US President Barack Obama called off plans to visit Asia and attend two summits because of the US government shutdown, raising questions about the strategic “pivot” to the region that he announced just two years ago.
Obama had planned to depart today for a four-nation, week-long trip. He canceled visits to Malaysia and the Philippines earlier this week because of his budget struggle in the US Congress and said on Thursday he would not attend the regional summits in Indonesia and Brunei.
The political standoff over the US budget has shut down non-essential government services and appeared likely to drag on for another week or longer. Another crisis looms in two weeks when lawmakers must decide whether to increase the US government’s US$16.7 trillion debt borrowing limit.
Photo: AFP
“The president made this decision based on the difficulty in moving forward with foreign travel in the face of a shutdown, and his determination to continue pressing his case that Republicans should immediately allow a vote to reopen the government,” the White House said.
Obama was scheduled to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, among other leaders.
Two of his main aims would have been to discuss the Syria crisis with Putin and to hold talks on a maritime code of conduct for disputed territories in the oil and gas-rich South China Sea.
“We are disappointed,” Indonesian Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said on the island of Bali, host of the APEC summit starting tomorrow.
“I think the summit will go on, there is a long-term plan, [but] without Obama, you can imagine how disappointed we are. We could hardly imagine he wouldn’t come,” he said.
Obama was also scheduled to attend ASEAN’s East Asia Summit in Brunei next week.
Xi, who was on a visit to Malaysia yesterday, did not comment on Obama’s decision. However, analysts said the no-show by Obama would work to China’s advantage.
“While his decision is perfectly understandable, it projects a poor image of America as a country that is politically dysfunctional and on the verge of another economic crisis,” said Ian Storey, senior fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. “Meanwhile, cash-rich and self-confident China will have the floor to itself.”
Obama twice postponed visits to Indonesia and Australia in 2010, because of a health reform bill and then because of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. He was absent from the APEC meeting last year in Vladivostok, Russia, because of a Democratic Party convention.
In Tokyo, Japan’s top government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, said Abe would attend the summits as planned.
“This is a domestic problem of the United States,” he said. “We hope the [Obama] administration and Congress negotiate earnestly to solve the problem as early as possible, so that the problem won’t be affecting various issues.”
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS