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U.S. President Donald Trump salutes as he attends the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, in Washington, D.C., U.S., on April 21, 2025.
HARD NUMBERS: Trump rolls real eggs, UAE seeks AI’s help, White House nixes safety jobs, South China Sea gets battle-tested, Gold rush, Senior US official robbed
30,000: Rising egg prices don’t seem to have hit the White House, as nearly 30,000 real eggs adorned the White House lawn Monday morning for the 147th annual Easter egg roll. Donald Trump paid tribute to Pope Francis, defended embattled US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and shared photos with the Easter bunny.
1: Hey ChatGPT, can you propose some new legislation for the United Arab Emirates? Yes, the Emirati nation plans to become the first country to harness the power of artificial intelligence to propose new legislation.
875: Out of the roughly 1,000 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Healthjobs, the Trump administration has cut 875 of them as part of its broader effort to slash the number of federal employees. This move could especially harm former coal miners – who often suffer from lung disease – as NIOSH has helped them find work outside the mines.
14,000: More than 14,000 American and Filipino soldiers – 9,000 from the US, 5,000 from the Philippines – are participating in a “full battle test” this year, amid mounting tensions in the South China Sea. The coordinated drill will also feature soldiers from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The exercise, which started on Monday, will run for three weeks.
$3,400: An age-gold problem: The price of gold surpassed $3,400 on Monday amid fears over the future of the global economy and concerns for the Federal Reserve’s independence. A year ago today, the price of gold was at $2,384.
$3,000: A thief swiped US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s bag while she was having dinner in Washington, DC, on Sunday night, taking her passport, makeup bag, checkbook, and $3,000 in cash. Police officers have not yet caught the thief, believed to be a white male.China's President Xi Jinping attends a meeting in Brazil in November 2024.
Tensions between China and the West heat up amid military exercises
Just days after a Chinese naval helicopter nearly collided with a Philippine patrol plane over a contested reef, China’s military started live-fire drills in waterways near Vietnam on Monday and between Australia and New Zealand over the weekend in an “unprecedented” display of firepower.
Beijing’s democratic critics put up their own show of force. On Sunday, France held military exercises with the Philippines and vowed to deepen their defense ties. On Monday, Japan followed suit, forging a security pact with Manila.
France, which is looking to assert its status as a Pacific power through its overseas island territories across the region, is now negotiating an agreement with the Philippines to allow troops to train on each other’s land, similar to the deal Manila has with the US and Australia.
At a meeting in Manila on Monday, Japanese Defense Minister Gen Nakatani and his Philippine counterpart, Gilberto Teodoro, agreed to work together to counter “unilateral attempts by China and other countries to change the international order and the narrative.”
After Vietnam released new maps marking what Hanoi considers its maritime boundary with Beijing, China on Monday began four days of live-fire military exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin. Vietnam has yet to respond.
Last week, Australia and New Zealand accused China of failing to announce the live-fire component of its military drills in international waters in the Tasman Sea. The abrupt shift in protocol forced commercial airlines to reroute flights last Friday morning. On Sunday, China’s Defense Ministry denied what it called “unreasonable accusations” from Canberra and Wellington.
It’s just the latest tensions between Australia and its largest trading partner. Earlier this month, a Chinese J-16 fighter plane released flares that passed within 100 feet of an Australian P-8 Poseidon surveillance jet flying over the South China Sea.
Where does it all go? Beijing has been trying to seize on the Trump administration’s cuts to international aid and America-first foreign policy to tighten its grip over the Pacific. But China’s early success at promoting economic and diplomatic relations are overshadowed by its “beefs” with most of its neighbors over sovereignty and national security, said Jeremy Chan, a senior analyst at the Eurasia Group.
“China can’t make friends with anybody,” Chan said. “If you zoom out and look at the South China Sea, China basically has a border dispute with almost every country in the Indo-Pacific. That puts a limit on Beijing’s ability to leverage Trump 2.0.”
A Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy Harbin Z-9 helicopter sits on CNS Yulin during a display of warships ahead of an exhibition at Changi Naval Base in Singapore on May 18, 2015.
China’s “dangerous” helicopter maneuver escalates tensions with US and Philippines
A Chinese naval helicopter flew nearly 10 feet from a Philippine patrol plane on Tuesday over a contested reef in the South China Sea, escalating tensions with Manila and Washington in the airspace over international waterways Beijing claims as its own.
The move, which the US condemned as a “dangerous maneuver,” comes months after a series of seaborne attacks in which Chinese coast guard vessels rammed Philippine ships.
