Saturday, April 12, 2014

The U.S. Takes Sides in a Dispute Between China and Japan as world war again begins to shroud the world


  The U.S. Takes Sides in a Dispute Between China and Japan:  For the first time, China will host the Western Pacific Naval Symposium, a meeting every two years of countries that border the Pacific Ocean. The W.P.N.S., as it is known in naval circles, counts among its members the United States, Australia, Chile, Canada and a number of Asian countries, including China and Japan.
 It can be an eye-popping display of war ships, destroyers and guided-missile cruisers. In 2008, when South Korea hosted the symposium, the United States sent the aircraft carrier George Washington, the guided missile cruiser Cowpens and the destroyer John S. McCain to take part. For this year’s fleet review, China, which is hosting the event in Qingdao, invited all the countries in the symposium to take part — except Japan.

Two Aegis ships bound for Japan

China ratchets up control over South China sea coming closer to confrontation


                                                
               

China demands removal of Japan’s forces from Spratley Island Group
Philippines drops food to troops after China "blockade":  "We confirmed there was an air drop of food to our troops," Defence Department spokesman Peter Paul Galvez said. He said the air drop was "via airplane," but did not say when it occurred nor give further details. The incident took place at Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly island group, which is around 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the western Philippine island of Palawan and which Manila insists is part of its continental shelf.

The shoal is more than 1,000 kilometres from Hainan island, the closest Chinese landmass, but China claims nearly all of the South China Sea based on what it says are historical records. A tiny unit of Filipino marines live on the BRP Sierra Madre, a decrepit, beached former World-War-II US navy transport ship that was transferred to the Philippine navy and run aground on the shoal in the 1990s.
China has long demanded the Philippines pull out the vessel and the marines.

 

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