By HYUNG-JIN KIM and KIM TONG-HYUNG, Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised South Korea’s plans to raise its military spending, saying Tuesday that the Asian ally will take a larger role in defending itself from North Korean aggressions as the allies must brace for “regional contingencies.”

In this photo provided by the South Korea Defense Ministry, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, second from left, and South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back, center, visit the Observation Post Ouellette near the border village of Panmunjom, South Korea, Monday, Nov. 3, 2025. (South Korea Defense Ministry via AP)

Modernizing the decades-long alliance between the U.S. and South Korea is a hot issue between the U.S. and South Korea, as the U.S. apparently wants South Korea to increase its conventional defense capabilities so that Washington can focus more on China.

After annual security talks with South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back in Seoul, Hegseth told reporters that he was “greatly encouraged” by Seoul’s commitment to increase defense spending and make greater investments in its own military capabilities. He said the two agreed the investments would bolster South Korea’s ability to lead its conventional deterrence against North Korea.

In a speech at parliament on Tuesday, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung asked lawmakers to approve an 8.2% increase in defense spending next year, which he said would help modernize the South Korean military’s weapons systems and reduce its reliance on the United States.

Hegseth highlighted defense cooperation on repairing and maintaining U.S. warships in South Korea, saying the activities harness South Korea’s world-class shipbuilding capabilities and “ensure our most lethal capabilities remain ready to respond to any crisis.”

“We face, as we both acknowledge, a dangerous security environment, but our alliance is stronger than ever,” Hegseth said.

‘No daylight or differences’

Hegseth said the South Korea-U.S. alliance is primarily aimed at coping with potential North Korean provocations, but must also keep other regional threats in view.

Related Articles

Dick Cheney, one of the most powerful and polarizing vice presidents in US history, dies at 84

What to watch on Election Day 2025: Trump’s strength, Democrats’ message and the shutdown effect

Mamdani and Cuomo face off as New York City chooses new mayor, while Sliwa hopes for an upset

California voters take up Democrats’ push for new congressional maps that could shape House control

Virginia governor’s race will test Trump and Democrats nationally — and make history

“There’s no doubt flexibility for regional contingencies is something we would take a look at, but we are focused on standing by our allies here and ensuring the threat of the DPRK is not a threat to the Republic of Korea and certainly continue to extend nuclear deterrence as we have before,” he said.

DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — North Korea’s official name — while Republic of Korea is South Korea’s formal name.

In recent years, the U.S. and South Korea have been discussing how to integrate U.S. nuclear weapons and South Korean conventional weapons in various contingencies. South Korea has no nuclear weapons and is under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” security commitment.

Ahn denied speculation that South Korea could eventually seek its own nuclear weapons program or is pushing for redeployment of U.S. tactical weapon weapons that were removed from South Korea in the 1990s. He stressed that Seoul remains committed to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

“Because we cannot have nuclear weapons, a system integrating U.S. nuclear capabilities and South Korea’s conventional weapons, the CNI (conventional-nuclear integration) framework, has been established,” he said.

Hegseth and Ahn did not issue a joint statement after the meeting, leaving the details of their agreements unclear. It’s unusual for the two countries’ defense ministerial talks to end without an immediate joint statement. But Hegseth said there was “no daylight or differences” between the two countries, only “a bigger deal which takes a little bit more time.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks during a joint press conference with South Korean Defense Minister Ahn Gyu-back, following the 57th Security Consultative Meeting at the Defense Ministry in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, Pool)

During a separate meeting with Hegseth later Tuesday, Lee reiterated his support of an implementation of a previous agreement to transfer wartime operational control of the allied forces to a binational command led by a South Korean general. Currently, the commander of the 28,500 troops in South Korea has wartime operational control of the allied forces, including the South Korean military.

Lee said South Korea taking greater defense responsibilities on the Korean Peninsula would lessen U.S. military burdens in the region, according to Lee’s office. Many South Koreans view regaining their military’s wartime operational control as a matter of national sovereignty.

