AUSTRALIA
Chinese dominate blacklist
Chinese and Indian citizens dominate the country’s border control blacklist, secret documents showed yesterday, with the majority of people singled out for national security reasons. The closely guarded Movement Alert List, released to the Australian newspaper under Freedom of Information laws, includes 34,189 Chinese citizens — 10 percent of the total 314,462 people who have been flagged by authorities. Indians were the second-largest group, with 21,643 citizens on the watch list, closely followed by New Zealanders (18,315) and Indonesians (16,271), June figures showed. Separate data from March showed almost half (49.24 percent) were on the list for national security reasons, with health concerns (11.08 percent) the next biggest group, primarily linked to respiratory illnesses like tuberculosis.
SOUTH KOREA
Minister travels to Russia
Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan left for Russia yesterday for talks focusing on North Korea and bilateral relations, a news report said. During his four-day trip, Kim will meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow tomorrow and discuss North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs, among other topics, Yonhap news agency said. He is accompanied by Wi Sung-lac, the chief envoy to the six-party talks on disarming the nuclear-armed North Korea. The meeting comes amid a flurry of diplomatic efforts to resume the stalled forum involving the two Koreas, Russia, China, Japan and the US.
JAPAN
Coast guard arrests Chinese
The coast guard has seized two Chinese fishing vessels and their captains for suspected illegal fishing in the Sea of Japan (East Sea), the Kyodo News agency reported. The trawlers were seized on Friday off Ishikawa Prefecture within the country’s exclusive economic zone, Kyodo quoted the coast guard as saying. It named the captains as Wang Fugui, 26, and Zheng Wenwu, 35, and said each of the ships had 17 Chinese citizens on board. Tensions have risen between the two Asian rivals over what Tokyo described last week as China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea, where the two countries have conflicting territorial claims, and the Pacific Ocean.
CHINA
Traffic pileup kills 17
The state news agency says a pre-dawn pileup on a southern expressway has killed 17 people and injured four. Xinhua news agency said the accident yesterday in Jiangxi Province involved three trucks and a passenger van. It said the pileup was triggered when a truck rear-ended another vehicle, then flipped into a lane of oncoming traffic. Twelve people were declared dead at the scene and five others died in a hospital. Serious traffic accidents are common because of lax driving habits, overloaded vehicles and bad road conditions.
NORTH KOREA
Red Cross assesses floods
The Red Cross says nearly 4,000 homes in just one province were destroyed or damaged by extensive flooding spawned by torrential rains late last month. The report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says more than 28,000 people were affected in the 12 counties in South Hwanghae Province in the southwest. The report released this week gave no independent estimate on how many people may have died during the heavy rains from July 25 to July 27, but it cited a government death toll of 26.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese