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PM says Solomon Islands Won’t Allow Chinese Military Base

By
Zoe Maven
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Amid a regional backlash, the Solomon Islands said it would not allow a Chinese military base in the Pacific islands nation despite its plans to sign a security pact with Beijing.

A day after officials from the two countries initialled a draft agreement on security, the office of Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said on Friday the agreement does not invite China to establish a military base.

Sogavare has not released details of the security agreement with China, amid concern sparked by a leaked draft that allowed Chinese navy ships to replenish in the islands. Ministers have not yet signed it.

When asked about the most recent comments from the Solomon Islands, China’s foreign ministry said the “starting point” of the security agreement is to safeguard people’s safety and property security.

Four people were killed during violent anti-government protests and much of the Chinatown neighborhood of Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, was destroyed during violent anti-government protests in November.

The leader of the Federated States of Micronesia on Thursday urged the Solomon Islands not to sign the security pact, saying he had “grave security concerns” and feared the Pacific could become embroiled in war between China and the United States.

New Zealand has also warned against the pact, which it says could upset long-standing regional security cooperation. Australia’s Defence Minister Peter Dutton on Friday said he respected Sogavare’s perspective but urged caution.

Chile Seeks World Court Ruling On River Dispute With Bolivia

By
Zoe Maven
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Chile has approached the United Nations’ highest court to seek a resolution to a long-running dispute with its Latin American neighbor Bolivia over the use of the waters of a small river that flows across both nations’ border.

Chile filed the case at the International Court of Justive in 2016 asking the court to rule that the Silala River is an international waterway, and that Chile is “entitled to the equitable and reasonable use” of its waters.

The head of Chile’s legal team, Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs Ximena Fuentes Torrijo, told judges that the dispute offered the court “an opportunity to affirm the applicability of the basic principle of reasonable and equitable utilization in these times of increasing fresh water scarcity.”

Chile says the river originates from remote springs in the Atacama Desert in Bolivia and flows across the border into Chile, where it feeds into another river.

Chile said the “nature of the Silala River as an international watercourse was never disputed until Bolivia, for the first time in 1999, claimed its waters as exclusively Bolivian.”

Fuentes Torrijo told judges Friday that “Bolivia’s sudden about face in 1999 was not based on any scientific foundation” and appeared motivated by efforts to seek compensation from Chile for use of the Silala’s waters.

She said the case should establish that nations “have a right to the reasonable and equitable use of an international watercourse and that the law of international watercourses does not permit an upstream state to charge its downstream neighbor for controlling the flow of such a watercourse.”

Bolivia is to begin presenting its arguments on Monday. The court will likely take months to issue a decision. Its rulings are final and legally binding.

U.S. Sanctions North Korea Firms Over Recent Missile Tests

By
Zoe Maven
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The U.S. has imposed sanctions on five North Korean entities in response to two ballistic missile tests the reclusive Asian country conducted in February and March.

The March launch was North Korea’s most provocative weapons test since President Joe Biden took office.

Authorized under an existing executive order targeting producers and supporters of weapons of mass destruction, the sanctions come after Japan issued its own penalties this week on four groups and nine individuals tied to missile development.

The U.S. government determined that the launches involved a new intercontinental ballistic missile which could be used in the future, potentially disguised as a space launch.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control said Friday’s sanctions target the firms for providing support to North Korea’s “development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs, in violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions.”

Sanctioned entities include the Ministry of Rocket Industry, the Hapjanggang Trading Corporation, Korea Rounsan Trading Corp., Sungnisan Trading Corp., and Unchon Trading Corp.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement that the DPRK’s provocative ballistic missile tests represent a clear threat to regional and global security and are in blatant violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

DPRK is an acronym for the country’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea

She added that the United States is committed to using our sanctions authorities to respond to the DPRK’s continued development of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.

Federal Tax Probe Into Biden’s Son, Hunter, Moves Forward

By
Zoe Maven
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A federal grand jury in the United States has heard testimony in recent months about Hunter Biden’s income and payments he received while serving on the board of a Ukraine energy company.

According to two people familiar with the probe, it remains unclear whether he might be charged.

