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TOKYO – Vice foreign ministers from Japan and China held a strategic dialogue Monday for the first time in four and a half years, as the countries focus on shared interests amid a host of diplomatic challenges.

Masataka Okano and Chinese counterpart Ma Zhaoxu discussed developments in the East and South China seas as well as Ukraine during their talk in Tokyo.

Other topics included Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and the detention of Japanese nationals in China.

Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa and Chinese counterpart Wang Yi are considering holding talks on the sidelines of ASEAN-hosted meetings in Laos starting Thursday.

China is eager to bolster ties with Japan ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, concerned that a harsher stance by Washington could lead Tokyo to follow suit.

Beijing also awaits the outcome of the leadership race in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party scheduled for next month, which will decide the country’s next prime minister.

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Critics say the legislation is fundamentally undemocratic and would undermine Israeli academia, because it restricts free speech and allows politicians to weaponise accusations that should be handled by the legal system.

Sivan said the legislation was dangerous for its broad restrictions and its narrow focus on universities, adding that Israel already had laws against incitement to terror that cover all residents.

“What they are trying to do is subject academics to stricter rules than other residents of Israel, where a violation of state laws is not judged in court but rather by a government-appointed administrator, with no process or opportunity for the accused one to defend him or herself.

The Association of University Heads, Israel (Vera) said in a public letter that the student union billboards backing the law were a divisive “campaign of persecution and incitement” that could lead to violence.

One of the academics targeted, Anat Matar from the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University, said the role of students in drafting and promoting a law to silence their lecturers was particularly disturbing.

Vera warned in a public letter that the draft law would also fuel international sanctions campaigns against Israeli universities by undermining their academic independence.

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The Philippines occupies Second Thomas Shoal but China also claims it, and increasingly hostile clashes at sea have sparked fears of larger conflicts that could involve the United States.

Chinese coast guard and other forces have used powerful water cannons and dangerous blocking maneuvers to prevent food and other supplies from reaching Filipino navy personnel at Manila’s outpost at the shoal, on a long-grounded and rusting warship, the BRP Sierra Madre.

The violent faceoff wounded several Filipino navy personnel, including one who lost his thumb, in a chaotic skirmish that was captured in video and photos that were later made public by Philippine officials.

In addition to China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have been locked in separate but increasingly tense territorial disputes in the waterway, which is regarded as a potential flashpoint and a delicate fault line in the U.S.-China regional rivalry.

The U.S. military has deployed Navy ships and fighter jets for decades in what it calls freedom of navigation and overflight patrols, which China has opposed and regards as a threat to regional stability.

Washington has no territorial claims in the disputed waters but has repeatedly warned that it is obligated to defend the Philippines, its oldest treaty ally in Asia, if Filipino forces, ships and aircraft come under an armed attack, including in the South China Sea.

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An MP for the radical-left France Unbowed party has sparked outrage after saying Israeli athletes are not welcome at the Paris Olympics and calling for protests against their presence.

Yonathan Arfi, the head of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), described the comments as “indecent” and “irresponsible”, accusing Portes of “putting a target on the backs of Israeli athletes”.

Arfi reminded the MP that 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics and said the country’s Olympians were “already the most in danger” at the Games.

Portes later told Le Parisien newspaper that French diplomats should put pressure on the International Olympic Committee to ban the Israeli flag and anthem at the Games, which open on Friday, “as is done for Russia”.

The French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said: “The hints of antisemitism in his [Portes’] comments are obvious.”

Israel’s football team is scheduled to play its first match of the Olympics against Mali in Paris’s Parc des Princes stadium on Wednesday, two days before the opening ceremony.

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Donald Trump has said China’s president wrote him a “beautiful note” after the assassination attempt a week ago, as he continued to court leaders whom Joe Biden has criticised as dictators.

In his first campaign rally since narrowly escaping the attempt on his life in Pennsylvania, Trump told a crowd in Michigan on Saturday: “[President Xi Jinping] wrote me a beautiful note the other day when he heard about what happened.”

As well as familiar attacks on Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, Trump also used the rally in Grand Rapids to hail Xi and Vladimir Putin as “smart, tough” figures who “love their country”, echoing praise he gave in 2022 of the Russian president’s strategy to invade Ukraine.

Still wearing a small wound dressing a week after the shooting, Trump also publicly supported the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, saying he was right in saying that “we have to have somebody that can protect us”.

In one letter, about a meeting in Singapore in June 2018, Kim wrote: “Even now I cannot forget that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched.”

After a summit in Vietnam in February 2019, Kim wrote that “every minute we shared 103 days ago in Hanoi was also a moment of glory that remains a precious memory”.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky struck an unusually subdued tone as he addressed his nation this week, hinting at a willingness to negotiate with Russia for the first time since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion more than two years ago.

