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Hard Numbers: Imran Khan faces new sentence, Russia gets economic upgrade, Philippines and Vietnam join hands in South China Sea, Germany makes big Bitcoin seizure
10: Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan and former Foreign Minister ShahMahmood Qureshi were sentenced Tuesday to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets. While Khan is already serving a three-year term on corruption charges, this is Qureshi’s first conviction. The new ruling comes just a week before general elections on Feb. 8. Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, called it “a sham case” and plans to challenge the decision in a higher court.
2.6: Is President Vladimir Putin’s military spending spree paying off? Russia’s GDP is expected to grow 2.6% in 2024, according to the International Monetary Fund, which is 1.5 percentage points higher than its October forecast. For 2025, the IMF sees GDP growth for Russia easing to just 1.1%.
2: Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed two memorandums of understanding with Vietnam on Tuesday to boost cooperation on maritime security in the South China Sea. Vietnam also agreed to a five-year trade deal to supply up to two million tons of white rice to Manila. China, which is less than thrilled by such agreements between its neighbors, launched military drills in the disputed waters earlier this month as the US and Philippines initiated their exercises in the region.
50,000: German authorities on Tuesday seized 50,000 Bitcoins worth nearly $2.17 billion in Saxony. While no charges have been filed yet, police suspect that two men who purchased the cryptocurrency did so with profits from a piracy website. Police are investigating unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works and money laundering.
Hard Numbers: Deadly terror attack in Paris, troubled South China Sea waters, migrants in English Channel, COP28 methane plans, twins for 70-year-old mom
3: A 26-year-old French national who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State attacked three people near the Eiffel Tower in Paris late Saturday, killing a German tourist and leaving two others, including a British man, wounded. President Emmanuel Macron called the incident "a terrorist attack."
135: More than 135 Chinese vessels “swarmed” the Julian Felipe reef off the coast of the Philippines in the South China Sea on Sunday. China and the Philippines have been involved in an increasing number of such incidents, as China aggressively asserts its claim to the sea under its so-called nine-dash line.
190: French authorities rescued 190 migrants off the coast of Calais in northern France over the weekend. The migrants were trying to cross the English Channel on dinghies to reach Britain, but authorities did not specify from which country the migrants had originally come.
30: At this week’s COP28 meeting in the UAE, the Biden administration unveiled final rules aimed at reducing the US oil and gas industry’s release of methane to help in the fight against climate change. Nations attending the summit had to detail how they will cut methane emissions by 30% from 2020 levels by 2030.
70:A 70-year-old Ugandan woman has become the oldest woman in Africa to give birth. Safina Namukwaya delivered a boy and a girl on Wednesday by cesarean section after conceiving through IVF. Born at 34 weeks' gestation, the babies are healthy and weigh 2 kilograms each. They were Namukwaya’s second delivery in three years, following the birth of a girl in 2020.Can Biden-Xi meeting ease tensions?
In the lead-up to the upcoming meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the APEC Summit in San Francisco, America’s China policy chief sat down with Beijing’s top border official to discuss the increasingly volatile situation in the South China and East China Seas.
US Department of State’s China Coordinator Mark Lambert spoke with Chinese Foreign Office’s Director-General for Boundary and Ocean Affairs Hong Liang in Beijing, with both sides attempting to lower the temperature after another week of tensions in the region.
On Friday, Canadian Defence Minister Bill Blair accused Chinese warplanes of buzzing a Canadian helicopter over international waters in the South China Sea and firing flares at it, endangering the crew. On Saturday, China’s Defence Ministry hit back that the helicopter had “unknown intent” and engaged in a “malicious” and “provocative” act with “ulterior motives.”
These salvos come the same week that China accused a Philippine military vessel of sailing too close to Scarborough Shoal, territory that China seized in 2012, but which falls within the Philippine’s Exclusive Economic Zone according to international maritime law. And late last month, Manila accused a Chinese coast guard ship of ramming two Philippine ships near Second Thomas, or Ayungin, Shoal, which also lies within its EEZ.
This backdrop sets the tone not only for Biden and Xi’s meeting, but for Taiwan’s presidential elections, scheduled for January 2024. According to Rick Waters, managing director of Eurasia Group’s China practice and, until recently, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for China and Taiwan, “The challenge for the [US] president going into the meetings in San Francisco is going to be this: if you look carefully at what the Chinese say about Biden and about his Taiwan policy, they don’t doubt his intentions.” Biden has stated on four occasions that the US would defend Taiwan in the event of an attack by China.
Some observers believe US diplomatic efforts are geared to avoid opening a third front in addition to the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel, which would strain Washington’s military and economic resources. We will be watching to see whether Biden’s diplomacy can successfully calm the waters.Rough waters in the South China Sea
Philippine officials say a Chinese coast guard ship and an accompanying vessel rammed a Philippine coast guard ship and a military supply boat in the South China Sea on Sunday. The incidents took place near the Second Thomas, or Ayungin, shoal in the Spratly Island chain near a Philippine naval outpost in an area Beijing claims as its territorial waters.
