MANILA: The United States renewed a warning that it would defend its treaty ally if Filipino forces come under attack in the disputed South China Sea, after a Chinese coast guard ship allegedly hit a Philippine patrol vessel with military-grade laser that briefly blinded some of its crew.
The Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila sent a strongly worded diplomatic protest to the Chinese Embassy Tuesday that “condemned the shadowing, harassment, dangerous maneuvers, directing of military-grade laser, and illegal radio challenges” by the Chinese ship.
The incident took place Feb. 6. when the Chinese coast guard ship beamed high-grade lasers to block the Philippine patrol vessel BRP Malapascua from approaching Second Thomas Shoal on a resupply mission to Filipino forces there, according to Philippine officials.
China claims the South China Sea virtually in its entirety, putting it on a collision course with other claimants. Chinese naval forces have been accused of using military-grade lasers previously against Australian military aircraft on patrol in the South China Sea and other spots in the Pacific.
Despite friendly overtures to Beijing by former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his successor, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who met Chinese leader Xi Jinping in January in Beijing, tensions have persisted, drawing in closer military alliance between the Philippines and the US
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Monday that a Philippine coast guard vessel trespassed into Chinese waters without permission. Chinese coast guard vessels responded “professionally and with restraint at the site in accordance with China’s law and international law,” he said, without elaborating or mentioning the use of laser.
US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said China’s “dangerous operational behavior directly threatens regional peace and stability, infringes upon freedom of navigation in the South China Sea as guaranteed under international law and undermines the rules-based international order.”
“The United States stands with our Philippine allies,” Price said in a statement.
He said that an armed attack on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft, including those of the coast guard in the South China Sea, would invoke US mutual defense commitments under a 1951 treaty. The treaty obligates the allies to help defend one another in case of an external attack.
Aside from China and the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei also have overlapping claims in the resource-rich and busy waterway, where a bulk of the world’s commerce and oil transits.
Washington lays no claims to the disputed sea but has deployed forces to patrol the waters to promote freedom of navigation and overflight — moves that have angered Beijing, which has warned Washington to stop meddling in what it says is a purely Asian dispute.
The contested waters have become a volatile front in the broader rivalry between the US and China in Asia and beyond.
Price said the Chinese coast guard’s “provocative and unsafe” conduct interfered with the Philippines’ “lawful operations” in and around Second Thomas Shoal.
In July, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on China to comply with a 2016 arbitration ruling that invalidated Beijing’s vast territorial claims in the South China Sea and warned that Washington was obligated to defend the Philippines under the Mutual Defense Treaty.
On Monday, Price reiterated that the “legally binding decision” underscored that China “has no lawful maritime claims to the Second Thomas Shoal.” China has long rejected the ruling and continues to defy it.
The Philippines filed nearly 200 diplomatic protests against China’s aggressive actions in the disputed waters in 2022 alone.
US renews warning it will defend Philippines after China spat
https://arab.news/6dztu
US renews warning it will defend Philippines after China spat
- Chinese coast guard ship allegedly hit a Philippine patrol vessel with military-grade laser that briefly blinded some of its crew
- China’s ‘dangerous operational behavior directly threatens regional peace and stability’
Hotline between military and air traffic controllers in Washington hasn’t worked for over 3 years
- The Army didn’t immediately comment Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month
A hotline between military and civilian air traffic controllers in Washington, D.C., that hasn’t worked for more than three years may have contributed to another near miss shortly after the US Army resumed flying helicopters in the area for the first time since January’s deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter, Sen. Ted Cruz said at a hearing Wednesday.
The Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of air traffic controllers, Frank McIntosh, confirmed the agency didn’t even know the hotline hadn’t been working since March 2022 until after the latest near miss. He said civilian controllers still have other means of communicating with their military counterparts through landlines. Still, the FAA insists the hotline be fixed before helicopter flights resume around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The Army didn’t immediately comment Wednesday about the near miss earlier this month and the steps it is taking to ensure helicopter flights in the area are safe or about the hotline.
The FAA said in a statement that the dedicated direct access line between air traffic controllers at Reagan and the Pentagon’s Army heliport hasn’t worked since 2022 because of the construction of a new tower at the Pentagon. But the FAA said “the two facilities continue to communicate via telephone for coordination.”
