Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday said the Chinese coast guard aiming a military-grade laser that briefly blinded some crew aboard a Philippine patrol vessel in the disputed South China Sea was not enough for him to invoke a mutual defense treaty with the US, but added that he told China that such aggression should stop.
Marcos told a news conference that he also told China’s ambassador to the Philippines that escalating aggression and incursions into Philippine waters by the Chinese coast guard, navy and maritime militia forces contravene an agreement he struck with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) last month.
“Despite the fact that it was a military-grade laser that was pointed at our coast guard, I do not think that that is sufficient for it to trigger the mutual defense treaty,” Marcos said in his first public remarks about the Feb. 6 incident involving two Chinese and Philippine coast guard vessels near the disputed Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙), which is also claimed by Taiwan.
Photo: AP
Responding to a question, Marcos said he was concerned that activating the 1951 treaty would ratchet up regional tensions.
Marcos spoke to reporters in the northern resort city of Baguio, where he delivered a speech to cadets and former graduates of the Philippine Military Academy and repeated a vow to defend the country’s territory amid a new territorial spat with China.
“This country will not lose one inch of its territory,” Marcos said to applause. “We will continue to uphold our territorial integrity and sovereignty in accordance with our constitution and with international law.”
Photo: AFP / PHILIPPINE COAST GUARD
“We will work with our neighbors to secure the safety and security of our peoples,” Marcos said without elaborating.
Like his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos has taken steps to nurture friendly ties with Beijing.
He met Xi in Beijing early last month to boost relations and discuss the countries’ long-seething territorial disputes in the strategic waterway that also involve Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.
China claims the South China Sea virtually in its entirety, putting it on a collision course with other Asian claimants and separately with Washington, which lays no claims to the disputed sea, but has deployed US Navy ships and fighter jets to patrol the waters, promote freedom of mobility and challenge China’s territorial claims.
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS