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Shanghai (AFP) - A Chinese auto glass tycoon has caused a stir by shifting part of his empire to the United States and setting up a factory in Ohio, citing high taxes and soaring labour costs at home. Cao Dewang's $600-million investment comes after Donald Trump threatened to declare Beijing a currency manipulator and slap 45 percent punitive tariffs on Chinese imports to protect American jobs. The 70-year-old tycoon's decision to open a glass factory in the eastern American state of Ohio in October -- a rare case of jobs being exported from China to the US -- triggered an...

Thailand and China are in talks about building military production facilities in Thailand, a Thai defense ministry spokesman said on Wednesday, the latest sign of warming relations between China and America's oldest ally in Asia. Relations between Thailand and the United States cooled following a May 2014 military coup that the Thai military said was necessary to end months of unrest, including street protests that led to the ouster of an elected government. The United States has said relations cannot return to normal until democracy is restored. The generals running Thailand have promised an election for 2017.

Donald Trump’s decision to break protocol and become the first president-elect in decades to speak by phone with a Taiwanese president was either a colossal blunder or a shrewd strategic coup, depending on which Beltway insider you ask. At the least, Trump’s divisive exchange with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen has sparked a substantive debate about the nature of U.S.-China-Taiwan relations and the sanctity of Beijing’s version of the “One-China” policy, which codifies China’s inalienable sovereignty over Taiwan and Tibet. Yet, as Washington braces for potential blowback from Beijing, both critics and supporters of the Trump-Tsai exchange have overlooked one key...

Taiwan says the African island nation of São Tomé and Principe has broken their diplomatic ties. Just 21 countries and governments now have diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Most of the world and the United Nations do not formally recognize Taiwan as a condition of maintaining relations with Beijing, which considers Taiwan a part of its territory. …

The U.S. Navy and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency successfully launched a salvo of two Raytheon Standard SM-6 Dual I missiles against a medium-range ballistic missile target earlier this week. USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53)—an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis destroyer—conducted the test shortly after midnight on Dec. 14 to demonstrate a Sea Based Terminal endo-atmospheric defensive capability. "This test demonstrated the capabilities MDA and the Navy are delivering to our fleet commanders," Vice Adm. Jim Syring, director of the MDA said in a statement. "The SM-6 missile and the Aegis Weapon System continue to prove that they are critical components of...

The United States on Tuesday said it has successfully located remains of the country's servicemen who went missing in Arunachal Pradesh during World War II. A Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) team carried out works on sites in the Himalayas where US aircrafts are believed to have crashed with still unaccounted for servicemen. The team visited several locations in Arunachal Pradesh to determine if the reported sites can be definitively correlated with known crash sites involving missing US servicemen. "The United States is committed to making sure all the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines who served our country come home....

The U.S. Defense Department announced on Dec. 9, 2016 that the U.S. Army had awarded an Alabama-based company $23 million to build components for the Taiwanese militaryÂ’s Chaparral air-defense missile systems. The contract award was routine. What was news to many observers is that Taiwan still operates Chaparrals. The 1960s-vintage missiles probably wonÂ’t make a dent in Chinese forces in the event China invades the island country. The U.S. Army launched development of the MIM-72 Chaparral air-defense system in 1965 after a more ambitious surface-to-air missile launcher, the MIM-46 Mauler, proved to be impractical. The Chaparral was an expedient. It...

<p>He grasped that what voters cared about were the very issues politicos were disdainfully ignoring.</p> <p>The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct and operates from cunning — and we will soon see whether we should redefine “wisdom.” But for now, for example, we have never heard a presidential candidate say such a thing as “We love our miners” — not “we like” miners, but “we love” them. And not just any miners, but “our” miners, as if, like “our vets,” the working people of our moribund economic regions were unique and exceptional people, neither clingers nor irredeemables. In Trump’s gut formulation, miners certainly did not deserve “to be put out of business” by Hillary Clinton, as if they were little more than the necessary casualties of the war against global warming. For Trump, miners were not the human equivalent of the 4,200 bald eagles that the Obama administration recently assured the wind turbine industry can be shredded for the greater good of alternate energy and green profiteering.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) — China has returned to the U.S. an unmanned underwater drone the Chinese Navy seized unlawfully last week in international waters, the Pentagon said. China's defense ministry said it handed the drone back after "friendly consultations." The Chinese Navy vessel that had seized the drone returned it near the location where it had been taken, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement issued late Monday. The incident occurred last Thursday near the Philippines. (more at the link)

"We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!"