“The developments at DCA in its airspace are extremely concerning,” Cruz said. “This committee remains laser-focused on monitoring a safe return to operations at DCA and making sure all users in the airspace are operating responsibly.”
The Army suspended all helicopter flights around Reagan airport after the latest near miss, but McIntosh said the FAA was close to ordering the Army to stop flying because of the safety concerns before it did so voluntarily.
“We did have discussions if that was an option that we wanted to pursue,” McIntosh told the Senate Commerce Committee at the hearing.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA accident investigator, said “the fact that they were unaware that this connection was not working for three years is troublesome.” But he is not entirely clear on the purpose of the hotline when controllers had other ways to communicate.
But Guzzetti thinks the Army needs to be more forthcoming about what it is doing to ensure the airspace around Washington remains safe. Since the crash, the Army has at times refused to provide information that Congress has asked for, and officials didn’t answer all the questions at a previous hearing.
“The DCA airspace is under the white hot spotlight. So the Army’s going to have to be more transparent and more assertive in their dealings with this problem,” Guzzetti said.
According to a US official, one course of action under consideration now is to have the Army give 24 hours notice of any flights around National Airport. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made and discussions are ongoing.
January’s crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people — making it the deadliest plane crash on US soil since 2001. The National Transportation Safety Board has said there were an alarming 85 near misses around Reagan in the three years before the crash that should have prompted action.
Since the crash, the FAA has tried to ensure that military helicopters never share the same airspace as planes, but controllers had to order two planes to abort their landings on May 1 because of an Army helicopter circling near the Pentagon.
“After the deadly crash near Reagan National Airport, FAA closed the helicopter route involved, but a lack of coordination between FAA and the Department of Defense has continued to put the flying public at risk,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth said.
McIntosh said the helicopter should never have entered the airspace around Reagan airport without permission from an air traffic controller.
“That did not occur,” he said. “My question — and I think the larger question is — is why did that not occur? Without compliance to our procedures and our policies, this is where safety drift starts to happen.”
The NTSB is investigating what happened.
In addition to that incident, a commercial flight taking off from Reagan airport had to take evasive action after coming within a few hundred feet of four military jets heading to a flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. McIntosh blamed that incident on a miscommunication between FAA air traffic controllers at a regional facility and the tower at Reagan, which he said had been addressed.
‘They need to let food to starving kids!’: Ben & Jerry’s cofounder confronts RFK Jr in Gaza protest at US Capitol
WASHINGTON: Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and longtime progressive activist, was removed from a Senate hearing Wednesday after confronting Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and lawmakers over US support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Kennedy had been reading prepared remarks about his department’s 2026 budget when activists interrupted the session, chanting “RFK kills people with AIDS.”
Kennedy jumped from his seat in reaction to the outburst.
Cohen then shouted: “Congress pays for bombs to kill children in Gaza,” accusing lawmakers of funding arms by cutting Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income families that Republicans are seeking to slash.
Video posted by anti-war group Codepink showed the 74-year-old in handcuffs as Capitol Police escorted him from the chamber.
“They need to let food into Gaza, they need to let food to starving kids!” Cohen yelled as he was taken away.
A vocal critic of Israeli policy, Cohen last year co-signed an open letter titled A Statement From Jewish Americans Opposing AIPAC, denouncing the pro-Israel lobby’s influence in US politics.
Trump administration scraps Biden-era plan to limit sale of Americans’ personal data
- Consumer Reports said the withdrawal of the data broker proposal would leave consumers “vulnerable to scams and identity theft”
The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is scrapping a proposal issued under former President Joe Biden that would have sharply limited the sale of Americans’ private information by “data brokers,” according to a Federal Register notice issued Wednesday.
The agency also yanked proposals that sought to extend consumer protections to the use of new digital payment technologies including cryptocurrency, and that would have prohibited certain terms in the fine print in consumer finance products.
In a statement, Consumer Reports said the withdrawal of the data broker proposal would leave consumers “vulnerable to scams and identity theft.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has moved this year to decimate the CFPB, initially seeking to shut it down entirely and subsequently saying it can meet its legal obligations with about 10 percent of its current staff. Efforts to fire large amounts of staff are currently on hold as federal courts consider the matter.