But the grand jury activity underscores that a federal tax investigation into President Joe Biden’s son that began in 2018 remains active as prosecutors continue to examine foreign payments and other aspects of his finances.

The people familiar with the investigation could not discuss details of the ongoing probe publicly and spoke condition of anonymity.

No matter how the investigation resolves, it has already presented a political headache for the Biden administration and could lead to an even bigger one, particularly if Republicans who have seized on the probe to attack the president retake control of the House in midterm elections later this year.

Republicans would then control congressional committees and shape the focus of any investigations.

The investigation could also force a delicate decision for the Justice Department, which has sought to assert its independence and has publicly stressed its willingness to let the facts and evidence, not political decisions, guide its investigative and charging decisions.

Sudan General Who Led Coup Threatens To Expel UN Envoy

By
Zoe Maven
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FILE - Sudan's head of the military, Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, speaks during a press conference at the General Command of the Armed Forces in Khartoum, Sudan, Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2021. The U.N.’s top human rights body is holding an urgent session about Sudan on Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, after a military coup there nearly two weeks ago, with Britain, the United States, Germany and Norway leading a push to commission an expert to monitor the situation. The push for a human rights expert comes amid mounting pressure on Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, and the forces loyal to him who dissolved Sudan’s transitional government and detained other government officials and political leaders in the Oct. 25 coup. (AP Photo/Marwan Ali, file)

Sudan’s top general threatened to expel the U.N. envoy to the country, accusing him of what he calls a flagrant interference in the country’s affairs.

The comments by Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, head of Sudan’s ruling Sovereign Council, come less than a week after U.N. envoy Volker Perthes warned that Sudan was heading for “an economic and security collapse” unless it addresses the political paralysis.

Sudan plunged into turmoil following an October military coup led by Burhan removed a Western-backed transitional government.

The Oct. 25 military takeover upended Sudan’s democratic transition after a popular uprising forced the military to remove autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.

Speaking at a ceremony for new graduates of Sudan’s military academy in the capital of Khartoum, Burhan called on Perthes to “stop exceeding the U.N. mission’s mandate and blatant interference in Sudanese affairs.”

A spokesman for the U.N. mission in Sudan declined to comment on Burhan’s remarks.

Burhan also called on the U.N. and the African Union to “facilitate dialogue among Sudanese and avoid exceeding their mandate and interfere in the country’s affairs.”

He reiterated that the generals “don’t want to rule the country alone” and said they have repeatedly called on protest groups and other political forces to engage in dialogue and achieve “national consensus.”

Perthes is leading international efforts to find a way out of the crisis in Sudan.

He told the U.N. Security Council on Monday that the absence of a political agreement on returning to a transitional path has already led to a deteriorating economic, humanitarian and security situation in the country.

Russian Space Chief Says Sanctions Could Imperil Space Station

By
Zoe Maven
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The head of Russia’s space program says the future of the International Space Station hangs in the balance after the United States, the European Union, and Canadian space agencies missed a deadline to meet Russian demands for lifting sanctions on Russian enterprises and hardware.

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, told reporters that the state agency is preparing a report on the prospects of international cooperation at the station, to be presented to federal authorities.

Rogozin implied on Russian state TV that the Western sanctions, some of which predate Russia’s current military operations in Ukraine, could disrupt the operation of Russian spacecraft servicing the ISS with cargo flights.

Russia also sends manned missions to the space station.

He stressed that the Western partners need the space station and “cannot manage without Russia, because no one but us can deliver fuel to the station.

Rogozin later Saturday wrote on his Telegram channel that he received responses from his Western counterparts vowing to promote “further cooperation on the ISS and its operations.”

He reiterated his view that “the restoration of normal relations between partners in the ISS and other joint (space) projects is possible only with the complete and unconditional lifting” of sanctions, which he referred to as illegal.

Space is one of the last remaining areas of cooperation between Moscow and Western nations. U.S.-Russian negotiations on the resumption of joint flights to the space station were underway when Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine last month, prompting unprecedented sanctions on Russian state-linked entities.

So far the U.S. and Russia are still cooperating in space. A NASA astronaut caught a Russian ride back to Earth on Wednesday after a U.S. record 355 days at the International Space Station, returning with two cosmonauts.