North Korean artillery tests before Hegseth’s arrival

North Korea didn’t immediately comment on the Hegseth-Ahn meeting.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier on Tuesday that it detected the North test-firing around 10 rounds of artillery toward its western waters on Monday, shortly before Hegseth arrived at an inter-Korean border village with Ahn to kick off his two-day visit to South Korea.

The joint chiefs said the North also fired the same number of rounds Saturday afternoon, before a summit between Lee and Chinese President Xi Jinping, where Lee called for a stronger role by Beijing to persuade the North to return to dialogue with Washington and Seoul.

North Korea had expressed irritation over the agenda of the Lee-Xi meeting, ridiculing Seoul for clinging to a “pipe dream” that the North would one day give up its nuclear weapons.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, one of Tesla’s biggest investors, said Tuesday that it will vote against a proposed compensation package that could pay CEO Elon Musk as much as $1 trillion over a decade.

Related Articles

Stability AI largely wins UK court battle against Getty Images over copyright and trademark

Denny’s to be acquired and taken private in a deal valued at $620 million

Stillwater: Construction mishap causes power outage near Lakeview Hospital construction site

Starbucks sells 60% stake in China business in $4 billion deal

Microsoft $9.7 billion deal with IREN will give it access to Nvidia chips

There will be more than a dozen company proposals up for a vote Thursday during Tesla’s annual meeting, but none have generated more division than Musk’s potentially massive pay package.

“While we appreciate the significant value created under Mr. Musk’s visionary role, we are concerned about the total size of the award, dilution, and lack of mitigation of key person risk consistent with our views on executive compensation,” said Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages the country’s Government Pension Fund Global. “We will continue to seek constructive dialogue with Tesla on this and other topics.”

The fund has a 1.16% stake, the sixth largest holding among institutional investors.

Baron Capital Management, which holds about 0.4% of Tesla’s outstanding shares said Monday that it will vote in favor of the compensation package.

“Elon is the ultimate “key man” of key man risk. Without his relentless drive and uncompromising standards, there would be no Tesla,” wrote founder Ron Baron. “He has built one of the most important companies in the world. He’s redefining transportation, energy and humanoid robotics and creating lasting value for shareholders while doing it. His interests are completely aligned with investors.”

Musk is the company’s largest investor, holding 15.79% of all outstanding shares.

Tesla management has proposed a compensation arrangement that would hand Musk shares worth as much as 12% of the company in a dozen separate packages if the company meets ambitious performance targets, including massive increases in car production, share price and operating profit.

The image that graces the cover of historian Ashley Farmer’s new biography of Pan-African activist Audley “Queen Mother” Moore is no less regal than the iconic photograph of Black Panthers founder Huey Newton in a rattan throne chair that many of us are more familiar with. 

Moore sits in an old striped armchair, wearing an African-print caftan and headdress, neck draped with beads, wrist adorned with bangles. Behind her, portraits of Malcolm X and Winnie Mandela hang on the wall. But, as Farmer notes in her introduction to Queen Mother: Black Nationalism, Reparations, and the Untold Story of Audley Moore (out from Pantheon on November 4), “What we know of Audley Moore, one of the most important activists and theorists of the twentieth century, remains largely confined to a few photos such as this one—a seven-decade history of struggle distilled down to a few still shots. Until now.” 

In her book, Farmer, a historian of Black women’s radical politics and an associate professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, chronicles Moore’s life and activism. Moore, a civil rights leader and Black nationalist, adopted the name Queen Mother in the 1960s as a symbol of both her matriarchal presence in Black organizing spaces as well as the connection to Africa that was key to her politics. From her roots in southern Louisiana at the dawn of the 20th century to her years pounding the pavement in Harlem as an organizer for the Communist Party to her reignition of the modern reparations movement well into her later years, Moore’s story offers a potent lesson for today’s organizers on the power of persistence, longevity, and showing up. 

