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Vice President Joe Biden once told Chinese President Xi Jinping that U.S. leaders only support human rights as a matter of political optics, and that this makes the United States no better than China, according to a new New Yorker profile of Jinping. The New Yorker relates encounters between Biden and Jinping in 2011 and 2012, when both were vice presidents of their respective nations: Biden told me that Xi asked him why the U.S. put “so much emphasis on human rights.” Biden replied to Xi, “No President of the United States could represent the United States were he not...

BEIJING: China would soon commission three indigenously-built advance nuclear-powered attack submarines having a vertical launcher capable of delivering its latest supersonic anti-ship missiles, state media reported today. China Central Television (CCTV) showed a satellite picture earlier this week of three submarines anchored at an unidentified port, and reported that the vessels were China's most advanced Type-093G nuclear-powered attack submarines, just completed by a Chinese shipyard and awaiting delivery. With a teardrop hull, the submarine is longer than its predecessor, the Type-093, and has a vertical launching system, China Daily reported. RELATED Ubisoft Announces New Assassin's Creed Games Set in India,...

Pakistan's Z-10s www.top81.cn Pakistan recently took delivery of three Z-10 attack helicopters, stored at this hangar in the Qasim Army base near Rawalphindi. The helicopters' state of disassembly suggests that Pakistani technicians are working to quickly familarize themselves with these new helicopters by installing rotor blades and other parts for flight, and then combat. Since a January 2015 agreement, China has transferred three Z-10 "Thunderbolt" attack helicopters to Pakistan, which has become China's staunchest ally and largest weapons buyer. These three Z-10 helicopters are currently at a Pakistani Army base in Qasim/Dhamial, undergoing testing, maintenance training and modifications for operating...

To keep track of increasingly stealthy Russian, Chinese, and Iranian submarines, the U.S. is building a robotic ghost ship - an unmanned, autonomous patrol ship - to follow them around the high seas.

Niannian Fan, a river sciences researcher at Tsinghua University in Chengdu, China, presented new thoughts on the disappearance of the Sanxingdui culture from a walled city on the banks of China's Minjiang River some 3,000 years ago, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. "The current explanations for why it disappeared are war and flood, but both are not very convincing," Fan told Live Science. In the 1980s, scientists found two pits of broken Bronze Age jades, elephant tusks, and bronze sculptures. Similar artifacts have been found nearby at another ancient city known as Jinsha. Did the people...

Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna thanks the governments of China and Russia, which helped in the evacuation. “The situation is under control, we have information that for now everything is going well,” he said. Russia air lifted 20 Polish citizens from the capital of Yemen, Sana’a to Moscow on board two aircraft, while the Chinese navy took four Polish citizens across a narrow strait from Aden to Djibuti. Yemen has recently been invaded by a Saudi-led coalition set up to dislodge the Shia Houthis who have taken over the capital city. (an)

Former Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina on Thursday blasted Apple CEO Tim Cook's opposition to Indiana's religious freedom law as "hypocrisy." (Photo on article not shown due to license held by Getty Images) Fiorina, a potential 2016 GOP presidential contender, said Cook had a double standard and cited Apple's operations in other countries with controversial laws about gays and women in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he’s...

While the world focuses on the dangers that a nuclear-armed Iran could present in the Middle East, a potentially more dangerous and unstable nuclear proliferation is occurring in the Indian Ocean. In the coming years India, Pakistan, and perhaps China will likely deploy a significant number of nuclear weapons at sea in the Indian Ocean. This could further destabilise already unstable nuclear relationships, creating a real risk of a sea-based exchange of nuclear weapons. Observers have long seen India-Pakistan nuclear rivalry as the most unstable in the world, and South Asia as the most likely location of nuclear conflict. This...

Under the framework of the recently launched Chinese-Israeli “Water City” project, 20 officials from the municipality of Shouguang are visiting the country this week to explore a variety of Israeli innovations across the sector, the Economy Ministry announced on Monday. The trip to Israel follows Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s November visit to China, during which Israeli and Chinese officials declared the eastern Chinese coastal city of Shouguang as the future hub – or “Water City” – for Israeli water activities in the Asian nation. At the time, the decision was made by Israeli and Chinese government officials that Israeli water...