Both Beijing and Manila claim the Scarborough Shoal – known in China as Huangyan Island and in the Philippines as Panatag Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc – located less than 150 miles off the west coast of the main Philippine island of Luzon. But China has controlled the waters around the unpopulated reef since 2012. In recent months, the Philippines and the US have sought to assert Manila’s sovereignty by flying air patrols over the shoal.
In a tense 30-minute standoff on Tuesday, a gray People’s Liberation Army naval Harbin Z-9 chopper hovered just over the wing of a Philippine C-208 light utility plane after Beijing said the Philippines “illegally invaded the airspace” over the shoal. Washington rebuked the move against its ally, whose 74-year mutual defense treaty both the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to reinforce over the past year.
“We condemn the dangerous maneuvers by a PLA Navy helicopter that endangered pilots and passengers on a Philippine air mission,” MaryKay Carlson, the US ambassador to Manila, wrote in a post on X. “We call on China to refrain from coercive actions and settle its disputes peacefully in accordance with international law.”
Flashback to a heated summer: Last June, Chinese coast guards wielding knives and axes rammed their ship into a Filipino vessel, injuring eight sailors and severing the thumb of one. The attack was intended to halt a resupply mission to a Philippine outpost in the Sierra Madre, a rusting World War II vessel run aground years ago on the shoal to mark Manila’s claim. China accused the Philippines of secretly hauling equipment to reinforce the decaying ship among food and water supplies for Philippine marines stationed on the outpost.
The bottom line: “While scary, this is more a continuation of near-boiling point tensions, where neither Beijing nor Manila wants the dispute to spill over into outright conflict,” said Jeremy Chan, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group. But Tuesday’s incident, he added, is “increasing the risk for both China and the Philippines that there could be some kind of aerial collision between the two countries.”
A person takes photos of the waves as Typhoon Krathon approaches in Kaohsiung, Taiwan October 2, 2024.
Hard Numbers: Taiwan prepares for treacherous Typhoon, Benin crushes alleged coup attempt, Vietnamese sailors injured in South China Sea clash, Old US bomb makes a bang in Japan
2: At least two people are dead in Taiwan, and 70 injured, from weather attributed to Typhoon Krathon, which is expected to make landfall on the densely populated west coast of the Island on Thursday. Thousands have been evacuated from areas at risk of floods or landslides. One elderly man fell off a ladder while pruning a tree near his house in preparation for the storm, and another crashed into fallen rocks while driving. Western Taiwan is usually sheltered from major storms by its east coast mountain ranges and Taipei has put 40,000 troops on standby for expected rescue operations.
2: Two high-profile Beninese political figures were arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of plotting a coup against President Patrice Talon, allegedly having attempted to bribe the head of the Republican Guard. Benin is one of the most stable democracies in West Africa — even the communist dictatorship that ruled 1975-1990 handed over power peacefully — and was not previously believed to be at risk of extralegal regime change.
40: Vietnamese media reported Wednesday that some Vietnamese fishermen were severely injured in a clash near the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea after around 40 foreign sailors boarded their vessels and beat the crews with iron bats on Sunday. The hull numbers of the alleged aggressors correspond with local Chinese maritime patrols, and Beijing confirmed an operation against Vietnamese fishermen near the Paracels but denied Hanoi’s version of events.
80: A long-forgotten US bomb dating back to World War II buried deep beneath a taxiway at Japan’s Miyazaki Airport suddenly exploded on Wednesday, causing a large crater and the cancellation of at least 80 flights. No one was harmed, thankfully, though hundreds of unexploded US bombs remain buried in Japan and are sometimes dug up during construction projects.A Philippine coast guard vessel and a Chinese coast guard vessel sail next to each other during an incident where the Philippines and China accused each other of ramming vessels and performing dangerous manoeuvres, at a location given as the South China Sea, in this screen grab obtained obtained from a handout video released August 19, 2024.
China and the Philippines play a dangerous game of bumper boats
On Sunday, Filipino and Chinese vessels collided for the second time in a week at the Sabina Shoal, a disputed area of the South China Sea. This latest clash occurred less than a month after Manila and Beijing signed a deal meant to avoid confrontation and escalation risk around the South Thomas Shoal. Chinese forces also fired flares at an airplane from Manila’s fisheries regulation agency on Saturday, and a Chinese fighter jet buzzed the same plane on Aug. 19.
Why the flare-up? The proximate cause seems to be Manila’s deployment of a coast guard ship to the waters around Sabina Shoal, an uninhabitable reef well within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. But Beijing still claims “indisputable” sovereignty there and may be worried about Manila attempting to set up some sort of semi-permanent base, as it did on the South Thomas Shoal by beaching an old ship on the rocks in 1999.
