The Philippines yesterday said that it has shelved planned improvements on a military airstrip in the disputed South China Sea to support its bid for a UN ruling against Beijing over the tense territorial confrontation.
The Philippines infuriated China in March by asking a UN tribunal to declare Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea a violation of international law.
China claims almost all of the sea, a vital avenue for world trade that is also believed to harbor vast oil and gas reserves.
However, its claims overlap in parts with those of Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino III’s spokeswoman Abigail Valte said that the government had suspended long-planned upgrades on a military runway in the disputed Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島) to boost chances of a favorable ruling at the UN.
“We wanted to maintain the moral high ground in light of the case we filed at the [UN] arbitration tribunal regarding the West Philippine Sea,” Valte said, using the Filipino name for the area.
“We chose... to ease tensions and avoid any incident that may be construed as ramping up tensions or trying to provoke any of the claimant countries,” Valte said yesterday over Philippine government radio.
The small runway lies on Thitu Island (Jhongye Island, 中業島), the largest of several islands and reefs in the Spratly group that are garrisoned by Filipino soldiers, but also claimed by Taiwan and China.
China has refused to take part in UN arbitration with the Philippines and told Manila that bilateral ties would suffer.
Valte dismissed suggestions that suspending the airstrip project would allow China to ramp up its increasingly assertive efforts to stake its claims in the South China Sea.
“In our view, it will not weaken our position,” she added.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
RSS