Senior officials in recent days have continued undoing much of the prior administration’s work in regulation and oversight. The agency last week withdrew scores of guidance documents issued across administrations since 2011.
In proposing the limits on data brokers in January, former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said the sale of Americans’ private information to data brokers was a “staggering” problem that also jeopardized national security by putting government officials’ privacy at risk.
The CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in a Federal Register notice, Russell Vought, the current acting CFPB director, said the proposal no longer aligned with the bureau’s changed policy objectives and its interpretation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
“Further, commenters raised numerous concerns related to this proposed rule that the Bureau believes require careful consideration before proceeding with a final rule,” he said. These included whether the proposal was at odds with federal law.
The Menendez brothers case reflects a shifting culture across decades
- A judge made the Menendez brothers eligible for parole Tuesday
LOS ANGELES: The trials of Lyle and Erik Menendez came at a time of cultural obsession with courts, crime and murder, when live televised trials captivated a national audience.
Their resentencing — and the now very real possibility of their freedom — came at another, when true crime documentaries and docudramas have proliferated and brought renewed attention to the family.
A judge made the Menendez brothers eligible for parole Tuesday when he reduced their sentences from life without parole to 50 years to life for the 1989 murder of their father Jose Menendez and mother Kitty Menendez in their Beverly Hills home. The state parole board will now determine whether they can be released.
Their two trials bookended the O.J. Simpson trial, creating a mid-1990s phenomenon where courts subsumed soap operas as riveting daytime television.
“People were not used to having cameras in the courtroom. For the first time we were seeing the drama of justice in real time,” said Vinnie Politan, a Court TV anchor who hosts the nightly “Closing Arguments” on the network. “Everyone was watching cable and everyone had that common experience. Today there’s a true crime bonanza happening, but it’s splintered off into so many different places.”
The brothers became an immediate sensation with their 1990 arrest. They represented a pre-tech-boom image of young wealthy men as portrayed in many a 1980s movie: the tennis-playing, Princeton-bound prep.
For many viewers, this image was confirmed by the spending spree they went on after the killings. Their case continued a fascination with the dark, private lives of the young and wealthy that goes back at least to the Leopold and Loeb murder case of the 1930s, but had been in the air in cases like the Billionaire Boys Club, a 1980s Ponzi scheme that spurred a murder.
The first Menendez trial becomes compelling live TV
Their first trials in 1993 and 1994 became a landmark for then-new Court TV, which aired it nearly in its entirety. Defense lawyers conceded that they had shot their parents. The jury, and the public, then had to consider whether the brothers’ testimony about sexual and other abuse from their father was plausible, and should mean conviction on a lesser charge.
The lasting image from the trial was Lyle Menendez crying on the stand as he described the abuse.
At the time there had been some public reckoning with the effects of sex abuse, but not nearly to the extent of today.
The two juries — one for each brother — deadlocked, largely along gender lines. It reflected the broader cultural reaction — with women supporting a manslaughter conviction and men a guilty verdict for first-degree murder.
A tough-on-crime era, and a Menendez trial sequel
The trials came at a time when crime in the US was at an all-time high, a tough-on-crime stance was a prerequisite for holding major political office, and a wave of legislation mandating harsher sentences was passed.
That attitude appeared to prevail when, at their second trial, the brothers were both convicted of first-degree murder.
As Associated Press trial reporter Linda Deutsch, who covered both trials along with Simpson’s and countless others, wrote in 1996:
“This time, the jury rejected the defense claim that the brothers murdered their parents after years of sexual abuse. Instead, it embraced the prosecution theory that the killings were planned and that the brothers were greedy, spoiled brats who murdered to get their parents’ $14 million fortune.”
The second trial was not televised and got less attention.
“There were no cameras, it was in the shadow of O.J. so it didn’t have the same spark and pop as the first one,” Politan said.
The Menendez brothers become a distant memory
They had become too well-known to be forgotten, but for decades, the Menendez brothers faded into the background. Occasional stories emerged about the brothers losing their appeals, as did mugshots of them aging in prison.
“The public’s memory of them was, ‘Yeah, I remember that trial, the guys with the sweaters in court,’” Politan said.
That would change in the era of true-crime TV, podcasts and streamers.
True crime goes big
The 2017 NBC drama series “Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders,” wasn’t widely watched, but still brought the case new attention. The next decade would prove more important.
