A top Republican lawmaker has accused the Biden administration of not doing enough to prevent China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) from strengthening the country’s chipmaking industry and military-industrial complex.

Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, urged US Commerce Department agents to visit SMIC’s facilities and check whether the company is illegally producing chips for Huawei Technologies, the sanctioned telecommunications equipment company seen as a national champion within China’s chip industry.

In a November 4 letter seen by Reuters, McCaul described what he called “growing bipartisan frustration” that the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) had not acted on reports of Huawei’s efforts to evade US export controls.

McCaul said SMIC’s breakthroughs – including its advanced chip in a Huawei smartphone, and expected production of over a million artificial intelligence (AI) processors for Huawei – are a “smoking gun” for a violation and could help China surpass the US in AI.

The Commerce Department said it had received McCaul’s letter and would respond through “appropriate channels”. Last week, in response to similar criticism, it said that no Commerce Department had been tougher on China.

SMIC did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did Huawei.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement that “certain US politicians” were “overstretching the concept of national security” and politicising “science and technology and economic and trade issues”.

Archive link

Deal signed between Chinese firm and Russian aviation engineering institution comes as Beijing and Moscow step up military cooperation.

A Chinese security company and a Russian university have had “extensive interactions” over importing Russian aviation technology, including low-altitude counter-drone technology, according to Chinese state media.

A Chinese company specialising in emergency technology and security services – Guangxi Xinhang Shengjie Emergency Industrial Park Management Company signed a deal on Monday with Russia’s Ufa State Aviation Technical University, a leading centre for aviation engineering, to bring in low-altitude drone defence technology, China News Service reported on Tuesday.

“China and Russia held extensive interactions on topics such as bringing in Russian aviation technology and low-altitude drone defence technology,” the report said. The signing took place in Wuzhou in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in southern China.

Under the deal, the Russian university will send experts to China to provide long-term support in areas such as technology, talent training and teaching, according to the report.

The Chinese side also planned to boost its low-altitude equipment manufacturing operations by adapting Russian heavy-lift helicopters and drone technology, it said.

It comes as China and Russia have stepped up military cooperation in recent years amid pressure from the United States and its allies.

Last month, Washington announced sanctions against two Chinese companies accused of cooperating with Russia to design and build long-range attack drones.

Archive link

It also includes a ratification bonus, as well as improved retirement and health care benefits, and overtime rules.

After seven weeks on strike, Boeing workers voted Monday to ratify a new contract that includes a 43.65% wage increase over four years — a significant improvement over the 25% increase that the aerospace giant offered in September.

Members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24 approved the contract in a 59%-41% vote around two weeks after rejecting a tentative deal that called for a 35% pay increase over a four-year period.

The contract approved by workers also includes a $12,000 ratification bonus, improvements to retirement and healthcare benefits, and improved overtime rules.

“Strikes work,” labor journalist Kim Kelly wrote in response to the contract vote.

Archive link

Three suspects are accused of involvement in the murder of scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh and spying for Israel.

Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed when his car was ambushed on a highway outside the capital in November 2020.

“The preliminary legal proceedings took place in Urmia, where these individuals were sentenced to execution; the case is currently in the appeals process,” Asghar Jahangir, spokesman of the Iranian judiciary, told a news conference in Tehran on Tuesday.

“After some investigations, three people out of eight arrested in West Azarbaijan province, were accused of committing espionage for the occupying regime of Israel,” Jahangir said.

He added that the three are also “accused of transporting equipment into Iran for the assassination of martyr Fakhrizadeh under the guise of smuggling alcoholic beverages”.

Fakhrizadeh was widely seen by Western intelligence as the mastermind of clandestine Iranian efforts in the early 2000s to develop nuclear weapons behind the facade of a declared civilian uranium enrichment programme – a claim rejected by Iran.

Iranian officials say the killing took place when a weapon using an advanced camera and controlled by a satellite zoomed in on the scientist while he was driving outside the Iranian capital. Tehran blamed the assassination on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.

Archive link

The blockade costs Cuba an estimated USD 5 billion annually and seriously restricts the country’s ability to purchase vital items such as fuel, food, medicine and medical equipment, spare parts for machines, and other goods necessary for the maintenance of daily life and production.