China has released pictures of an unnamed “new-type of bomber”, along with an announcement that it has carried out its first military drills in the airspace above the Western Pacific Ocean. According to a statement on the Chinese Ministry of Defence website, the drills took place over the Bashi Canal, which is between a Taiwanese island and a Philippines island.

Pakistan government has approved the purchase of eight submarines from China, as per an “in principle” decision conveyed during a hearing of the Pakistan National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Defence. Pakistan has been negotiating the purchase of six submarines – now increased to eight — from China since 2011. Pakistan Navy currently operates five French submarines: three Agosta 90B submarines purchased in the 1990s and two Agosta 70 submarines of late 1970s vintage. It also has three MG110 miniature submarines. After the recent accidents, the number of active duty submarines in Indian Navy is now down to 13 diesel-electric submarines...

David Alan Stockman interviewed on CBS-TV 60 Minutes (October 2010) Highlights of recent interview by Harry Dent. David Stockman: People don't want to hear the reality and the truth that we're facing. But I think there is an enormous appetite out in the country to get a different perspective than what you have from the media day in and day out, so I say the fed is out of control. Its balance sheet is exploded. It's printing money like never before. Zero interest rates for 70 months have basically destroyed the pricing function in the financial markets. I said...

WASHINGTON — The White House on Tuesday morning unveiled President Obama’s blueprint for cutting United States greenhouse gas pollution by nearly a third over the next decade. Mr. Obama’s plan, part of a formal submission to the United Nations ahead of efforts to forge a climate change accord in Paris in December, detailed the United States side of an ambitious joint climate change pledge the president made in November in Beijing with the Chinese president Xi Jinping. In an effort to spur other countries to enact their own domestic climate change plans leading to the Paris accord, the leaders of...

Mike Bird March 31, 2015China's new development bank, which was announced just five months ago, is becoming a massive headache for the US. Try as it might, the US government can't convince its allies to stop joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The bank will be a bit like the World Bank, providing loans to developing countries in Asia for infrastructure projects. Unlike the World Bank, China will hold the reins of the AIIB. The US administration is publicly worried that the institution won't meet high governance standards, but really seems opposed to the move because it signals a...

more than two weeks, public debate in South Africa has been dominated by a statue. Students at the University of Cape Town have been demonstrating to have the bronze figure of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes removed from its central position on campus. Rhodes bequeathed the land on which the university was built, but he also slaughtered Africans by the thousands in colonial conquest and helped lay the foundations of apartheid in South Africa.

Narendra Modi in Mahe, Seychel On February 18, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) formally cleared India's single-largest defence project: a joint Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)-Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC)-Navy project to build six nuclear-powered attack submarines or SSNs for roughly $12 billion (Rs.74,400 crore). This mammoth 'Make in India' project, nearly the size of the budget allotted this year to the three services to buy hardware ($15 billion), was not an isolated policy decision. Less than a month after he chaired the CCS, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Indian Ocean littoral countries of Seychelles, Mauritius and...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a...

When Lee Kuan Yew died Monday at age 91, the founding father of Singapore did not leave just his legacy as the prime minister whose authoritarian policies shaped a backwater British colony into the world’s fourth-wealthiest nation. He also left Singaporeans with one of the most formidable armies in the world. The tiny island state of 5.4 million, with a land area far smaller than New York City’s, has more fighter jets than Spain, Poland or Sweden. Its army has as many tanks as Italy, which is more than 400 times the size. Its navy boasts the only stealthy ships...

“The Chinese side has noticed that (Saudi Arabia has launched airstrikes against Yemen) and is deeply worried about the situation in Yemen that is getting worse,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, said at a weekly press briefing on Thursday. Expressing hope that the crisis could be resolved “through political dialogues”, Hua said, “We hope that all parties will act in accordance with relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council… and restore national stability and order at an early date.” Saudi-led attacks: widely condemned The Saudi invasion of Yemen drew condemnation from Iran, Russia, the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, Syria,...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a...