The Philippine navy inherited the former U.S. tank-landing ship USS Harnett County in 1976, and ran it deliberately aground at Second Thomas Shoal in 1999. The Sierra Madre is now effectively a shipwreck, but the Philippine military has not decommissioned it. This makes the ship an extension of the government and means any attack on the ship is tantamount to an assault against the Philippines. Manila deploys civilian boats with a fresh batch of marines and 10 tons of food for resupply. In a bid to draw global attention to what Philippine officials have called China’s bullying tactics, they have invited more than a dozen journalists, TV cameramen and photographers to come along on the 30-hour-plus journey from the Philippine mainland.

Wait isn't this communique literally the exact same points as China's one last year, except they removed the parts about peace talks and rebuilding after?

Unrelated:

US Green Berets deploying to Taiwan’s front-line

The US is quietly arming Taiwan to the teeth

PRESIDENT TSAI ING-WEN RECEIVES NED DEMOCRACY SERVICE MEDAL

I guess the US really likes protecting the rights of pedophiles...

Dalai Lama apologises after kissing boy and asking him to ‘suck my tongue’

In unrelated news, the USS Eisenhower has moved about 1000km since last week, away from Yemen and towards the Suez Canal. Completely unrelated, I'm told.

fuck off all you mods are MBFC apologists

shit site run by shit people

The death of personal privacy happens not with a bang but with a whimper.

I know naturalgasbad@lemmy.ca is our resident climate activist, but they were tempbanned for shit talking some idiot peddling MBFC... I'm posting this, but know where it came from and pls unban them.

Camp David Accords? To shreds, you say?

All the complaints about supposed violations of international law that the US has made in the past really ring hollow now that Johnson has said the quiet part out loud: international bodies are designed to control the "impoverished, barbaric" Global East and South, not the "enlightened" Global West.

Usually not the biggest fan of bellingcat because they tend to be overconfident (and often wrong as a result), but when you have a surplus of information like in this case there's little they can deny...

April Fools right guys? Haha... ha...

The line between joint counterterrorism and an invasion is drawn with chalk in a rainstorm.

Bigoted against freedom and democracy

China and Taiwan is a domestic issue stemming from civil war, which you'd know if you ever picked up a history book. There's a reason Taiwan's current territorial claims are larger than the entirety of mainland China's (China signed some treaty with Vietnam, which Taiwan does not recognize).

China doesn't typically intervene in clearly foreign affairs unless Chinese citizens are harmed. This is as true in Sri Lanka as it will be in Pakistan. Balochistan's days are numbered.

Edit: isn't it just a little odd that Russia, Iran, and Pakistan (but really China) just conveniently got hit by terrorist attacks in the first 3 months of 2024?

Real "cultural genocide" is when your schools have specific halal canteens in the dining hall.

Freedom and democracy is when you outlaw Islamic schools.

Following the fall of the Qing Dynasty (and the ensuing Kuomintang government led by Sun Yat-sen and then Chiang Kai-shek), Tibet separated from China (an de facto independence which was never recognized by either China, Britain, or India) and began negotiations with the British to demarcate the line separating Tibet from India. In an effort to gain de jure recognition of the Tibetan state, Tibet gave up Arunachal Pradesh (among other territories) to the British. China at the time has bigger issues to worry about (internal turmoil from regime change, the Japanese threat, and then the civil war that saw the formation of the PRC), and while it never recognized British-Tibetan negotiations it took no action against it. In 1949, the PRC officially supplants the ROC and by 1950, Mao Zedong annexes Tibet with less than 300 total casualties from both sides.

The British negotiated with a government they didn't recognize to take territory away from a government they did. Sounds familiar? Maybe it's understandable, since Britain had more pressing concerns in Europe at the time.

Gee it sure sucks that Evergrande collapsed. What a horrible sign for the Chinese economy!

The third holiest site in Islam. Access restricted.

Huh.