By KIM TONG-HYUNG

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea and the United States began their annual large-scale joint military exercise on Monday to better cope with threats by nuclear-armed North Korea, which has warned the drills would deepen regional tensions and vowed to respond to “any provocation” against its territory.

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The 11-day Ulchi Freedom Shield, the second of two large-scale exercises held annually in South Korea, after another set in March, will involve 21,000 soldiers, including 18,000 South Koreans, in computer-simulated command post operations and field training.

The drills, which the allies describe as defensive, could trigger a response from North Korea, which has long portrayed the allies’ exercises as invasion rehearsals and has often used them as a pretext for military demonstrations and weapons tests aimed at advancing its nuclear program.

In a statement last week, North Korean Defense Minister No Kwang Chol said the drills show the allies’ stance of “military confrontation” with the North and declared that its forces would be ready to counteract “any provocation going beyond the boundary line.”

Ulchi Freedom Shield comes at a pivotal moment for South Korea’s new liberal President Lee Jae Myung, who is preparing for an Aug. 25 summit with U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington. Trump has raised concerns in Seoul that he may shake up the decades-old alliance by demanding higher payments for the American troop presence in South Korea and possibly reducing it as Washington shifts its focus more toward China.

South Korean protesters stage a rally to oppose the joint military exercises, Ulchi Freedom Shield or UFS, between the U.S. and South Korea in front of the presidential office in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. The banners read “Stop the military exercise between the U.S. and South Korea.” (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula remain high as North Korea has brushed aside Lee’s calls to resume diplomacy with its war-divided rival, with relations having soured in recent years as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un accelerated his weapons program and deepened alignment with Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“What’s needed now is the courage to steadily take steps toward easing tensions, grounded in a firmly maintained state of ironclad security readiness,” Lee said during a Cabinet meeting on Monday. South Korea also on Monday began a four-day civil defense drill involving thousands of public workers, often scheduled alongside the allies’ summertime military exercises.

Seoul’s previous conservative government responded to North Korean threats by expanding military exercises with the United States and seeking stronger U.S. assurances for nuclear deterrence, drawing an angry reaction from Kim, who last year renounced long-term reconciliation goals and rewrote the North’s constitution to label the South a permanent enemy.

In his latest message to Pyongyang on Friday, Lee, who took office in June, said he would seek to restore a 2018-inter-Korean military agreement designed to reduce border tensions and called for North Korea to respond to the South’s efforts to rebuild trust and revive talks.

The 2018 military agreement, reached during a brief period of diplomacy between the Koreas, created buffer zones on land and sea and no-fly zones above the border to prevent clashes.

But South Korea suspended the deal in 2024, citing tensions over North Korea’s launches of trash-laden balloons toward the South, and moved to resume frontline military activities and propaganda campaigns. The step came after North Korea had already declared it would no longer abide by the agreement.

When asked whether the Lee government’s steps to restore the agreement would affect the allies’ drills, the South’s Defense Ministry said Monday that there are no immediate plans to suspend live-fire training near the Koreas’ disputed western maritime border.

South Korean protesters stage a rally to oppose the joint military exercises, Ulchi Freedom Shield or UFS, between the U.S. and South Korea in front of the presidential office in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Aug. 18, 2025. The banners read “Stop the military exercise between the U.S. and South Korea.” (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

While the allies have postponed half of Ulchi Freedom Shield’s originally planned 44 field training programs to September, U.S. military officials denied South Korean media speculation that the scaled-back drills were meant to make room for diplomacy with the North, citing heat concerns and flood damage to some training fields.

Dating back to his first term, Trump has regularly called for South Korea to pay more for the 28,500 American troops stationed on its soil. Public comments by senior Trump administration officials, including Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, have suggested a push to restructure the alliance, which some experts say could potentially affect the size and role of U.S. forces in South Korea.

Under this approach, South Korea would take a greater role in countering North Korean threats while U.S. forces focus more on China, possibly leaving Seoul to face reduced benefits but increased costs and risks, experts say.

In a recent meeting with reporters, Gen. Xavier Brunson, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, stressed the need to “modernize” the alliance to address the evolving security environment, including North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, its deepening alignment with Russia, and what he called Chinese threats to a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”

By RIAZ KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) — Anguished Pakistanis searched remote areas for bodies swept away by weekend flash floods as the death toll reached 277 on Monday, while one official replied to the lack of evacuation warnings by saying people should have built homes elsewhere.

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A changing climate has made residents of northern Pakistan’s river-carved mountainous areas more vulnerable to sudden, heavy rains.

More than 150 people were still missing in the district of Buner in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province after Friday’s flash floods.

Villagers have said there had been no warning broadcast from mosque loudspeakers, a traditional method for alerting emergencies in remote areas. The government has said the sudden downpour was so intense that the deluge struck before residents could be informed.

Emergency services spokesman Mohammad Suhail said three bodies were found on Monday. The army has deployed engineers and heavy machinery to clear the rubble.

On Sunday, provincial chief minister Ali Amin Gandapur said many deaths could have been avoided if residents had not built homes along waterways. He said the government would encourage displaced families to relocate to safer areas, where they would be assisted in rebuilding homes.

