Five Chinese research vessels, including ships used for space and missile tracking and underwater mapping, were active in the northwest Pacific last month, as the US stepped up military exercises, data compiled by a Guam-based group shows.
Rapid militarization in the northern Pacific gets insufficient attention, the Pacific Center for Island Security said, adding that it makes island populations a potential target in any great-power conflict.
“If you look at the number of US and bilateral and multilateral exercises, there is a lot of activity,” Leland Bettis, the director of the group that seeks to flag regional security risks, said in an interview.
Photo: AFP
“Is the fact that the Chinese are sending research vessels into this area to map what is effectively undersea battle space surprising? Probably not,” he said.
The center’s Micronesia Security Monitor, launched yesterday, showed three Chinese research vessels, including the space and missile tracking ship Yuanwang 7, near the tiny Pacific island of Kiribati over the last month.
A Pacific Ocean neighbor of Hawaii with close ties to Beijing after switching recognition from Taiwan in 2019, Kiribati has a vast exclusive economic zone spanning 3.6 million square kilometers.
Last year it expressed concern at China’s test of an intercontinental missile that landed near its waters.
Two more Chinese research vessels traveled east of the US territory of Guam, near island states with US defense compacts, the Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands, the monitor showed.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment on the purpose of the Pacific research vessel activity. Kiribati did not respond to a request for comment.
Between August and this month, the US has held nine multilateral war drills near Guam with allies, the monitor showed.
Exercise Malabar — which saw Australia, India, Japan and the US drill anti-submarine warfare and air defenses — concluded yesterday with the Australian Defence Force saying the exercise was important to “deter coercion in the Indo-Pacific.”
The US has military bases in Guam and Marshall Islands, and overflight rights and maritime access to three freely associated states, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.
Palau and the Marshall Islands are diplomatic allies of Taiwan.
“Thirty years ago the US presence in these places would have been a deterrent; today that makes us a target, as a result of modern technology,” Bettis, who lives in Guam, said shortly before yesterday’s launch.
The monitor’s visuals also showed the spread of the US military footprint across Micronesia, including upgraded wharves and airfields.
The project is funded by commercial donors, the Carnegie Corp and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS