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India, Japan, the United States and Australia will hold the Malabar navy exercise off the coast of Sydney on Friday, the first time the war games previously held in the Indian Ocean have taken place in Australia.

Japanese and Indian navy vessels stopped in Pacific Island countries Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea on the way to Sydney, highlighting the strategic importance of the region at a time of friction between China and the United States.

Vice Admiral Karl Thomas, Commander of the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet, said at a press conference on Thursday in Sydney the exercise was "not pointed toward any one country" and would improve the ability of the four forces to work with each other.

"The deterrence that our four nations provide as we operate together as a Quad is a foundation for all the other nations operating in this region," Thomas said.

"Oceania, the island nations that are just northeast of Australia...all of our nations now are focusing on those countries," he added.

Indian Navy Vice Admiral Dinesh Tripathi said there had been large changes in the world since the United States and India held the first Malabar Exercise in 1992 at the end of the Cold War.

When Australia participated for the first time in 2007, it "sent some signals around the world", he said.

Australia dropped out of the so-called Quad in 2008 after protests from China over its participation in Malabar. The Quad was revived and Australia rejoined Malabar in 2020, although China continues to criticise the grouping as an attempt to contain it.

"The Pacific is very important to us," said Australian fleet commander, Rear Admiral Christopher Smith.

"We understand people have ambition to continue to grow and develop... but its about transparency."

Ships from the four nations will be joined by Australian F-35 fighter jets, as well as P-8 surveillance aircraft and submarines.

"The underwater battle space is seen to be the front line in terms of competition and potential future conflicts", Smith said.

Malabar is being held off the east coast of Australia, instead of the west coast which faces the Indian Ocean, because ships were nearby after the larger Talisman Sabre exercise involving 13 nations which closed last week, he said. (Reuters)

Russia made its final preparations on Thursday for the launch of its first lunar landing spacecraft in 47 years as it races to be the first power to make a soft landing on the south pole of the moon which may hold significant deposits of water ice.

For centuries, astronomers have wondered about water on the moon, which is 100 times drier than the Sahara. NASA maps in 2018 showed water ice in the shadowed parts of the moon and in 2020 NASA confirmed water exists on the sunlight areas.

A Soyuz 2.1v rocket carrying the Luna-25 craft will blast off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, 3,450 miles (5,550 km) east of Moscow, on Friday at 0211 Moscow time and is due to touch down on the moon on Aug. 23, Russia's space agency said.

The Russian lunar mission, the first since 1976, is racing against India which sent up its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month and more broadly with the United States and China which both have advanced lunar exploration programmes.

"The last one was in 1976 so there's a lot riding on this," Asif Siddiqi, professor of history at Fordham University, told Reuters.

"Russia's aspirations towards the moon are mixed up in a lot of different things. I think first and foremost, it's an expression of national power on the global stage."

U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong gained renown in 1969 for being the first person to walk on the moon but it was the Soviet Union's Luna-2 mission which was the first spacecraft to reach the moon's surface in 1959 and the Luna-9 mission in 1966 was the first to do a soft landing on the moon.

But Moscow then focused on exploring Mars and since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has failed to send probes beyond the earth's orbit. There is much riding on the Luna-25 mission - especially as the Kremlin says the West's sanctions over the Ukraine war have failed to cripple the Russian economy.

"Let me put it this way: If Russia prevailed and the Indian probe succeeded, it would really be something," Saddiqi said, pointing to the deterioration of Russia's space programmes over the recent decades.

MOON WATER?

Major powers such as the United States, China, India, Japan and the European Union have all been probing the moon over recent years, though a Japanese lunar landing failed last year and an Israeli mission failed in 2019.

No country has yet made a soft landing on the south pole. An Indian mission, the Chandrayaan-2, failed in 2019.

Rough terrain makes a landing there difficult, but the prize of discovering water ice there could be historic: quantities of ice could be used to extract fuel and oxygen, as well as for drinking water.

"From the point of view of science, the most important task, to put it simply, is to land where no one else has landed," Maxim Litvak, head of the planning group for the Luna-25 scientific equipment, said.

"There are signs of ice in the soil of the Luna-25 landing area, this can be seen from the data from orbit," he said, adding that the Luna-25 would work on the moon for at least an earth year, taking samples.

Russian space agency Roskosmos said that it would take five days to fly to the moon. The craft would spend 5-7 days in lunar orbit before descending on one of three possible landing sites near the pole - a timetable that implies it could match or narrowly beat its Indian rival to the moon's surface.

Chandrayaan-3 is due to run experiments for two weeks, while Luna-25 will work on the moon for a year.

With a mass of 1.8 tons and carrying 31 kg (68 pounds) of scientific equipment, Luna-25 will use a scoop to take rock samples from a depth of up to 15 cm (6 inches) to test for the presence of frozen water that could support human life.

It can explore the moon's regolith - the layer of loose surface material - to a depth of 10 centimetres and carries a dust monitor and a wide-angle ionic energy-mass analyser that provides measurements of ion parameters in the moon's exosphere.

Russia has been planning such a mission for decades. The launch, originally planned for October 2021, has been delayed for nearly two years. The European Space Agency had planned to test its Pilot-D navigation camera by attaching it to Luna-25, but broke off its ties to the project after Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year.

Residents of a village in Russia's far east will be evacuated from their homes at 7.30 a.m. on Friday because of a "one in a million chance" that one of the rocket stages that launches Luna-25 could fall to earth there, a local official said. (Reuters)

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is likely to reshuffle his cabinet between Sept. 11 to 13, the Yomiuri Shimbun daily reported on Thursday.

The reshuffle, which will likely be timed to fall between a tight schedule of diplomatic events, has been widely expected as Kishida seeks to bolster sagging support rates and could also provide clues as to the timing of a possible snap election.

Asked about the report on Thursday, Kishida said "the right people should be in the right positions," but declined to confirm a shakeup and said there was no timetable. (Reuters)

Pakistan's outgoing prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, and the leader of the opposition will on Thursday meet to pick a caretaker leader to oversee a general election due by November, a government official said.

Sharif and opposition leader Raja Riaz will meet in the afternoon, said the official in the prime minister's office, who declined to be identified pending the announcement of the meeting.

Under the constitution, the two have three days to reach agreement on a caretaker. If they can't, the decision will go to a parliamentary committee, and if it can't, then the Election Commission of Pakistan will decide.

The lower house of parliament was dissolved on Wednesday, three days before the end of its five-year term on Aug. 12.

A general election in the South Asian country of 241 million people should be held in 90 days but it could be delayed for several months because the election commission has to redraw the boundaries of hundreds of constituencies based on a new census data.

Any delay could fuel public anger and add to uncertainty in the nuclear-armed country, analysts say.

Sharif led a coalition government of nearly a dozen parties after they voted out his predecessor, Imran Khan, whose party won the last election in 2018, in a no-confidence vote in parliament last year.

The former cricket star has been at the heart of months of political turmoil since he was ousted, raising new worries about stability. He has since been jailed in connection with a graft case and has, as a result, been barred from taking part in an election for five years. (Reuters)