Local buses, recycling bins and leafletting were among Tiffany Yuen’s main responsibilities as an elected official when she was arrested for violating Hong Kong’s national security law and sent to jail. In a year, a single law has decimated human rights in Hong Kong | Human Rights | Al Jazeera
Month: June 2021
Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has emerged victorious in Switzerland’s $6.5 billion fighter competition, beating out entrants from Eurofighter, Dassault and Boeing. Lockheed’s F-35 topples competition in Swiss fighter contest (defensenews.com)
BAE Systems will deliver the first batch of new military GPS user equipment to Germany, after being awarded a Foreign Military Sales contract by the Space and Missile Systems Center’s Space Production Corps. BAE Systems to deliver first M-Code GPS User Equipment to Germany (c4isrnet.com)
The Navy has approved the low-rate rate initial production for the first iteration of its new, powerful airborne jamming pod. Navy’s powerful aerial jamming pod moves to next phase (c4isrnet.com)
The U.S. Army continued its yearslong tradition of not funding the procurement of the latest variant of the CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopter in favor of future programs in its fiscal 2022 budget request, but House appropriators are pushing back. House appropriators want more cargo helos for US Army in FY22 (defensenews.com)
Tweaking President Joe Biden’s Pentagon spending request for next year, House appropriators have proposed $1.7 billion more for weapons procurement and $1.6 billion less for development and testing of cutting-edge technologies meant to deter China. Democratic appropriators want to spend more on weapons procurement than Biden (defensenews.com)
The transatlantic community is starting to coordinate on Taiwan. Speaking as the Group of Seven (G7), the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom—together with Japan—recently took the unprecedented step of assuming a shared position on China’s most sensitive territorial dispute. “We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan […]
The Biden administration may only be several months old, but its statements and actions have already raised the global profile of climate issues. The new climate czar, John Kerry, has been traveling the world to secure bilateral pledges of more aggressive action to combat climate change. And expectations are rising for a new consensus on […]
On 7 May, Taiwan’s Constitutional Court made a ruling in Interpretation 803 about laws pertaining to hunting by Indigenous people. Activists had hoped the ruling would be a decisive legal case like Australia’s Mabo Case, which overturned the doctrine of terra nullius, or Canada’s Delgamuukw Case, which upheld Aboriginal title. Taiwan’s Indigenous activists expected the Court to uphold the 2005 Indigenous Peoples Basic Law, […]
On 24 April 2021, Indonesian authorities declared that the Nanggala-402, a Navy submarine that went missing while conducting a naval exercise on 21 April, had sunk. Despite an intensive search and rescue operation involving naval assets from Singapore, Australia, India, Malaysia and the United States, the submarine was unable to be located. Its wreckage was later […]
The Japanese government’s approval of a plan to discharge treated radioactive water stored at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean has unilaterally reversed a decade of nuclear safety reform in Japan. Although providing information to foreign embassies in Tokyo and online social networks, the Japanese government has failed to allay domestic concerns […]
One of US President Joe Biden’s aims is to show that ‘America is back’ by rebuilding relationships with allies and partners. But he faced an uphill battle in Taiwan where, unlike other parts of Asia, the majority supported Donald Trump. Biden wins over Taiwan (eastasiaforum.org)