At the same time, questions are emerging about the willingness of some of Ukraine’s closest and most important allies – notably the United States and Germany – to continue pouring resources into the conflict in support of Kyiv.

Speaking to CNN from the Aspen Security Forum, Herbst said that it was possible Zelensky was trying to reach out to the potential future Trump administration by stressing he would be willing to negotiate – as long as the deal on the table is just.

Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, said that considering Putin’s public demands, Zelensky’s words were likely meant as a message to the rest of the world.

The southern front – which stretches from the Donbas in eastern Ukraine across the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, with Russian-occupied territory creating a land bridge between Russia and Crimea – will be a key target.

He believes Kyiv could “speak with some justification of Ukrainian victory in this war,” even if Ukraine doesn’t manage to get back all of its pre-war territory – as long as it reclaims enough to be an economically viable and secure state.

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In the months before the Israeli invasion, Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah was a lifeline, a place where thousands sought shelter or scrabbled to raise funds to cross into neighbouring Egypt.

Social media video and satellite images show the destruction of the Rafah crossing point, previously the last remaining passenger route out of Gaza, after Israeli forces seized control of the area in early May.

Soon afterwards, Israel said it had “operational control” of the entire Philadelphi corridor, a slim strip of land that runs next to the border with Egypt, where an Israeli presence is prohibited by the 1979 peace treaty between the two nations.

The moves appear designed to support the long-term presence of Israeli troops in Gaza, signalling little end to a war that has already lasted over nine months, the longest in Israel’s history.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a highly symbolic visit to the Rafah crossing in recent days, inspecting a lookout point at the Philadelphi corridor, shortly before flying to Washington to address Congress and meet Biden.

David Mencer, a spokesperson for Netanyahu, said: “With the intensive phase of this war coming to an end, the prime minister talks about a longer conflict, the necessity to go into Gaza to defeat terrorists when they raise their heads as needs be.”

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has blocked plans for a field hospital in Israel to treat sick and injured children from Gaza, according to reports.The site was announced earlier this week by Defence Minister Yoav Gallant as a temporary measure to provide treatment while the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt remains closed to civilians.

Since the conflict began last year, there have been numerous reports and widespread international concern about its impact on children and the number suffering serious physical injuries.

Mr Gallant said the temporary hospital would be used to address the most urgent humanitarian needs until a permanent system for the evacuation and treatment of sick children could be established.

He said it would treat those suffering with conditions including cancer, diabetes, and orthopaedic injuries.However, on Thursday the Mr Netanyahu’s office announced that he “does not approve the establishment of a hospital for Gazans within Israeli territory - therefore, it will not be established”.An Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the AFP news agency that the defence ministry had asked the prime minister’s office to help speed up the evacuation of patients from Gaza two weeks ago.

“No response was received, so the minister issued an order to the army to establish a field hospital within Israeli territory as an immediate solution for sick children,” they said.Mr Netanyahu’s military secretary Major General Roman Gofman told the Ynet news site that there had not been enough progress in creating a corridor for transporting sick and injured Gazans to other countries and this was why the hospital did not go ahead.The episode is just the latest sign of tension in the Israeli government to show in recent months.

In April, British surgeon Dr Victoria Rose, who had been working in Gaza, told the BBC that a “huge amount” of the operations she had carried out had been on children under 16, including many under six.She said she had treated people with bullet wounds and burns and that a lack of food available in Gaza meant patients were not strong enough to heal properly.

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Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system has largely protected Tel Aviv and other population centers from the thousands of rockets fired by Hamas out of Gaza and by Hezbollah from Lebanon.

But an Israeli military official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said no alert was sounded because the detection system had not been activated.

The Houthis, the most powerful group in Yemen, claimed responsibility and said this was a new type of drone "capable of bypassing the enemy’s interception systems and undetectable by radars.

The Israeli military official said the initial evidence suggested the drone was launched from Yemen, but Israel was investigating a range of possibilities.

The Houthis say they are acting to show solidarity with the Palestinians over the war in Gaza, though the civilian shipping traffic involves vessels from around the world.

Tel Aviv came under heavy rocket fire from Hamas in the early weeks of the war last fall, but the attacks have long since stopped.

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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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At the 2024 NATO Summit in Washington, commemorating the alliance’s 75th anniversary, leaders offered Ukraine a fresh round of false hope in its war against Russia — which is worse than doing nothing.

Whether by military commitment or intensified support, the pretension that NATO could currently deliver a Ukrainian victory, or secure one later, encourages the country’s leaders to postpone reckoning with their dire circumstances.

The underwriter of the alliance, the U.S., has already clearly demonstrated it won’t fight and risk nuclear war on Ukraine’s behalf, even when the latter’s survival is at stake, as the U.S. doesn’t have a vital interest in doing so — a point former President Barack Obama made explicitly in 2016.