The outpost was built atop a World War II-era warship that was purposefully grounded in 1999 to serve as a bulwark against China’s expansionism in the area. Situated 200 kilometers off the Philippine coast, its personnel rely on regular resupply deliveries from the mainland. The Chinese coast guard claimed the Philippine vessels “trespassed” “without authorization” despite several radio warnings and blamed the Philippines for the collisions. In response, MaryKay Carlson, US ambassador to Manila, posted to X that “the United States condemns the PRC’s latest disruption of a legal Philippine resupply mission to Ayungin shoal, putting the lives of Filipino service members at risk.”
The confrontations follow a near-miss earlier this month when a Chinese coast guard vessel came within three feet of colliding with a Philippine coast guard ship. In the past few months, Chinese vessels have also reportedly sailed dangerously close to Philippine government ships at which they fired water cannons and deployed “military-grade lasers."
China has long attempted to enforce the “nine-dash line” by which it claims ownership of 90% of the South China Sea. Analysts believe Beijing’s increased belligerence is designed to test the limits of the US-Philippine defense treaty, by using “gray zone” tactics just below the threshold that would trigger US engagement. Should China overstep either by accident or design, however, America could be drawn into yet another armed conflict – when it is already supporting allies on two other fronts, in Ukraine and Israel.Vladimir Putin, film critic
This summer the only thing hotter than the melting planet has been the BOX OFFICES. Hear what esteemed film critics Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un thought of the season’s blockbusters.
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Canada caught up in US-China maritime tensions
This week, China sailed a warship very close to a US destroyer and a Canadian frigate transiting through the Taiwan Strait, which separates the Chinese mainland from the self-ruled island. The encounter follows a recent near-air collision between a Chinese fighter jet and a US spy plane over the South China Sea.
The US and Canada say they were conducting what is known in navy parlance as a Freedom of Navigation Operation or FONOP under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which guarantees all ships the right to "innocent" passage. Yet for China, these actions are anything but innocent: FONOPs seek to provoke Beijing by sailing through disputed waters to challenge China's claims in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, one of the world's busiest maritime shipping routes.
The buzzing incident also puts a spotlight on Canadian FONOPs in this part of the world, which are becoming more frequent as relations with China get frostier. (Interestingly, Canadians like doing FONOPs with Americans in China-claimed waters but not in the Arctic, where Ottawa and Washington have a beef over who controls the Northwest Passage.)
Still, by joining US-led FONOPs in testy Pacific waters, Canada risks getting caught in the crossfire of rising US-China tensions — especially over Taiwan. And the harder China pushes back, the bigger the odds of a miscalculation that could trigger an armed conflict.
"China doesn’t seem terribly worried about an accident," says Anna Ashton, Eurasia Group's top China analyst. Beijing "is probably hoping to intimidate the US, Canada, and other countries into conducting fewer transits and other activities in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea because that helps China assert greater de facto control over these regions."
Hard Numbers: South China Sea war games, Chinese sour on America, US chipmaking labor shortage, Ya Ya breaks the internet
24: In a recent war game run by Chinese military planners, 24 hypersonic anti-ship missiles were able to sink the USS Gerald R. Ford, the US Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, every single time in 20 simulated battles. In the exercise, the US fleet is attacked after ignoring Chinese warnings not to approach a China-claimed island in the disputed South China Sea.
70,000-90,000: The US CHIPS Act is pouring billions of dollars into bringing semiconductor factories back to American soil to counter China. But, who will make the chips? According to one estimate, the US chipmaking industry faces a shortage of between 70,000 and 90,000 workers (engineers and technicians) in the coming years.
12.2: Only 12.2% of Chinese people “like” the United States, according to a new survey about views on national security by Tsinghua University, Xi Jinping's alma mater. The most popular country is Russia (54.8%) and the least, India (8%).
230 million: China's superstar giant panda Ya Ya finally returned to Beijing this week after 20 years at the Memphis Zoo in the US. Ya Ya, whose troubled journey encapsulates the current state of US-China ties, has become such an internet sensation among patriotic Chinese that a hashtag following her homecoming got 230 million views on Weibo, China's answer to Twitter.Hard Numbers: Australia ups its defense game, Biden’s emission limits, deadly blasts in Pakistan, Champagne destroys beer (literally)
19 billion: Following a major defense review, Australia is forking out A$19 billion ($12 billion) to conduct its biggest military overhaul since World War II. With an eye on China’s expansionism in the South China Sea and its increasingly dicey bilateral relations with Beijing, Canberra will procure missiles with longer striking capabilities, with munitions built domestically.
3,400: The Biden administration will soon announce limits on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions coming from existing power plants, compelling the country's 3,400 plants to use carbon-capture technology. Currently, the plants — only 20 of which use the technology — generate a quarter of the country’s planet-warming pollution.
17: At least 17 people were killed in northwest Pakistan on Monday when two explosives went off at a police counterterrorism office in Kabal. It’s unclear who was behind the attack, but there has been an uptick in terrorism in recent months, particularly in border regions.
2,352: Belgian customs authorities crushed 2,352 cans of perfectly good Miller High Life beer after the Comité Champagne – which represents growers and traders of the French bubbly – complained that the American beer behemoth’s use of the “champagne of beers” slogan infringed upon the region’s protected right to the term “champagne.” Belgian customs said the Comité Champagne even covered the bill.