内容摘要：India’s chief of defence staff says the country suffered initial losses in the air during a recent military conflict with neighbouring Pakistan, but declined to give details.

India’s chief of defence staff says the country suffered initial losses in the air during a recent military conflict with neighbouring Pakistan, but declined to give details.

Czech Cardinal Dominik Duka was cited by the Reuters news agency as saying the situation of Catholics in communist China had been raised as an issue.The Vatican and China in 2018 signed a controversial deal on the appointment of bishops in the country, which gives Beijing some input into their selection.

Conservatives have attacked the still-secret deal as a sellout, but Duka told Reuters it was necessary to keep dialogue open in places where the Church is oppressed.Chinese state media says the mission aims ‘to shed light on the formation and evolution of asteroids’ and the Earth.China has successfully launched a spacecraft as part of its first-ever mission to retrieve pristine asteroid samples, in what researchers have described as a “significant step” in Beijing’s ambitions for interplanetary exploration.

China’s Long March 3B rocket lifted off at about 1.31am local time (18:30 GMT) on Thursday from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwest China’s Sichuan province. It was carrying the Tianwen-2 spacecraft, a robotic probe that could make China the third nation to fetch pristine asteroid rocks.Announcing the launch, Chinese state-run news outlets said the “spacecraft unfolded its solar panels smoothly”, and that the China National Space Administration (CNSA) had “declared the launch a success”.

Over the next year, Tianwen-2 will approach a small near-Earth asteroid some 10 million miles (16 million km) away, named “469219 Kamoʻoalewa”, also known as 2016HO3.

The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the asteroid, which researchers believe is potentially a fragment of the Moon, in July 2026. It will then shoot the capsule with rock samples back to Earth for a landing in November 2027.Despite White House claims about its efficacy, the extent of DOGE’s cost-savings has remained foggy.

As of Friday, the panel claimed it had achieved an estimated $175bn in savings, made up of “asset sales, contract/lease cancellations and renegotiations, fraud and improper payment deletion, grant cancellations, interest savings, programmatic changes, regulatory savings, and workforce reductions”.But DOGE’s transparency and methodology have been repeatedly questioned. The only accounting made available to the public adds up to less than half of the claimed figure.

published on Friday by the news agency Reuters also suggests the actual sum is much lower. Using US Treasury summaries, Reuters found that only $19bn in federal spending had been cut, though it noted that some savings may require more time to be reflected in the Treasury Department’s data.Regardless, all of those figures fall far short of the goal of $2 trillion saved that Musk initially set out to achieve.