Archive link

A Russian rocket carrying a payload of satellites into orbit – including two from Iran – blasted off successfully, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said, in a move seen as reflecting the growing cooperation between Moscow and Tehran.

The Soyuz-2.1 spacecraft lifted off as scheduled from the Vostochny Cosmodrome launchpad in far eastern Russia and put its payload into a designated orbit nine minutes after the launch on Tuesday.

Among the 53 small satellites, the two Iranian satellites were identified as the Kowsar, a high-resolution imaging satellite, and Hodhod, a small communications satellite. A Russian-Chinese student satellite, Druzhba ATURK, was also placed into orbit.

The Iranian satellites are the first launched on behalf of the country’s private sector, with the Kowsar manufactured by the Omidfaza company, which began designing the satellite in 2019, Iran’s official IRNA news agency reported.

The latest satellite launch comes as Russia and Iran expand ties in various spheres, and amid mounting criticism from Ukraine and the West that Tehran has provided Moscow with drones for use in attacks on Ukrainian targets.

Moscow and Tehran are also planning to further bolster their ties with a “comprehensive strategic partnership”, set to be signed during Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s planned visit to Russia, the date for which has yet to be confirmed.

Archive link

Retired Jewish professor Haim Bresheeth, a child of Holocaust survivors and founder of the Jewish Network for Palestine, was arrested under a UK anti-terrorism law after speaking at a recent pro-Palestinian protest in London.

Indonesia and Russia have begun their first joint naval exercises, as Jakarta’s new leader Prabowo Subianto seeks a bigger role for the south-east Asian country on the global stage.

The exercises off the eastern coast of Java island, come just two weeks after Prabowo, a former general and defence minister, took over Indonesia’s presidency.

Prabowo has vowed to maintain Indonesia’s long-standing neutral foreign policy, but he is also seeking a more influential role for the world’s fourth-most populous country, whose natural resources have put it at the centre of global clean energy supply chains.

The five-day joint exercise will be conducted in Surabaya, a port in the east of Java, and its surrounding waters, the Indonesian navy said on Monday. Russia has brought four warships, one helicopter and one tug salvage ship for the exercise, it added.

Indonesia has held joint exercises with Russia in the past as part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but this week’s drills are the first bilateral effort between the two countries. Jakarta also holds annual joint exercises with the US and its allies.

As president-elect, Prabowo travelled to more than a dozen countries and met leaders including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Last week, his administration announced its intention of joining the Brics grouping of major emerging economies that includes China and Russia.

“We consider Russia as a great friend,” Prabowo said in a statement after meeting Putin in July, calling to deepen ties with Moscow.

But Julia Lau, senior fellow and co-co-ordinator of the Indonesia studies programme at the Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, warned against interpreting the naval drills and overtures to the Brics bloc of emerging economies as evidence of a tilt towards China and Russia. As president-elect, Prabowo also met Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy and France’s Emmanuel Macron.

Prabowo “is trying a balancing act vis-à-vis the US, China and Russia,” she said. The military drills with Russia are “part of the new administration’s strategy to show that they are not aligned with any great power”.

Archive link

The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in war-torn Sudan have unleashed yet another depopulation campaign in the towns and villages of Gezira state, killing hundreds, looting, raping, and burning crops in the country’s breadbasket amid a famine that has engulfed over half the population.

“Never in modern history have so many people faced starvation and famine as in Sudan today,” according to UN experts. “Severe levels of hunger” affect more than 25 million people, including 97% of the over 11 million internally displaced people (IDPs). Along with the over three million others who have fled to neighboring countries, 30% of Sudan’s population has been displaced.

Adding to the largest displacement crisis in the world, the wave of attacks since October 20 has forced another 135,000 people to flee from the eastern region of the state, the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported on November 1.

The RSF, a paramilitary organization that has been at war with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) for over a year and a half, invaded Gezira in December 2023. Attacking more than 2,000 villages this February, it had brought agriculture to a near halt in this state whose Nile-watered fields were producing over half of all Sudan’s wheat.

Most of these villages in the western vicinity of the Hasahisa, one of the main towns in the central part of Gezira, remain deserted, said Jamal (name changed) spokesperson of Hasahisa’s Resistance Committee (RC).

