Briefly

UNITED STATES

Joint defense board with Canada halted

The US on Monday suspended cooperation with Canada in an 86-year-old joint defense advisory body, in the latest disruption of ties between the two neighbors. US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby said in a post on X that the Pentagon was "pausing" participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defense, which was created in 1940 and made up of US and Canadian military and civilian representatives. The move follows President Donald Trump imposing tariffs on Canada and repeatedly calling for the country to become 51st state of the US. Trump has often pushed the country's traditional allies to boost military spending and rely less on US protection.

NIGERIA

46 kidnapped in attacks on schools

The Christian Association of Nigeria said on Monday that 46 people, most of them children, were kidnapped during a rare attack on three schools in southwest Nigeria last week. Elisha Olukayode Ogundiya, the Christian association chairman in Oyo state, said that "46 persons, mostly children" aged from two to 16, were seized in the attacks in the southwestern state on Friday. In what police on Friday called a "coordinated attack", gunmen simultaneously raided Yawota Baptist Nursery and Primary School, and two other schools, seizing pupils and teachers. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu on Monday condemned the attack as "barbaric", while promising that the government was working to "rescue all the victims". Nigeria is now battling a scourge of criminal gangs known as bandits who kidnap for ransom and target poorly policed rural areas.

ARGENTINA

Scientists lay traps in hantavirus hunt

Scientists attempting to determine whether hantavirus is present in Argentina's Ushuaia on Monday set the first traps to catch rodents potentially carrying the disease. The MV Hondius cruise ship, where a hantavirus outbreak on board killed three people and triggered a global health scare, set sail from the city at Argentina's southernmost tip on April 1. Beginning on Monday, biologists from Buenos Aires are spending several days setting traps at various locations on the southern island of Tierra del Fuego to analyze whether the captured rodents carry the Andes strain of the virus, the only one known to spread between people. The team set up 150 traps, according to a local healthcare source.

Agencies - Xinhua