As with the draft treaties Russia submitted in December 2021 and the Istanbul negotiations conducted in March and April 2022, any resolution will inevitably be conditioned on Ukraine not joining NATO.

Western aid may help Kyiv hold its front lines and harass Russian targets for a time, but it cannot substitute for Ukraine’s ultimate lack of manpower, particularly while the West’s own industrial base is under strain to provide sufficient firepower to match Russia’s.

In recent weeks, Ukraine has already used its own indigenous capabilities to strike Russian radar stations, which are designed to provide early warning in case of an American nuclear attack.

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Donald Trump has said Taiwan should pay the US for protection from China, calling into question Washington’s support for the island democracy should he win back the White House in November’s presidential election.

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek on Tuesday, Trump was asked if he would defend Taiwan against China if he wins the US election in November.

TSMC is spending billions building new factories overseas, including $65bn on three plants in the US state of Arizona, though it says most manufacturing will remain in Taiwan.

Trump’s comments added to signs that the US approach to China could be hawkish – but potentially unpredictable – should he win in November.

Elsewhere in the interview the former president pledged that he would impose tariffs on China of between 60 and 100%, but that he would back down on banning the China-owned app, TikTok.

Trump’s newly announced running mate, JD Vance, told Fox News on Tuesday the US should be focused on China as its greatest security threat.

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New figures show the pace of its clean energy transition is roughly the equivalent of installing five large-scale nuclear power plants worth of renewables every week.

A report by Sydney-based think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) said China was installing renewables so rapidly it would meet its end-of-2030 target by the end of this month — or 6.5 years early.

The coal-fired plants are also being used, like the batteries and pumped hydro, to provide a stable supply of power down the transmission lines from renewable energy zones, balancing out the intermittent solar and wind.

John Grimes, the Smart Energy Council CEO who also attended, said Australia could learn from the Chinese government’s ability to execute a long-term, difficult and costly transition plan, rather than relying on market forces to find a solution.

He and other energy experts are frustrated with the progress of Australia’s transition, including the discussion of nuclear power and the “weaponisation of dissent” from community groups over new wind farms and transmission lines.

The Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) plan to decarbonise the grid and ensure the lights stay on when the coal-fired power stations close requires thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines and large-scale solar and wind farms.

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Russian forces over the weekend pushed into Urozhaine, a southern village won back by Ukraine last summer, the latest in a series of slow but steady advances that are reversing hard-won Ukrainian victories.

Kyiv held on to Urozhaine for nearly a year after its liberation, despite an intense Russian bombardment campaign in recent months that involved glide bombs, heavy artillery and powerful rockets, Mr. Paroinen said.

Ukraine has long argued that defending small places of little strategic value is worth the cost in lives and weapons because the attacking Russians pay an even higher price.

Since Russia captured Avdiivka, a Ukrainian stronghold in the east, this year, its troops have been slowly advancing toward the crucial road, called Highway T0504.

Its troops have now managed to halt Russian assaults near the city of Kharkiv, where Moscow opened a new front in late April and made its biggest territorial gains in more than a year.

The Ukrainian Army rushed in elite brigades and slowly fell back to more heavily fortified positions, a strategy that eventually helped stop the Russian advance, experts say.

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Those differences were on display over the weekend after Israel launched an airstrike on southern Gaza that targeted Muhammad Deif, the leader of Hamas’s military wing, and killed dozens of people.

And a growing number of Palestinians have argued that Fatah and Hamas need to find common ground in order to advance the reconstruction of Gaza when the current war ends — even though many are pessimistic about the prospect.

“There’s still a major divide between Hamas and Fatah, but there’s an absolute necessity that they achieve a national consensus for the administration of Gaza,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a Palestinian political research group.

Hamas officials have expressed willingness to give up civilian control of Gaza, handing responsibility for rebuilding the enclave to a government of independents — although it has ruled out dismantling its military wing.

The establishment of an independent government in Gaza without formal ties to Hamas could make it easier for the United States, European nations and international organizations to participate in rebuilding the territory.

It has also deepened its investments in the region, and pledged to expand cooperation with countries there in areas such as artificial intelligence, where the United States has sought to isolate China.

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These failures have thwarted Russian efforts to overcome Ukraine’s air defenses and enable significant breakthroughs on the ground, Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.

And “should the Russian military succeed in a limited land invasion, it would immediately establish surface-to-air missile (SAM) coverage over any captured territory,” Can Kasapoğlu, a Hudson Institute nonresident senior fellow, said recently.

Experts and Western military officers have said that in such a fight, the US and its allies, even with fleets of fifth-generation stealth fighter jets, likely would find it difficult to establish the same level of air dominance they’ve largely had since the end of World War II.