Residents said they were not living near streams, yet the flood swept through their homes. In Buner’s Malak Pur village, Ikram Ullah, aged 55, said people’s ancestral homes were destroyed even though they were not near the stream, which emerged in the area because of the flood. He said large boulders rolled down from mountains with the flood.

In flood-hit Pir Baba village, Shaukat Ali, 57, a shopkeeper whose grocery store was swept away, said his business was not near a river or stream but had stood for years alongside hundreds of other shops in the bazar. “We feel hurt when someone says we suffered because of living along the waterways,” Ali told The Associated Press.

This map shows the Buner region and a number of villages particularly badly impacted by the recent flooding. (AP Digital Embed)

Pakistan has seen higher-than-normal monsoon rains since June 26 that have killed at least 645 people across the country, with 400 deaths in the northwest. The National Disaster Management Authority issued an alert for further flooding after new rains began Sunday in many parts of the country.

In a statement, the military said the Pakistan Air Force played a key role in flood relief operations by airlifting 48 tons of NGO-provided relief goods from the port of Karachi to Peshawar, the regional capital. It said the air force established an air bridge to ensure the swift delivery of supplies.

On Monday, torrential rains triggered a flash flood that struck Darori village in northwestern Swabi district, killing 15 people, government official Awais Babar said.

He said rescuers evacuated nearly 100 people, mostly women and children, who had taken refuge on the roofs of homes. Disaster management officials said the floods inundated streets in other districts in the northwest and in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif chaired a high-level meeting Monday to review relief efforts in flood-hit areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as well as northern Gilgit-Baltistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

At the meeting, officials estimated flood-related damages to public and private property at more than 126 million rupees ($450,000), according to a government statement.

The U.N. humanitarian agency said it had mobilized groups in hard-hit areas where damaged roads and communication lines have cut off communities. Relief agencies were providing food, water and other aid.

Flooding has also hit India-administered Kashmir, where at least 67 people were killed and dozens remain missing after flash floods swept through the region during an annual Hindu pilgrimage last week.

In 2022, catastrophic floods linked to climate change killed nearly 1,700 people in Pakistan and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

Associated Press writers Ishfaq Hussain in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, Rasool Dawar in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this story.

Thirteen years ago, a young mayor of San Antonio gave the keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in North Carolina. At that point, the largely unknown Julián Castro became an instantaneous political phenom and a seemingly inevitable rising party star. 

The press and politicos dubbed him the “Hispanic Obama,” a rather reductive moniker drawing the connection between the high-profile speaking slot that helped spark their ascents. Castro was soon after appointed Obama’s Housing and Urban Development secretary, which was supposed to serve as a stepping stone to the top of the ballot in Texas, where he could ride the state’s demographic destiny to victory and, eventually, run for president. 

Alas, that was not the case. He decided not to challenge Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate in 2018, leaving the path wide-open for Beto O’Rourke, and waited to run straight for the presidency in 2020, a failed bid that likely narrowed his political future rather than expand it. His twin brother, longtime Congressman Joaquin Castro, declined to challenge Cruz in that pivotal year too. 

Julián Castro’s case is symbolic of a broader trend in Texas politics in which Democrats’ leading Hispanic political talent has opted against running for higher office (or has otherwise failed to make it through the primary). This has come even as Latinos have become a plurality of the state population, at roughly 40 percent, en route to a likely majority.

Democratic Congressmen Joaquin Castro and Beto O’Rourke in Dallas in April 2017 (Gus Bova)

There are myriad reasons for this. For one, the anti-Trump electoral resistance of 2018 shifted emphasis to (largely white) swing voters in the purpling suburbs—not base turnout among Latino voters. Another reason is that some of the state’s most qualified Hispanic candidates have preferred to remain in their current cozy posts in the Texas Legislature or U.S. House rather than risk embarrassment in a statewide loss. 

The national party, which has significant influence in primary races for federal office in Texas, has prioritized a cookie-cutter playbook backing performatively moderate candidates like military veteran M.J. Hegar and former NFL linebacker-turned-Dallas Congressman Colin Allred, who can raise truck-hauls of money from donors nationwide and proceed to waste it all on ineffective TV ads full of tropes about football and motorcycles. 

Take, for instance, the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 2024 between Allred and San Antonio state Senator Roland Gutierrez, who was channeling fury over the Uvalde school shooting in his district to run statewide as a progressive fighter. Allred, who was the chosen pick of Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, outraised Gutierrez by gargantuan ratios. 

The national party even reportedly worked behind the scenes to pressure the influential Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ super PAC, which is meant to back Latino candidates running in competitive primaries, to withhold its endorsement (and potential millions in support) from Gutierrez. 

A brief mini-scandal was even made of Gutierrez’s once-uncontroversial case on the campaign trail that the Dems’ best shot at winning statewide in Texas would come through running strong Hispanic candidates. He pointed to electoral results from 2022 showing that attorney general candidate Rochelle Garza, a little-known civil rights advocate from the Rio Grande Valley, outperformed then-gubernatorial candidate O’Rourke by 3 percentage points, as did he in his own downballot race. 