Ex-UN Prosecutor Urges Global Arrest Warrant For Putin

By
Zoe Maven
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Carla del Ponte, member of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic attends a news conference into events in Aleppo at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

The former chief prosecutor of United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda Carla Del Ponte has called for an international arrest warrant to be issued for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In interviews given to Swiss media to mark the release of her latest book, the Swiss lawyer who oversaw U.N. investigations in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia said there were clear war crimes being committed in Ukraine.

She said she was particularly shocked by the use of mass graves in Russia’s war on Ukraine, which recalls the worst of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

Other war crimes she identified in Ukraine included attacks on civilians, the destruction of civilian buildings and even the demolishing of entire villages.

She said the investigation in Ukraine would be easier than that in Yugoslavia because the country itself had requested an international probe. The current ICC chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, visited Ukraine last month.

If the ICC finds proof of war crimes, she said, “you must go up the chain of command until you reach those who took the decisions.”

She said it would be possible to bring even Putin to account.

Del Ponte added that investigations should be carried out into possible war crimes committed by both sides, pointing also to reports about the alleged torture of some Russian prisoners of war by Ukrainian forces.

Taiwanese Puppeteers Looking To Preserve Art Through NFTs

By
faith Jegede
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A group of Taiwanese puppeteers is looking to bring their traditional art form into a modern era and keep it relevant with the help of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

NFTs are all the rage now, even though their spark seems to be dying down when compared to last year. They are crypto-assets representing a digital item, such as an image, video or even land in virtual worlds, with prices rising so fast last year that speculators around the world sometimes “flipped” them within days for a profit.

Pili International Multimedia 8450.TWO, which makes Taiwan’s longest-running television show featuring the puppets at its studio in Yunlin County, says it wants to use NFTs as another source of revenue.

“The sort of imagination everyone nowadays has for the online world is developing so fast that we are almost unable to grasp it,” said Seika Huang, Pili’s brand director. “Instead of sitting on the sidelines, the best approach is to go ahead and understand fully what’s going on. This is the fastest way to catch up.”

Pili has thousands of glove puppet characters, a traditional part of Taiwanese street entertainment culture that spins colorful and highly stylized stories of heroic courage and romance, often featuring martial arts.

The puppets are painstakingly created and expertly maneuvered during filming, with costumes that are sewn on and strands of hair meticulously put in place. Pili said four of its puppet characters were made into digital versions and 30,000 sets had been sold as NFTs since they were listed in early February.  The company declined to reveal its profit-sharing with the market platform but said prices for each set started at US$40, which translates to generated revenue of at least $1.2 million.

Marketing technology company VeVe, which is in charge of selling Pili’s NFTs, said the stories of the puppet heroes resonated with a younger crowd and could draw in foreign fans of superhero films, such as those based on characters from Marvel Comics. “Westerners actually really like our martial arts heroes and kung fu,” said VeVe brand manager Raymond Chou.

Huang, who said Pili’s initial listings sold out seconds after launching on VeVe, is now working on transforming up to 50 other puppet characters into NFTs, potentially adding another million-dollar revenue stream for the studio.

Victory As Amazon New York Wins Union Battle

By
faith Jegede
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0
Christian Smalls, president of the Amazon Labor Union, center, addresses reporters outside of the National Labor Review Board’s offices in Brooklyn, on Friday, April 1, 2022. Workers at Amazon’s massive warehouse on Staten Island voted by a wide margin to form a union, according to results released on Friday, in a landmark win for a campaign targeting the country’s second-largest employer and one of the biggest victories for organized labor in a generation. (DeSean McClinton-Holland/The New York Times)

Victory has come for Amazon’s Labor Union as 55% of votes came back in their favour after years of trying the unionize America’s second-largest private employer. Labor groups have begun to see a path ahead to enlist workers and end decades of contraction in their ranks.

A vote by Amazon workers to organize their warehouse in New York surprised and inspired long-time labor backers, for whom a new reality is settling in: It can be done, though it won’t be easy.

For them, Amazon now seems a more manageable target for them, though still a challenging one, for the group headed by the online retailer’s former employee Christian Smalls.