The conflict in Ukraine has heavily stressed stockpiles of precision-guided munitions, but Russia has supplemented its arsenal with Iranian-made and homemade one-way attack drones, particularly for strikes on cities and critical infrastructure.

The ubiquity of drones and long-range missiles suggests that advancing armor columns will need to move forward with shields of electronic warfare and air defenses, assets that are even more important if these forces can’t count on friendly aircraft overhead.

Specifically, NATO needs to boost its air-defense capabilities along the alliance’s eastern flank, where member states have said they could be the first ones targeted by Russia should it succeed in Ukraine, and place a greater focus on force dispersal to make aircraft and their accompanying support assets less vulnerable to attacks.

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Yet at the same time, US media was dominated by concerns about Biden’s health and fitness for the presidency, and while his speech was delivered forcefully enough, a lengthy struggle to tie a sash bearing the presidential medal of freedom on to the outgoing Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, was a graphic reminder of the problem.

However, the reality is that Ukraine has been asking publicly for extra air defence since April – a need tragically underlined on Monday when 44 were killed in attacks by Moscow, including the strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv.

Ukraine has received weapon systems from the west that nobody would have thought possible immediately after Russia first launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, but the political fanfare that greets each new arrival has so far been followed by relative disappointment on the battlefield.

When fresh US aid was withheld by Trump allies in Congress for months in the spring, Ukraine first lost Avdiivka in February, then border territory near Kharkiv in May, before sufficient supplies started coming through.

That all 32 allies could agree on describing China’s discreet supply of military components and chemicals to Russia as a “decisive enabler” of the war in Ukraine was a success from the point of alliance unity, Von Hippel said.

Such statements are unlikely to persuade Beijing to change its mind – “This is a hard nut to crack,” Von Hippel said – but anything that puts off China from supplying weapons to Russia can be defined as a success for the west.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A U.S. Coast Guard cutter on routine patrol in the Bering Sea came across several Chinese military ships in international waters but within the U.S. exclusive economic zone, officials said.

A short time later, a helicopter aircrew from Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak spotted a fourth ship approximately 84 miles (135 kilometers) north of the Amukta Pass.

The Coast Guard did not respond to questions about how long the Chinese ships were in the Exclusive Economic Zone but said the Kimball and an air crew monitored them until they transited south of the Aleutian Islands and into the North Pacific Ocean.

And in September 2021, Coast Guard cutters in the Bering Sea and North Pacific Ocean encountered Chinese ships about 50 miles (80 kilometers) off the Aleutian Islands.

“I also met yesterday morning with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and specifically raised this issue—how America must be much more prepared for the increasing activity in the Arctic, and to also let Alaskans know that our military is on the job protecting our state and our country,” Sullivan said.

He said it’s similar to how the U.S. has deployed Coast Guard or other ships to the Taiwan Strait to uphold freedom of navigation and support American allies in the region — with the important distinction that the Aleutian Islands are clearly part of the U.S.

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The female of the critically endangered mammal was born July 1, the second Chinese pangolin born in captivity in Europe following her sister, Cone, in February last year.

When the park in 2022 received Guo Bao, a male, and Run Hou Tang, a female, from the Taipei zoo, the leading breeder of the mammals, the major goal was just to keep them alive and in good health, zoo director Miroslav Bobek said Wednesday.

The Chinese pangolin is native to southern China and Southeast Asia.

The pangolins are difficult to breed in captivity because they require a special feed that includes drone larvae and need a particular humidity and temperature in their enclosure.

The pangolins arrived came after Prague decided to revoke a sister-city agreement with Beijing and signed a similar deal in 2020 with the Taiwanese capital, Taipei.

The deal caused tensions with China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory.

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Former Polish Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński, no stranger to run-ins with reporters, deflected a question from a 10-year-old parliamentary correspondent by telling her she was too young to exercise freedom of speech.

Sara Małecka-Trzaskoś, a blogger who has press accreditation in the Polish parliament, tried to ask Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, about the abortion legislation that the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk is trying to get enacted.

Kaczyński was trying to explain to journalists why PiS-aligned Polish President Andrzej Duda is refusing to sign any bill that would ease the strict abortion rules put in place by the PiS government before it was defeated by a coalition led by Tusk’s Civic Coalition party in the last Polish election.

Małecka-Trzaskoś, who started her TikTok channel in February, was doing what a parliamentary correspondent is supposed to do: interview politicians.

I would ask him why he thinks that, why freedom of speech is not for children,” Małecka-Trzaskoś told Polish news portal Onet.

The PiS party, which led the country for eight years until losing power in elections last October, had tightened Poland’s abortion rules to a near-total ban in 2020.

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