Born in 1897 in New Iberia, Louisiana, to a mother from a free Black community and a father born into slavery, Moore bore witness to the dying breaths of Reconstruction in the South. Though she enjoyed membership in the Creole elite upon moving with her father to New Orleans, she found herself cut off from that wealth and access upon his death while she was still in high school. Newly a member of the working class, taking up domestic labor to provide for herself and her two younger sisters, the arrival of Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, one of the foremost proponents of the Back-to-Africa movement, laid the cornerstone of Moore’s political philosophy for the rest of her life. 

“It was Garvey who brought consciousness to me,” she recalled in an oral-history interview quoted in the book. “You can experience a thing without being conscious of yourself. … [You can] see the brutality of the police all against us and so on, and yet a consciousness is not aroused.” 

From then on, Moore would see herself as a vital part of a global Black community and as working in service of Black liberation. 

Moore and her then-husband were ready to follow Garvey to Africa, making his vision of an Africa for Africans a reality—the pair had sold their grocery store and packed their trunk—before extended family interceded. Still, the two were ready to leave New Orleans, and they decamped to Harlem in the mid-1920s. Harlem proved a fertile ground for Moore to come into her own as an organizer. After attending a rally led by the local Communist Party, she was invigorated by a speech wherein party leader James Ford expounded on imperialism in Africa and the struggle of the international working class. By 1936, she was a card-carrying party member, selling copies of The Daily Worker and helping to articulate a vision of a fight against capitalism and white supremacist imperialism both at home and abroad. 

During Moore’s time in the party, she rose through the ranks, organizing around bread-and-butter issues like tenants’ rights and grocery affordability, eventually leading the Upper Harlem Branch’s Women’s Commission. She’d go on to run for the New York State Assembly on the Communist Party ticket and help elect a Black Communist to represent Harlem on the New York City Council. Farmer writes: “Moore’s ideological compass was always pointed at Black Nationalism. But she had a malleable approach to organizing that led her to join groups, protests, and causes that were pro-Black even if they were not explicitly nationalist.” 

Though J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI began targeted surveillance of Moore in 1941, it wasn’t this threat that weakened her ties to the Communist Party but rather the party’s own lack of a commitment to her Black nationalist vision that led her to renounce membership in 1950. 

Even after her time in the Communist Party, Moore retained the understanding that civil rights alone wouldn’t give her the results she wanted; it would take capital to ensure that Black people could be truly free. Symbolic and material reparations were not a novel idea, but back home in Louisiana, where Moore returned in 1956 with her sisters after a successful campaign to reclaim the house that their half-brother had kicked them out of decades earlier, Moore launched the modern reparations movement. She tasked the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, her organizing home which until then had largely been advocating for Black men on death row, with researching historical claims to reparations for Black Americans. 

Ever the tactician, Moore was capacious in her vision, appealing to more-moderate constituencies with plans for hiring quotas and job-training programs as well as to armed Black separatists like those of the Republic of New Afrika, who wanted to found a sovereign Black nation in Mississippi. 

The fight for reparations carried Moore through the second half of the 20th century. She continued advocating, benefitted by a longevity in the movement that most Black nationalist leaders were denied, their lives too often cut short. Until her death, in 1997, if Black people were gathering to discuss political objectives, whether in the United States or the United Kingdom or Africa, Queen Mother Moore was there to remind them that, even as the political landscape changed—Africa decolonized, voting rights achieved—reparations were critical to any vision of a liberated Black political future. 

Farmer mirrors Moore’s tenacity in her insistence on chronicling her subject’s life at all, in the face of an academic establishment claiming that, without substantial archives, a definitive biography was a fruitless project. Our understanding of the history of Black activism, with its points both high and low, will be fuller for Farmer’s portrait of Moore, who offers those of us who struggle toward justice a model for playing the long game.

