China announces more military exercises near Taiwan
Just a day after the largest-ever military exercises near Taiwan ended, China announced new operations in the area.
It is a sign that Beijing will continue its military pressure on Taiwan and could normalize its presence around the island before gradually cutting off access to airspace and waters.
The Taiwan Ministry of Defense said it had discovered multiple Chinese warships involved in nearly 40 missions near the island, including 21 crossing the informal median line in the Taiwan Strait between the island and the mainland.
Background: Beijing threw the military exercises as punishment for last week’s visit by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But they also gave a warning to allied countries like Japan and served as training for a possible attack.
context: Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader in generations, has made it clear that he sees uniting Taiwan and China as an important goal. He is also keen to project a strong image for a Communist Party congress scheduled for the fall, when he is expected to be confirmed for a third term.
Related: When a Taiwanese democracy activist was jailed in China, his wife drew international attention to his plight.
The pungent stench of the war in Ukraine
“There was a mass grave with 300 people, and I was standing on the edge,” writes Natalia Yermak, a Ukrainian reporter and translator for The Times. “The chalky body bags were piled up in the pit, visible. A moment before that I was a different person, one who never knew what the wind smelled like after flying over the dead one pleasant summer afternoon.”
Yermak reported from Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, near the front lines of the war with Russia, where deaths are an “inevitable reality that feels like the air in your lungs.”
Our coverage of the war between Russia and Ukraine
She didn’t think such tragedies would follow her west – but once Yermak returned to Kiev, she learned that her best friend’s cousin had been killed fighting in the east and that she would soon have to stand over another grave. .
“It was an experience many Ukrainians knew,” Yermak wrote. “Five months after the Russian invasion began on a large scale, the front lines of the wars mean little. Rocket attacks and the news of deaths and casualties have blackened almost every part of the country like poison.”
Other war news:
Afghanistan is on a precipice
A year after the US military left Afghanistan, the country finds itself in a position of dire need.
The magnitude of the suffering there today is hard to fathom. Despite more than $100 billion in development spending by the West, Afghanistan has remained one of the poorest and most aid-dependent states in the world. Actions by the country’s fundamentalist Taliban government, such as largely denying young women education and ordering women to wear burqas, can undermine global goodwill and deplete the country’s workforce, especially in critical areas such as medicine.
Even members of the government have expressed frustration at the culture war being encouraged by the ministry for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice, especially those responsible for reinvigorating a failing state.
“Why are we making trouble for ourselves with these announcements? Just do your job,” a Taliban bureaucrat, a former military commander, told The Times Magazine. “People only hear these announcements about clothing — they don’t see any real work.”
When President Biden announced… Last week, when Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri was killed in a US drone strike in Kabul, he appeared to be exaggerating al-Zawahri’s role in major attacks.
THE LAST NEWS
world news
Current artificial intelligence technology is not really conscious and cannot create robots that can emote, converse or jam to lead vocals like a human. But it can mislead people, writes my colleague Cade Metz.
Life lived
Olivia Newton-John sang pop hits in the 70s and 80s and starred in “Grease,” one of the most popular music films of its time. She died Monday at the age of 73.
ART AND IDEAS
The Invincible Spotted Lantern Fly
Scientists say there’s only one option when you see a spotted lanternfly in the US: kill it by sight.
For years, US officials have urged people to crush the attractive yet destructive insects, which scientists believe arrived in the country in 2011 in a shipment of rocks. But the invasive insects, native to parts of Asia, are spreading in New York City and elsewhere.
Freelance bug squishers can’t turn back the lantern fly tide on their own. But lanternflies, an urban ecologist told The Times, “invite a lot of participation.” She hopes that civilian exterminators will involve their representatives in the pest and also turn their attention to other invasive species.
Invasive pests are persistent. Rabbits in Australia became an environmental and economic pest after they were introduced in the 19th century. Scientists killed hundreds of millions of them by introducing the myxoma virus — the deadliest vertebrate virus — but as Carl Zimmer wrote in June, the rabbits adapted and started an evolutionary arms race.
But when New Yorkers can’t control the lantern fly, there’s a silver lining: They feed on the Tree of Heaven, a tough, stinky invader with whom city dwellers have a love-hate relationship.