The company said it may file objections, and if and when the ALU’s victory is finalized, it still must win a contract, which can be as hard as winning an election, according to Gregory DeFreitas, a professor of labor economics at Hofstra University.

Amazon spent more than $4 million on labor consultants in 2021 to try to sway workers, according to a government filing.

“Amazon just has sort of tremendous resources with which to fight unions and tremendous determination to do whatever is necessary in order to remain union-free,” said John Logan, a professor at San Francisco State University who studies anti-union actions.

Duplicating the success at Amazon could be difficult. Local knowledge and warehouse experience helped the ALU’s leadership, who at times distanced their work from that of national labor groups.

The New York win builds on several recent ones at Starbucks coffee shops. It also helps create a view that the labor movement is changing. The ALU brought innovative organizing tactics to bear, building momentum through social media, said Joshua Freeman, a history professor at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

At the same time, traditional unions are reaching out to help ALU leader Smalls. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is offering “whatever support we can,” said its president, Mary Kay Henry.

The Teamsters, a dogged opponent of Amazon for years that had yet to unionize one of its U.S. sites, is continuing to bring their fight “on the shop floor, at the bargaining table and on the streets,” General President Sean O’Brien said after the ALU’s victory.

“This will spread like wildfire,” Henry said in an interview. “It’s a huge source of inspiration to workers that are battling the five major corporations in the airline industry, the workers that are battling Starbucks.”

Though not yet final, a losing union vote at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama caused some to fret that the ALU’s victory could happen only in a labor-friendly state like New York. Not so, said Logan, the labor professor.

The next battle will be in Staten Island this month at a second Amazon site, but some of the company’s grocery workers are organizing in Seattle, as are employees or contractors elsewhere.

“All of a sudden, it doesn’t seem so futile to try and form a union at Amazon anymore,” said Logan, adding, “If you can win at Amazon, you can win anywhere.”

Mega Moon Rocket: National Aeronautics And Space Administration Begins Critical Final Test

By
Angel Gimalo
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NASA began a critical two-day-long test of its giant Space Launch System (SLS) rocket complete with a simulated countdown, as the agency gears up to return humans to the Moon.

Known as the “wet dress rehearsal,” it is the final major test before the Artemis-1 mission this summer: an uncrewed lunar flight that will eventually be followed by boots on the ground, likely no sooner than 2026.

“The countdown is now underway,” NASA said in its Artemis blog at 5:00 pm Eastern Time (2100 GMT), confirming members of the launch control team had been issued their “call to stations.”

Data from the test, which ends Sunday mid-afternoon, will be used to finalize a launch date for Artemis 1. NASA had said May could be the first window, but later now seems likely.

It is called a “wet” dress rehearsal because supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen will be loaded into SLS from ground systems, just as they would be in a real launch.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket — expected to be the most powerful in history at the time it is operational — was rolled out to Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida around two weeks ago.

Teams are now filling up a sound suppression system with water that is used to dampen acoustic energy during lift-off. They will continue to practice every operation that would be carried out in a real launch.

Come Sunday morning, with the SLS rocket and Orion crew capsule fixed atop both powered on, they will load up 700,000 gallons (2.6 million liters) of propellant.

They won’t actually ignite the rocket’s RS-25 engines, which were tested previously. Instead they will halt the countdown about 10 seconds before liftoff, in order to simulate a “scrub,” when launch is aborted due to technical or weather related issues.

The fuel will be drained, and a few days later SLS and Orion will be rolled back to the vehicle assembly building to carry out checks on how everything went.

Test milestones will be posted on NASA’s blog for the Artemis mission, and the public might be able to glimpse the rocket venting vapor on the launch pad on April 3, during tanking operations, on the agency’s YouTube channel.

On Monday, agency officials plan to hold a press conference to give further information.

NASA won’t however let the public listen to live internal audio.

Senior NASA official Tom Whitmeyer explained this was because certain key information, including timing sequences, could assist other countries looking to develop long range missiles, and fall foul of export control regulations called International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

The decision has caused some confusion, as commercial launch companies routinely make their countdown audio available, while most intercontinental ballistic missiles run on solid fuel, not liquid propellants.

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