The post The ‘Queen Mother’ of the Reparations Movement Gets Her Due appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By JIM GOMEZ, Associated Press

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Typhoon Kalmaegi has left at least 26 people dead in the Philippines, mostly in flooding set off by the storm, which barreled across the central part of the country on Tuesday, disaster response officials said. Floodwaters trapped scores of people on their roofs and submerged cars.

A Philippine air force helicopter with five personnel on board crashed in a separate incident in southern Agusan del Sur province while flying to help provide humanitarian assistance to provinces battered by Kalmaegi.

The Super Huey chopper crashed near Loreto town and efforts were underway to locate the air force personnel aboard, the military’s Eastern Mindanao Command said in a statement.

Military officials didn’t immediately provide other details about the crash, including the condition of the five air force personnel aboard and what could have caused the crash.

Kalmaegi was last spotted over the coastal waters of Jordan town in the central province of Guimaras with sustained winds of 81 mph and gusts of up to 112 mph. It was forecast to blow away into the South China Sea late Tuesday or early Wednesday after hitting the western province of Palawan.

Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV, deputy administrator of the Office of Civil Defense, said that at least 26 people were reported killed — many in flooding in Cebu province and other central island provinces pummeled by Kalmaegi, the 20th tropical cyclone to batter the Philippine archipelago this year. Details of those typhoon deaths were still being verified, he said.

Among the dead was an older villager, who drowned in floodwaters in Southern Leyte, where a province-wide power outage was reported after the typhoon made landfall around midnight in one of its eastern towns. A resident died after being hit by a fallen tree in central Bohol province, provincial officials said.

Gwendolyn Pang, secretary-general of the Philippine Red Cross, said that an unspecified number of residents were trapped on their roofs by floodwaters in the coastal town of Liloan in Cebu, and added that cars either were submerged in floods or floated in another Cebu community.

“We have received so many calls from people asking us to rescue them from roofs and from their houses, but it’s impossible,” Pang told The Associated Press on Tuesday morning. “There are so many debris, you see cars floating so we have to wait for the flood to subside.”

Cebu province was still recovering from a 6.9 magnitude earthquake on Sept. 30 that left at least 79 people dead and displaced thousands when houses collapsed or were severely damaged.

Related Articles

Today in History: November 4, Obama wins presidency in historic election

Starbucks sells 60% stake in China business in $4 billion deal

France threatens to block Shein over sale of childlike sex dolls ahead of Paris store opening

Hopes dashed as man extracted from partially collapsed medieval tower in Rome dies soon after

Israel rocked by scandal as top military lawyer resigns, goes missing, is found and thrown into jail

In Eastern Samar, one of the east-central provinces first lashed by Kalmaegi early Tuesday, fierce wind either ripped off roofs or damaged about 300 mostly rural shanties on the island community of Homonhon, which is part of the town of Guiuan, but there were no reported deaths or injuries, Mayor Annaliza Gonzales Kwan said.

“There was no flooding at all, but just strong wind,” Kwan told the AP by telephone. “We’re OK. We’ll make this through. We’ve been through a lot, and bigger than this.”

In November 2013, Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful tropical cyclones on record, slammed ashore into Guiuan. it then raked across the central Philippines, leaving more than 7,300 people dead or missing, flattening entire villages and sweeping scores of ships inland. Haiyan demolished about 1 million houses and displaced more than 4 million people in one of the country’s poorest regions.

Before the typhoon’s landfall, officials said that more than 387,000 people had evacuated to safer ground in eastern and central Philippine provinces. Authorities warned of torrential rains, potentially destructive winds and storm surges of nearly 10 feet.

Interisland ferries and fishing boats were prohibited from venturing into increasingly rough seas, stranding more than 3,500 passengers and cargo truck drivers in nearly 100 seaports, the coast guard said. At least 186 domestic flights were canceled.

The Philippines is battered by about 20 typhoons and storms each year. The country also is often hit by earthquakes and has more than a dozen active volcanoes, making it one of the world’s most disaster-prone countries.

Joeal Calupitan and Aaron Favila contributed to this report.