📸 The images, captured by Colorado-based satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies, show the outlines of a full-scale US carrier and two destroyers.
➡️ One sits on a railway track suggesting it could be used as a moving target
🚢Some of the fake boats have a huge amount of detail.
The USNI identified funnels and weapons systems on one of the copies of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer
🇨🇳The structures are in Ruoqiang, northwestern Xinjiang region, according to Maxar.
The area is near a former target range China used to test early versions of its “carrier killer” DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles in 2013
This summer, the US Navy announced that its aircraft carrier Gerald R Ford successfully completed the Full Ship Shock Trials.
➡️One of the mock-up boats in the Xinjiang desert bears a striking resemblance to that boat.
AllSource Analysis said there did not appear to be any signs of weapon impact in the area around the structures.
🧠This raises the possibility that they were partly being used as psychological warfare
📸The pictures emerged as top leaders of China's ruling Communist Party started a pivotal meeting expected to further firm President Xi Jinping's grip on power
🇨🇳 Mr Xi's tenure has been marked by an increasingly assertive approach to foreign relations, as well as a sprawling anti-corruption crackdown, and repressive policies in regions like Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong
Here's the latest on the global tech outage from reporter @matthfield:
Television channels, airports and banks around the world have been knocked offline in a massive outage causing Windows computers to suddenly shut down.
Sky News’s breakfast show was not on air on Friday morning, replaced by archive footage.
Downdetector, a website which monitors outages, reported sudden spikes in problems with websites including Microsoft applications, banking websites and airline apps.
On Ryanair’s website, the company urged passengers to arrive at airports three hours early blaming a “third party IT issue, which is outside Ryanair’s control and affect all airlines operating across the network”.
Our Senior Technology Reporter @GazTheJourno will be here from 1pm today to answer all of your questions!
Drop them below 👇
✍️ @GazTheJourno: Elon Musk has always wanted to create a company called X.
The first X was in fact an online bank he set up in the late 1990s - and its CEO was Peter Thiel. That company later became PayPal and was bought by eBay in 2002.
@GazTheJourno 🗣️ @GazTheJourno: Twitter’s blue bird logo has been with the site since its creation in 2006. Its branding has always been twee(t!), featuring the bird doing cutesy things including lifting up the fail whale on its ‘site over capacity’ page back in the 2010s… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
🇺🇦 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures, a Telegraph investigation has found.
🔴 Elderly and vulnerable Ukrainians were taken into Russian territory, stripped of their citizenship, forced to give blood and left in agony from botched medical procedures.
Oleg Andreev, 65, who is paralysed, was taken by Russian invaders occupying his village in eastern Ukraine. Mr Andreev said his wheelchair was stolen by a Russian soldier, who used it for an
injured comrade.
🇺🇦 Exclusive: Alexander Lukashenko implicated in alleged war crime as boys and girls as young as six are taken to camps in 'forced deportation'
Read this exclusive in full from @sophia_yan, @Nat_Vasilyeva, and @VerityBowman here 👇
@sophia_yan @Nat_Vasilyeva @VerityBowman It is estimated that 2,150 Ukrainian children have been taken to at least four camps in Belarus since September 2022, with numbers expected to reach 3,000 by autumn this year.
Three of the “camps” are in the Minsk region, namely the Ostroshitsky Gorodok Sanatorium, the Zubrenok national children’s educational and health centre, and Dubrava children’s camp. The fourth site is the Golden Sands Sanatorium in the Gomel region.
🔴NEW: The US was concerned about what would happen to Russia’s nuclear weapons during the armed coup staged by Yevgeny Prigozhin, an official has said.