The first hint of Donald Trump’s vision of a New World Order came when he said in a speech during the primaries that NATO was “obsolete.” The UK Independent wrote about that speech, As currently constituted, he says, NATO is ill-suited to combating international terrorism, which is for him the world’s “single biggest threat”. He especially objects to the US footing so much of the bill, saying that other allies should “pay up or get out”, and refuses to see the US as the “world’s policeman”. As he told a town hall meeting in Wisconsin: “Maybe NATO will dissolve and...

BEIJING — Only a day before a small Chinese boat sidled up to a United States Navy research vessel in waters off the Philippines and audaciously seized an underwater drone from American sailors, the commander of United States military operations in the region told an audience in Australia that America had a winning military formula. “Capability times resolve times signaling equals deterrence,” Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. told a blue-chip crowd of diplomats and analysts at the prestigious Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, the leading city in America’s closest ally in the region. In the eyes of America’s friends in...

The facts are really very simple. In the 1996 presidential campaign and during the Clinton Monicagate investigation, the Chinese government paid a total of about Seventy Seven Million Dollars in bribes and payoffs to the Clintons. The payoffs served three purposes for the Clintons, and one for the PRC. First, the Clintons were worried about funding the 1996 general election. The 1994 Congressional election had been a disaster for the Democrats. The House of Representatives experienced a 54 seat swing in favor of Newt and his team. The House went from solidly Democrat to firmly Republican. In 1996, America was...

"We should tell China that we don't want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!" https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/810288321880555520

The day before the Dalai Lama’s November 18 trip to Mongolia, Beijing issued a “strong demand” to its neighbor to cancel the visit of the “anti-Chinese separatist” or face (unstated) consequences. The Dalai Lama would be making his ninth visit to the sparsely populated nation of 3 million people, just to China’s north. Previous visits triggered retaliation from China, including the temporary closure of parts of the Sino-Mongolian border. Just like in the past, Ulaanbaatar ignored the warnings. Befitting a nation where a majority of the population practices a form of Buddhism derived from Tibet, Mongolian officials described the visit...

China said Saturday it will return the unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) it seized in the South China Sea from the U.S., the Pentagon confirmed. "We have registered our objection to China's unlawful seizure of a U.S. unmanned underwater vehicle operating in international waters in the South China Sea," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement. "Through direct engagement with Chinese authorities, we have secured an understanding that the Chinese will return the UUV to the United States," he said. China earlier had indicted it would return the unmanned device, while accusing the U.S. of having "hyped" the issue. "Upon...

Unmamed sources in Chinna have said that they had "inside" information to suggest that Trump may have been indicating a future "un" seating of Chinese leaders including Chinese "President" Xi Jin-ping-Pong if a recently seized US Drone was not immediately returned. It is also sayed that the fact that the tweet was in the past tense Trump may have already envisioned the their own demise. The Chicoms are reportedly to have said that they didn't want to take any chances. Trump had described the taking of the drone in a widely reported "Typo" tweet as an "unpresidented act"....moor nooz at...

A vessel containing meat soup, prepared more than 2,000 years ago, was discovered during archaeological excavations in China's Henan province, authorities said on Thursday. The stew, containing beef bones and other ingredients, was discovered on Monday at an archaeological tomb site in Chengyang district near the city of Xinyang, Efe news reported.

Friday evening Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin sounded the alarm on the growing “Putin wing” of the Republican Party. China is on the move, having seized a U.S. underwater drone in the South China Sea. And there are members of the Republican party, the “Code Pink Republicans,” Levin said, that would appease the Chinese in the face of this aggression. “We now have a group in the Republican party that embraces George McGovern’s foreign policy!” Levin said. Listen: “You see appeasement, isolationism, passivity in the face of evil … [which] results in more provocations as they [China] continue to test...

When president-elect Donald Trump broke with decades of foreign policy by asserting that the U.S. might abandon its acceptance of the “One China” policy and no longer regard Taiwan as a part of China, he provoked predictable outrage from Beijing. By using this threat as a bargaining chip for better trade, Trump led the Chinese government to declare that the One China policy is the “political bedrock” of U.S.-China relations. The Taiwan issue is one of China’s “core interests”, referring to a nonnegotiable policy objective that forms the basis for China’s assertiveness on the international stage. Beijing was already fuming...