New Zealand and China will soon hold a series of high-level meetings and work to promote free trade, the countries’ governments said yesterday, amidst growing concerns about US trade protectionism.
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) and New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Murray McCully yesterday met in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland, a day after Wang met with New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English.
“We were setting the scene for a range of high-level meetings and engagements,” McCully told reporters in a telephone interview yesterday.
He declined to say which leaders from the two countries were meeting or when they would meet.
However, he said the meetings would provide opportunities for investing in New Zealand.
“Other regions in the world in particular are starting to ask questions about the benefits of globalization and free trade,” McCully said.
“We are countries that have led the way in the [free-trade] process and need to show leadership again in demonstrating ... the benefits of continuing down this path,” he added.
The pair discussed the upgrade of the nations’ bilateral free-trade agreement, China’s possible involvement in what remains of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations and New Zealand’s role in China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative.
International focus has centered on China’s role as a steadying force in global affairs amid a turbulent start by new US President Donald Trump, whose first weeks in office have been marked by media feuds and protests.
McCully said he told Wang that he would like to see China in the TPP and they agreed this should be discussed further.
New Zealand and Australia have said that they hope to salvage the TPP by encouraging China and other Asian countries to join the trade pact after Trump kept an election pledge to abandon the accord.
Wang invited New Zealand to attend China’s “One Belt, One Road” summit in May and McCully said a New Zealand government minister, yet to be announced, would attend.
The two had agreed New Zealand should ensure the government’s 30-year infrastructure plan matched China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy where possible.
New Zealand was the first Western country to sign a free-trade agreement with China in 2008. China is now New Zealand’s largest goods export partner, with the nation’s exports to China totaling NZ$12.2 billion (US$8.8 billion) in the year to June last year.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.