(PARIS) — France’s defense ministry announced Monday it had carried out its first armed drone strike, killing seven Islamic extremists in central Mali over the weekend.

France joins a tiny group of countries that use armed drones, including the United States.

The drone deployment came nearly one month after two French helicopters collided in Mali, killing 13 soldiers in the deadliest military loss for France in nearly four decades.

A defense ministry statement said the drone strike took place Saturday while French President Emmanuel Macron was visiting neighboring Ivory Coast, where France has a military base. Macron already had announced that French forces had killed 33 extremists that day.

The drone strike targeted jihadists in the Ouagadou forest, where a group known as the Macina Liberation Front is active. French commandos “were attacked by a group of terrorists who infiltrated on motorcycles,” the ministry said.

“Working in a difficult environment, in a densely wooded region..

(NEW YORK) — A chat app that quickly became popular in the United Arab Emirates for communicating with friends and family is actually a spying tool used by the government to track its users, according to a newspaper report.

The government uses ToTok to track conversations, locations, images and other data of those who install the app on their phones, The New York Times reported, citing U.S. officials familiar with a classified intelligence assessment and the newspaper’s own investigation.

The Emirates has long blocked Apple’s FaceTime, Facebook’s WhatsApp and other calling apps. Emirati media has been playing up ToTok as an alternative for expatriates living in the country to call home to their loved ones for free.

The Times says ToTok is a few months old and has been downloaded millions of times, with most of its users in the Emirates, a U.S.-allied federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula.

Government surveillance in the Emirates is prolific, and the Emirates long h..

(KYIV, Ukraine) — Two men with close ties to Rudy Giuliani leveraged their political connections to pursue a deal to export natural gas from the U.S. to Ukraine intended to benefit Republican donors and friends of President Donald Trump’s family.

The plan centered on replacing the head of Ukraine’s state-owned gas company Naftogaz with its No. 2, Andrew Favorov, in hopes that the dual U.S. Ukraine citizen would be more amenable than his boss to the proposal. To make that happen, they also pushed to eliminate the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was known for fighting corruption.

Favorov, in a series of interviews with The Associated Press in Kyiv, described his dealings with Giuliani’s associates, Soviet-born Florida businessmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. His tale, corroborated with interviews with key witnesses, shows how Parnas and Fruman were able to use their contacts in Republican circles to suggest they had access to the people and money that could make a com..