China's ramping up pressure on Taiwan
Updated 0707 GMT (1507 HKT) May 29, 2018
Beijing's push to isolate Taiwan is gathering pace, with two of the island's few remaining allies switching allegiance to China in the past month.
Taiwan isn't just taking heat from China diplomatically. Multi-national companies are being pressured over how they describe Taiwan, with Beijing insisting they follow its line that the island is an integral part of China. Shows of force by the Chinese military in the Taiwan Strait, the narrow strip of water that divides the two, are also becoming more commonplace.
This ratcheting up of tensions between China and the self-governed, democratic island opens up another fault line for Washington in its dealings with Beijing, with the Trump administration already at odds with China over trade, North Korea and the South China Sea.
The school teaching North Korean refugees how to live in the South
More than 100 students attend Yeomyung school in Seoul, where they are taught the quirks of assimilating, from using credit cards to navigating the metro
Pak Sool marched down a flight of stairs, descending into Seoul’s metro for the first time at the age of 19, only to stare at the spaghetti-bowl map of the transit system and then – feeling nervous and embarrassed – simply give up.
It was one of the many moments that have confounded the North Korean refugee since his recent arrival in the South.Shopping, using a cash machine and even understanding the South’s dialect, peppered with English slang, were also monumental challenges.
“What I saw when I came to South Korea was overwhelming,” says Pak, who arrived in Seoul at the end of 2016. “North and South Korea are totally different. I had no idea what a credit card was, and that’s used everyday here.”
Latin America's water crisis is not about millennials' avocado habit, but the human and environmental impact of food production
This kind of rhetoric plays into the schadenfreude that comes as a generation’s smug attempts to be 'woke' backfire, but in a game of food basket whack-a-mole, you ditch one product only for another to be revealed as equally ethically dubious
Avocado-munching millennials are under fire again. First, it was the smashed avocado toast controversy. Now, Chilean water rights activists are speaking out about how plantations in a region supplying avocados to Britain are illegally tapping into water that locals depend on. It’s a problem, for sure – but relentlessly shaming millennials over their diets won’t solve South America’s water issues. It’s more complicated than that.
Villagers from Petorca in the Valparaíso growing region have saidthey don’t have enough water to cook and wash, and have to resort to contaminated water brought in by truck. British demand for avocados soared 27 per cent in 2017, and many of those came from Chile. Oh dear.
The news has prompted a flurry of criticism. “When they say guac is extra, they mean that your avocado obsession is leaving thousands in Chile disenfranchised and plagued by drought,” Vice admonishes us.
Dozens of refugees, police clash in German city of Dresden
Two police officers and a security guard were injured when fighting broke out at a migrant reception center in the eastern city of Dresden. It was the second standoff between asylum seekers and authorities in a month.
Around 50 refugees attacked police after they attempted to stop a fight at a migrant center, authorities in the eastern German city of Dresden said on Monday.
Police were called after security guards struggled to contain a dispute about food between two migrants from Georgia on Friday evening.
"As a result, about 50 residents gathered and attacked officers by throwing lit cigarettes, then kicking and beating them," a statement from Dresden police said.
MH370: Four-year hunt ends after private search is completed
The four-year hunt for Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has ended with the latest, privately funded search coming to a close.
US-based Ocean Infinity had been using a deep-sea vessel to survey a vast area of the southern Indian Ocean.
But it found nothing and Malaysia's government says it has no plans to begin any new searches.
The plane disappeared on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Official search efforts ended last year and there are still fierce debates about what happened to the flight.
ALLAN NAIRN ON HOW TRUMP DRAGGED A RIGHTIST REVOLUTION TO POWER
Jeremy Scahill
DONALD TRUMP HAS been in office 16 months. And the majority of media hours and column inches spent on his administration deal primarily with the Russia investigation, Stormy Daniels, and Trump’s personnel intrigue. It’s not that there isn’t great journalism being done on other issues. It’s that this narrow set of stories consume much of the energy and are on constant repeat pretty much everywhere in corporate media, except for FOX, which generally broadcasts from an alternate reality.
On Intercepted, we have found it useful to occasionally step back from the daily grind of the Trump presidency and take stock of where we are and how we got here. My friend and colleague Allan Nairn is one of the sharpest analysts of the modern history of the American empire. As a journalist, he has played a significant role in exposing the U.S. involvement and sponsorship of brutal regimes and security forces around the globe. He survived the Dili massacre in East Timor in the early 1990s, he exposed the CIA’s financing of right-wing death squads in Haiti and the agency’s support for brutal military dictators in places like Guatemala and El Salvador, and he is perhaps the foremost expert in the world on the U.S. support for the genocidal regime of Suharto in Indonesia.
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