaged a car in the capital’s center, but preliminarily there were no wounded or casualties, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

Kyiv’s city military administration said that 23 Russian-launched “air objects” had been destroyed.

RABAT, 01 Janurary 2023, (TON): The bodies of 13 Moroccans were recovered after their boat sank off the country’s southern coast while attempting to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, Moroccan media reported.

The 45 passengers on board were attempting to reach the islands’ main city of Las Palmas when their boat hit a rock and sank, “10 minutes after” embarking near the town of Mirleft, according to online news service Hespress.

Twenty-four people, including a minor, were rescued from the water and the body of one woman was among those recovered, the Arabic-language site reported.

ISTANBUL, 01 Janurary 2023, (TON): The foreign ministers of Turkiye, Syria and Russia will meet “in the second half of January,” the Turkish foreign minister said Saturday, in the latest sign of rapprochement between Ankara and Damascus.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters “we have decided to hold a tripartite meeting in the second half of January. The meeting could take place in a third country.”

The defense ministers of Turkiye, Syria and Russia met in Moscow on Wednesday for the first time since the start of the war in Syria in 2011, which has strained relations between Ankara and Damascus.

In mid-December, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he might meet his Syrian counterpart Bashar Assad after meetings at the level of defense and foreign ministers.

MOSCOW, 01 Janurary 2023, (TON): Russian authorities have announced that soldiers and state employees deployed to fight in Ukraine will be exempt from income tax, Moscow’s latest effort to encourage support for a military campaign against Kyiv that has suffered multiple setbacks and defeats.

The new tax measure concerns all Russian troops fighting in the four Ukrainian territories Moscow has declared as its own – Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia – although it does not completely control the four regions.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov cited an exemption contained in an anti-corruption law, which the Russian authorities published the details.

Soldiers, police, members of the security services and other state employees serving in the four regions no longer have to supply information on “their income, their expenditure, their assets”, according to the decree.

WASHINGTON, 01 Janurary 2023, (TON): President Joe Biden has pardoned six people who have served out sentences after convictions on a murder charge and drug- and alcohol-related crimes, including an 80-year-old woman convicted of killing her abusive husband about a half-century ago and a man who pleaded guilty to using a telephone for a cocaine transaction in the 1970s.

The pardons, announced, mean the criminal record of the crimes is now purged. They come a few months after the Democratic president pardoned thousands of people convicted of “simple possession” of marijuana under federal law.

He also pardoned three people earlier this year and has commuted the sentences of 75 others.

Biden’s stance on low-level crimes, particularly low-level drug possession, and how those crimes can impact families and communities for decades to come has evolved over his 50 years in public service.

WASHINGTON, 31 December 2022, (TON): President Joe Biden on Thursday signed off on a $1.7 trillion spending bill that will keep the US government funded through the next fiscal year notably including another big package for Ukraine’s war effort.

Biden, vacationing over the New Year’s holiday on Saint Croix in the US Virgin Islands, tweeted a picture of himself signing the bill into law.

“It’ll invest in medical research, safety, veteran health care, disaster recovery” and funding for programs combating violence against women, Biden tweeted. It also “gets crucial assistance to Ukraine. Looking forward to more in 2023.”

WASHINGTON, 31 December 2022, (TON): US military said “a Chinese fighter jet flew dangerously within 20 feet of a much larger US air force surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea.”

In the December 21 incident, a Chinese Navy J-11 fighter pilot “performed an unsafe maneuver during an intercept of a US Air Force RC-135 aircraft,” the US Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement.

The Chinese pilot flew in front of and within 20 feet of the nose of the US aircraft, “forcing the RC-135 to take evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision.”

US command said ”the RC-135, was lawfully conducting routine operations over the South China Sea in international airspace.”