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 | By SPENGLER No Russian cyberspooks, no Chinese spies, no jihadi terrorists – no external enemies of any kind could have brought as much harm to the United States as its own self-inflicted wounds. I spent last evening taking calls from friends around the world, including a senior diplomat of an American ally who asked me what I thought of the first evacuation of Capitol Hill since the British invaded in 1812. “I’m horrified,” I said. “So is the entire free world,” the diplomat replied. There are belly-laughs in Beijing this morning. The Chinese government daily Global Times taunted: The riots taking place in Washington DC, the storming of the US Capitol by hundreds of President Donald Trump's supporters which ended with four dead, 52 arrested and 14 police officers injured on Thursday shocked the world, and Chinese experts said this unprecedented incident will mark the fall of "the beacon of democracy," and the beautiful rhetoric of "City upon a Hill" will perish. |
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 | HK reports 15 mutant virus cases in two weeks By JEFF PAO A total of 15 people in Hong Kong have been found to have the mutant coronavirus originating in the UK, which is thought to be 70% more infectious than the original strain that swept through the world. Laboratories at the Health Department and the Polytechnic University discovered the mutated virus in samples from five infected people who came to Hong Kong from the UK, the Philippines and France from December 13 on. |
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 | Death knell tolls for Indonesia’s oil and gas By JOHN MCBETH With Chevron and perhaps ExxonMobil heading for the exits, active exploration at a virtual standstill and production on an increasingly downward spiral, Indonesia’s government needs to conduct radical regulatory surgery before its oil and gas industry is doomed by the onrushing era of renewable energy. Analysts say the nationalist tide that has swept over the industry in the past six years has left Indonesia on the bottom rung of prospective foreign investment and without the financial and technical means to explore for and develop new fields independently. |
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 | New York Stock Exchange flops after flipping on Chinese stock listings By DAVID P. GOLDMAN The New York Stock Exchange reversed yesterday’s decision to allow China’s big three telecom providers to keep their listing on the Big Board, a day after it declared that the Chinese firms would keep their NYSE listing, and four days after it initially announced that they would be delisted. But the world’s largest stock market also left the door open to yet another reversal, noting in a brief announcement that “the issuers have a right to a review of this determination.” |
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 | A message from Beijing: beware Chinese anger By TUVIA GERING “China is angry. If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy.” That is how a Chinese Embassy official recently summed up her country’s diplomatic stance regarding Australia. Relations between Beijing and Canberra deteriorated significantly after a diplomatic incident so bizarre that the matter could almost have been missed. The official made the remarks to an Australian reporter in November in Canberra, after handing him a sheet of paper with a bulleted list of 14 points: “I want it to be clear that’s what worries China.” |
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 | South Korea sends destroyer after Iran seizes tanker By ANDREW SALMON
South Korea has redeployed a destroyer from anti-piracy duties in the Gulf of Aden to the Straits of Hormuz after a Korea-flagged tanker was seized by seaborne units of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard on Monday. Revolutionary Guards aboard armed speedboats seized the tanker HK Hankuk Chemi on Monday afternoon, Gulf-time, citing environmental and chemical pollution by the vessel, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. The vessel was carrying a cargo of chemicals, including methanol. |
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 | Pakistan looks beyond the Gulf towards China By SALMAN RAFI SHEIKH When Saudi Arabia pressed Pakistan last August to repay early a US$3 billion soft loan, Riyadh’s demand caught Islamabad’s rulers by surprise. Islamabad quickly dispatched its current army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa to Riyadh to defuse the tensions, but the mission failed as Saudi officials stood firm on their early repayment demand. Riyadh also froze a $3.2 billion oil credit facility with Islamabad. |
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 | ‘Global Britain’ takes aim at China in South China Sea By RICHARD JAVAD HEYDARIAN Fresh off a hard-fought Brexit deal with Brussels, the United Kingdom has immediately plunged itself into the center of Asian geopolitics and on a maritime collision course with China. Touting itself as “a global power with truly global interest”, the UK has announced the successful initial test of the newly-launched aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, its largest warship on record. Having achieved initial operational capacity, the UK’s flagship Carrier Strike Group — centered on the 65,000-tonne carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth with state-of-the-art F-35 stealth fighter jets, helicopters, submarines, frigates and destroyers — can now be deployed within just five days of initial notice for any global contingency. |
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