The 2022 Max docuseries “Menudo: Forever Young” included a former member saying he was raped by Jose Menendez when he was 14. At about the same time, the brothers submitted a letter that Erik wrote to his cousin about his father’s abuse before the killings.
The new true-crime wave would continue to promote them, even if the portrayal wasn’t always flattering.
” Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” a drama created by Ryan Murphy on Netflix, made them beautiful and vain buffoons, and the actors were shown shirtless on provocative billboards. Javier Bardem as Jose Menendez brought Oscar-winning star power to the project that dropped in September of last year.
That was followed a month later by a documentary on Netflix, “The Menendez Brothers.”
Together, the shows had the public paying more attention to the case than it had since the trials. Almost simultaneously came a real-life turning point, when then- Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said he was reviewing new evidence in the case.
The office of Gascón’s successor, Nathan Hochman, opposed the resentencing.
Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian constantly sought at hearings to make sure the “carnage” caused by the brothers wasn’t forgotten, and repeatedly emphasized that they “shotgunned, brutally, their parents to death.”
But the shifts in public perception and legal actions were already in motion. The judge’s decision to reduce their charges came not with the drama of the televised trial, but in a short hearing in a courtroom that wouldn’t allow cameras. The broader public never saw.
Despite his opposition, Hochman was reflective in a statement after the resentencing.
“The case of the Menendez brothers has long been a window for the public to better understand the judicial system,” Hochman said. “This case, like all cases — especially those that captivate the public — must be viewed with a critical eye. Our opposition and analysis ensured that the Court received a complete and accurate record of the facts. Justice should never be swayed by spectacle.”
Gabbard fires 2 top intelligence officials and will shift office that preps Trump’s daily brief
- “The director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community”: Gabbard’s office
WASHINGTON: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired two veteran intelligence officials because they oppose President Donald Trump, her office said, coming a week after the release of a declassified memo written by their agency that contradicted statements the Trump administration has used to justify deporting Venezuelan immigrants.
Mike Collins was serving as acting chair of the National Intelligence Council before he was dismissed alongside his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof. They each had more than 25 years of intelligence experience. The two were fired because of their opposition to Trump, Gabbard’s office said in an email, without offering examples.
“The director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community,” the office said.
The firings, which were first reported by Fox News Digital, follow the release of a declassified memo from the National Intelligence Council that found no coordination between Venezuela’s government and the Tren de Aragua gang. The Trump administration had given that as reasoning for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting Venezuelan immigrants. The intelligence assessment was released in response to an open records request.
While it’s not uncommon for new administrations to replace senior officials with their own picks, the firings of two respected intelligence officials who had served presidents of both parties prompted concern from Democrats. US Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he’s seen no details to explain the dismissals.
“Absent evidence to justify the firings, the workforce can only conclude that their jobs are contingent on producing analysis that is aligned with the President’s political agenda, rather than truthful and apolitical,” Himes said in a statement.
Though it’s not widely known to the public, the National Intelligence Council plays a key role in the nation’s spy services, helping combine intelligence gathered from different agencies into comprehensive assessments used by the White House and senior national security officials.
Collins was considered one of the intelligence service’s top authorities on East Asia. Langan-Riekhof has served as a senior analyst and director of the CIA’s Strategic Insight Department and is an expert on the Middle East.
Attempts to reach both were unsuccessful Wednesday. The CIA declined to comment publicly, citing personnel matters.
Gabbard also is consolidating some of the intelligence community’s key operations, moving some offices now located at the CIA to ODNI buildings, her office said. They include the National Intelligence Council as well as the staff who prepare the President’s Daily Brief, the report to the president that contains the most important intelligence and national security information.
The move will give Gabbard more direct control over the brief. While the brief is already ODNI’s responsibility, the CIA has long played a significant role in its preparation, providing physical infrastructure and staffing that will have to be moved to ODNI or re-created.
Gabbard oversees and coordinates the work of 18 federal intelligence agencies. She has worked to reshape the intelligence community — eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs under Trump’s orders and creating a task force to examine ways to cut costs and consider whether to declassify material relating to COVID-19 and other topics.
Gabbard also has vowed to investigate intelligence leaks and end what she said was the misuse of intelligence for political aims.