Beijing and Manila both recognize the risks of testing each other’s boundaries — and Washington has been clear it will back its longstanding ally if called upon to protect it from China. Even so, Eurasia Group’s Jeremy Chan says the likelihood of the invocation of the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty “is quite low, as the actions by the China coast guard vessels do not rise to the level of a ‘direct attack’ on a Philippine vessel and no injuries have been reported by either side.” It also means Beijing is “steering clear of the red lines established by Philippine President Marcos, and Manila has little interest in escalating tensions in the near term,” Chan adds.FILE PHOTO: Philippine Marines fold a Philippine national flag during a flag retreat at the BRP Sierra Madre, a marooned transport ship in the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, part of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, March 29, 2014.
Philippines successfully conducts resupply through disputed sea under new deal
On Saturday, Filipino vessels carried food and supplies to the Second Thomas Shoal, a disputed atoll in the South China Sea that has been the source of severely strained relations with Beijing in recent months. Manila deliberately beached a ship called the Sierra Madre on the Second Thomas Shoal in 1997 to effectively control it and now must regularly resupply Marines based there.
The mission represents an early success for the recently signed deal between China and the Philippines intended to cool temperatures in the region and preserve the status quo through better coordination and communication.
Manila and Beijing’s coastguards reportedly communicated about the mission in advance, and Chinese ships did not shadow or intercept the Filipinos as in past attempted resupply missions.
While details about the deal have not been made public, both sides passed the first test with flying colors. Confrontations between Manila and Beijing had been posing a serious risk of escalation – and such encounters could spiral quickly given the longstanding mutual defense treaty between the US and the Philippines.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken applauded the peaceful coordination and said the US “[expects] to see that it continues going forward.”U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken shakes hands with Chinese Communist Party's foreign policy chief Wang Yi during their bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia, Thursday, July 13, 2023.
Top diplomats meet in Laos to discuss Myanmar & South China Sea
On Thursday, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations met in Vientiane, Laos, to kick off a three-day summit focused on resolving Myanmar’s violent civil war and cooling tensions in the South China Sea. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, and Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are also attending – each with their own interests in mind.
In Myanmar, ASEAN nations have failed to make progress toward their “five-point consensus” unveiled in April 2021, two months after a military coup. Since then, the country has spiraled into a humanitarian crisis – with over 3 million displaced and more than 5,400 Burmese killed. ASEAN’s plan seeks an immediate cessation of violence, which has largely been ignored by junta leaders, calling into question the efficacy of the bloc amid fears of regional spillover.
This week’s talks hope to revive the much-criticized plan but are likely to face significant obstacles as competing geopolitical interests leave countries – including the US and China – supporting opposing factions.
On the South China Sea sovereignty issue, ASEAN is hoping to capitalize off the progress made on Sunday’s deal between China and the Philippines and to finalize a similar agreement of their own – a protracted code of conduct including China. Still, pessimism looms over how much these nations can achieve to ease these protracted issues in the region.
A Philippine flag flutters from BRP Sierra Madre, a dilapidated Philippine Navy ship that has been aground since 1999 and became a Philippine military detachment on the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, part of the Spratly Islands, in the South China Sea March 29, 2014.
China and Philippines sign South China Sea deal
Manila announced Sunday it had reached a “provisional agreement” with Beijing aimed at establishing an arrangement in the South China Sea that both sides can live with — without renouncing territorial claims. The text of the deal has not yet been released.
The agreement builds off last week’s announcement of the establishment of presidential hotlines and signals a desire for de-escalation by both countries – following a serious clash on June 17. But the key word in this agreement is “provisional” as both Beijing and Manila are already showing irreconcilable differences in their positions.
China had previously told Manila it could not bring construction materials to the wreck of the Sierra Madre, a decrepit hulk deliberately beached on the South Thomas Shoal by Manila to give it de facto control. Without repairs, the ship will likely break apart soon. But Beijing claims Manila agreed to give China advanced notice and allowed inspections of shipments sent to the marines it keeps stationed there carrying food and supplies. A senior Filipino official told the Associated Press that the final deal did not require the Philippines to pre-notify the Chinese of shipments.
What to watch? A deal to cool temperatures in the South China Sea would be welcome news for all parties, including the US. “The next big test,” says Eurasia Group senior China analyst Jeremy Chan, “will be how both Manila and Beijing behave on future resupply missions, and whether either side can cede any ground.”