China and Russia were holding a joint military exercise yesterday, with the drill seen as a chance to beef up “anti-terrorism” cooperation after a flare-up of violence in Xinjiang.
The “Peace Mission 2009” five-day exercise in northeast China comes weeks after China’s worst ethnic unrest in decades between Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese in the far-western region of Xinjiang that killed at least 197 people.
“To some extent, the July 5 Xinjiang riot pushed forward anti-terrorism cooperation between China and Russia,” the China Daily newspaper quoted Major Wang Haiyun (王海雲), a former Chinese military attache to Russia, as saying.
Russia itself has been grappling with rising violence in the North Caucasus regions of Ingushetia, Dagestan and Chechnya. Russia and China are also wary of a rising tide of instability in post-Soviet Central Asia that has spilled over from Afghanistan.
“The situation in Central Asia itself, including Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, is not so good, so that’s the most likely area of practical cooperation. And in fact they’re learning new ways to fight against Islamic insurgents and Uighurs,” said Vassily Kashin, a Chinese military expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Moscow.
Russia and China are the core members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which some experts say is an attempt to form an alternative military bloc to NATO.
The SCO’s members also include the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
“Some NATO officials ... fancy it is up to them to look after world order, performing the role of the world’s policeman,” Russian military analyst Viktor Litovkin said. “But the situation in Afghanistan shows that NATO, without Russia, without assistance from the Central Asian states, China and other leading nations of the region, is unable to deal alone with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.”
But analysts said the smaller scale of the bilateral exercise compared with one in 2007 under the SCO, reflects a recent cooling of Sino-Russian military ties.
“In reality, they are downgrading or reducing their military ties for the past couple of years,” said Andrew Yang (楊念祖), the head of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies in Taiwan.
“[China has] already reached a stage where they can produce or develop their own indigenous and advanced weapons systems. They’re no longer totally reliant on Russian support.”
When asked during a video link with Beijing what new weapons Russia would show off during the drills, military analyst Litovkin said he believed there would not be any.
Crowds in Bangladesh are flocking to snap photographs with an unlikely social media star — an albino buffalo with flowing blond hair nicknamed “Donald Trump” that is due to be sacrificed within days. Owner Zia Uddin Mridha, 38, said his brother named the 700kg bull over its flowing helmet of hair resembling the signature look of the US president. “My younger brother picked this name because of the buffalo’s extraordinary hair,” he said at his farm in Narayanganj, just outside the capital, Dhaka. Mridha said that a constant stream of curious visitors — social media fans, onlookers and children — have come throughout
The Philippines said it has asked the country’s Supreme Court to allow it to arrest former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s chief drug war enforcer to stand trial in an international tribunal. The International Criminal Court (ICC) last week unsealed an arrest warrant against Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, accusing him along with Duterte and other “coperpetrators” of the “crime against humanity of murder.” Dela Rosa briefly sought refuge in the Philippine Senate last week while asking the Philippine Supreme Court to stop an ongoing attempt by government agents to arrest him. “By his own conduct, he has placed himself outside the protection of
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library. They flipped through its digitized pages and found their sought-after treasure: the oldest surviving English poem. “We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, a visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin’s school of English. The poem was also within the main body of Latin text, she said, calling it “extraordinary.” Composed in Old English by a Northumbrian agricultural worker in the 7th century, Caedmon’s Hymn appears within some copies of
RSS