A network of RCs across Sudan was spearheading the mass protests against the military junta jointly led by the SAF and the RSF, before the allies turned on each other, hurling the country rocked by revolutionary turmoil into a civil war in April 2023. Since then, the RCs have been organizing and coordinating relief and rescue efforts for civilians caught in the war which has claimed well over 62,000 lives, according to a conservative estimate.

Gezira was a safe haven for those fleeing the fighting in the capital region of Khartoum, until the RSF’s invasion late last year. Following the attacks in February, the eastern area was the only safe region, Jamal said. Its market towns of Rufaa and Tamboul were “serving as the main suppliers of food for the entire state.”

The areas under attack in Gezira are expanding. On October 31, the RSF invaded homes, seized vehicles, looted gold and money, and gave residents a 24-hour ultimatum to desert the village of Mustafa Al-Qureshi in Al-Halawin.

The UN’s Secretary-General “is appalled by reports of large numbers of civilians being killed, detained and displaced, acts of sexual violence against women and girls, the looting of homes and markets and the burning of farms,” his spokesperson said on November 1.

That day, RSF depopulated another village in Al-Halawin, before launching attacks on other localities including Al-Kamlin and Hasahisa to the west and northwest of Tambul. Across Gezira, a total of 120 villages have been affected by RSF attacks since October 20, according to a joint statement by the RCs of Hasahisa and Rufaa on November 1.

Archive link

At least six people died after Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki in eastern Indonesia erupted late on Sunday, spewing explosive plumes of lava and forcing authorities to evacuate several nearby villages, officials said on Monday.

Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, located on Flores Island in East Nusa Tenggara province, erupted on Sunday at 11.57pm local time, belching a fiery-red column of lava, volcanic ash and incandescent rocks, Hadi Wijaya, a spokesman for The Centre of Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation, said on Monday.

“After the eruption, there was power outage and then it was raining and big lightning which caused panic among residents,” he said, adding that the authority had raised the status of the volcano to level IV or the highest.

The agency has recommended a 7km (4.35 miles) radius must be cleared.

The Disaster Management Agency lowered the known death toll from an earlier report of nine, saying it had received updated information from local authorities. Heronimus Lamawuran, a local official at East Flores area, said the eruption had affected seven villages.

The authorities are still gathering data on the number of evacuees and damaged buildings.

Indonesia sits on the “Pacific Ring of Fire”, an area of high seismic activity atop multiple tectonic plates.

This eruption follows a series of eruptions of different volcanoes in Indonesia. In May, a volcano on the remote island of Halmahera, Mount Ibu, caused the evacuation of people from seven villages.

Archive link

Archive link

The air quality index exceeded 1,000 on Saturday, above the 300 considered ‘dangerous’, according to data from IQAir.

Pakistan’s second city of Lahore will close primary schools for a week over record pollution, government authorities said on Sunday, to avoid exposing millions of children to smog several times above levels deemed dangerous.

For days, the city of 14 million people has been enveloped by smog, a mix of fog and pollutants caused by low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal agricultural burning and winter cooling.

“Weather forecast for the next six days shows that wind patterns will remain the same. Therefore we are closing all government and private primary schools in Lahore for a week,” said Jahangir Anwar, a senior environmental protection official in Lahore.

“This smog is very harmful for children. Masks should be mandatory in schools. We are keeping an eye on the health of children in senior classes,” Punjab senior minister Marriyum Aurangzeb told a news conference on Sunday.

Smog counters have been established in hospitals, she added.

Breathing the toxic air has catastrophic health consequences, with the WHO saying strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory diseases can be triggered by prolonged exposure.

On Saturday, the concentration of deadly PM2.5 pollutants – fine particulate matter in the air that causes most damage to health – was more than 40 times the level deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization. PM2.5 levels on Sunday morning exceeded that before decreasing slightly.

Last week, the provincial environmental protection agency announced new restrictions in four “hotspots” in the city.

Tuk-tuks equipped with polluting two-stroke engines are banned, as are restaurants that barbecue without filters.

Children are particularly vulnerable because they have less developed lungs and breathe more rapidly, taking in more air relative to their size than adults.

Pollution in excess of levels deemed safe by the WHO shortens the life expectancy of Lahore residents by an average of 7.5 years, according to the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.

Archive link