U.S. Navy ships and planes will transit the Taiwan strait in the next two weeks.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby condemned Chinese military drills in the area and said the Pentagon had ordered the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and her escorts to remain near Taiwan to “monitor the situation.”
His location in Kabul suggests a form of Taliban sanctuary, undermining the regime’s claims to cutting ties with transnational terrorists.
On Monday, President Biden revealed that a U.S. drone strike killed al-Qaida leader, and mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Ayman al-Zawahiri over the weekend. Al-Zawahiri was reportedly on the balcony of a safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan. Last week, the United States participated in a regional conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan focused on counterterrorism, where Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said his regime had followed through on commitments to not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for transnational terrorism. Al-Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul seemingly undercuts Muttaqi’s remarks and the Taliban’s supposed promise to cut ties with groups like al-Qaida. It also complicates discussions held last week between Taliban and U.S. officials on unfreezing Afghan Central Bank assets, which could help ease Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis.
As Beijing promotes its concept of global security, Washington should project a positive vision for the international rules-based order.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, some hoped that China would use its “no limits” partnership with Moscow and multifaceted relationship with Kyiv to help prevent the conflict from escalating. The European Union’s foreign policy chief pointed to China as the obvious mediator and some among China’s policy elite also called publicly on their government to play a proactive role in helping to resolve the war. One prominent American intellectual urged Chinese President Xi Jinping to seize his “Teddy Roosevelt Moment,” referring to Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize winning mediation of the 1905 Russia-Japan war. For its part, Beijing indicated it was prepared to help mediate but it would do so “in its own way.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that China’s military exercises aimed at Taiwan, including missiles fired into Japan’s exclusive economic zone, represent a “significant escalation” and that he has urged Beijing to back down.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Thursday the Western military alliance has the joint tasks of both supporting Ukraine in its fight against a Russian invasion and to prevent the conflict from spreading into a war between Russia and NATO.
China’s urging “flexibility” on North Korea appears to coincide with the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions in the region.
“According to unclassified intelligence reports to Congress, there are five key Chinese banks and a specially created holding company that funds the North Korean missile and nuclear technology programs.” — Peter Huessy, Real Clear Defense, August 10, 2017.
Every visit by a foreign leader to Iran draws considerable attention, not to mention criticism, in Israel. A visit, however, by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the leader of a global power working to establish an anti-American axis, is cause for greater concern. While bilateral cooperation between Russia and Iran is not unprecedented, Israel has hoped such relations would remain limited in scope due to the engrained competition between the two for influence in Syria and Moscow’s fear of getting too close to a “regional pariah.” As recently as 2018, some Israeli experts and policymakers even hoped that Russia would “squeeze Iran out of Syria” for Israel’s benefit.
Since coming to power last year, the Taliban has increasingly reverted to form on almost every level. The killing of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul safe house on July 31 only underscores the group’s continued close ties with the Taliban, particularly the Haqqani network. Taliban leaders are also steadily reimposing the world’s most extreme restrictions by far on women and girls, returning to their old practices of “disappearing” women by closing off their education, restricting their travel, dictating their dress, and limiting their movement.
TOURISTS, CLAD in shorts and sandals, gathered on China’s Pingtan island. Some clutched umbrellas to ward off the sun. Those with cameras tended to point them at the blue waters of the Haitan Strait, which divides Pingtan from Fujian, a province on the country’s east coast. Their holiday snaps on August 4th captured military helicopters swarming overhead and rockets streaking into the sky. These were some of the first missiles fired from the Chinese mainland towards the waters off Taiwan in 26 years.
Three Anti-Stock Theft Unit officers were injured on Monday after suspected Al-Shabaab militants attacked Mandera’s Elram base.
Elram is about 10kms to the Somalia border.