In reality, Texas Democrats haven’t actually tested the case of whether a strong Latino candidate can mobilize the state’s largest demographic to win a statewide race—notwithstanding the party’s 2002 “Dream Team” slate of diverse candidates headlined by Laredo millionaire banker Tony Sanchez, whose main asset other than his identity was an ability to self-fund, rather than any particular political prowess.

Just a few Hispanic candidates have even run at or near the top of the state ballot since—including then-Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez for governor in 2018 and Garza for AG in 2022—but these were underqualified candidates who ran in the absence of more-prominent federal or state elected officials. (Valdez’s main primary competition in 2018 was the son of a former governor, and the 77-year-old later went on to lose a bid to retake her old sheriff seat; Garza bested a former Galveston mayor in her 2022 primary and, to her credit, now leads the venerable Texas Civil Rights Project.) Meanwhile, the Castros of course stayed out, as did a few sometimes-mentioned possible candidates in the Legislature like Rafael Anchía and Gina Hinojosa.

Allred trounced Gutierrez in last year’s primary, but he was in turn trounced by Cruz (who is Cuban-American, among other things) in the general election in November. That same election was headlined by now-President Donald Trump, who made historic inroads with Latino voters in the South Texas borderlands and beyond. 

Those electoral changes fueled narratives about a Trump-powered racial realignment among the Latino electorate from blue to red. It’s unclear whether those voting changes were more of an ephemeral wonder than a true tectonic shift, but if it’s the latter, then Democrats’ chances of flipping Texas blue are, well, dead. 

Perhaps the best way to fight those trend lines, win back those voters, and prove that Democrats are the party of the working-class majorities in Texas—and the party fighting against Trump’s mass-deportation agenda targeting immigrant communities—is also the most obvious way: Run a strong Latino candidate, who already holds office at an appropriate governmental level, and mobilize all the backing that the state and national party apparatuses can muster for them. Cut loose the perennial losers and the failsons of fading political and ranching dynasties; they’ll be just fine. (And, of course, it wouldn’t hurt to actually run on working-class issues or seriously oppose the political corruption that’s rampant in this state.)

As of early August, only one serious Democrat, Allred, has declared his candidacy for next year’s marquee U.S. Senate race—continuing the trend of failed candidates seeking second shots in Texas. Other names include prominent gringos, O’Rourke (who seemingly remains born to be in it) and Austin state Representative-turned-social media phenom James Talarico. Joaquin Castro has hinted interest but, as ever, is keeping his cards tight. 

If a serious Hispanic candidate does get in, they’ll still have to win the primary against (at minimum) Allred, who retains a big national donor base and apparent backing from major players. Primary voters and a sufficient mass of party leaders will have to choose to change course.

Before the Sanchez Dream Team failed at the outset of the 21st century, there were precious few Latino Texans nominated or elected to statewide office in the century prior. San Antonio state Representative Dan Morales’ 1990 election as attorney general still stands as the only statewide ballot-box victory for a Hispanic Democrat in Texas history.

Perhaps, it’s time for an idea whose time clearly came long ago. 

The post Is a Strong Latino Candidate Texas Democrats’ Only Hope? appeared first on The Texas Observer.

By KAREEM CHEHAYEB

BEIRUT (AP) — The U.S. special envoy to Lebanon said Monday that his team would discuss the long-term cessation of hostilities with Israel, after Beirut endorsed a U.S.-backed plan for the Hezbollah militant group to disarm.

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Tom Barrack, following a meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, also said Washington would seek an economic proposal for post-war reconstruction in the country, after months of shuttle diplomacy between the U.S. and Lebanon.

Barrack is also set to meet with Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Speaker Nabih Berri, who often negotiates on behalf of Hezbollah with Washington.

“I think the Lebanese government has done their part. They’ve taken the first step,” said Barrack, who is also the U.S. ambassador to Turkey. “Now what we need is for Israel to comply with that equal handshake.”

Lebanon’s decision last week to support a plan to disarm Hezbollah angered the Iran-backed group and its allies, who believe Israel’s military should first withdraw from the five hilltops it has occupied in southern Lebanon since the end of its 14-month war with Hezbollah last November and stop launching almost daily airstrikes in the country.

Naim Kassem, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, has vowed to fight efforts to disarm the group, sowing fears of civil unrest in the country.

Barrack warned Hezbollah that it will have “missed an opportunity” if it doesn’t back the calls for it to disarm.

Aoun and Salam both want to disarm Hezbollah and other non-state armed groups, and have demanded Israel halt its attacks and withdraw from the country.

Aoun said he wants to increase funding for Lebanon’s cash-strapped military to bolster its capacity. He also wants to raise money from international donors to help rebuild the country.

The World Bank estimates that Hezbollah and Israel’s monthslong war in late 2024 cost $11.1 billion in damages and economic losses as larges swaths of southern and eastern Lebanon were battered. The country has also faced a crippling economic crisis since 2019.