Diplomatic spat between UK and China after Beijing slams London's 'colonial' attitude to Hong Kong - CNN

Beijing has hit out at the UK over accusations of "interference" in the semi-autonomous Chinese city, after British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt expressed support for Hong Kong protesters and said London would stand by the city in preserving its limited democratic freedoms.

Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers have taken to the streets in recent weeks over a proposed extradition bill with China critics fear would be used to go after political dissidents. On Monday, student protesters stormed and briefly occupied the city's legislature, causing widespread damage to the building and its contents before retreating in the face of a large police clearance operation.

Referencing the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 which governs the handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule, Hunt said on Tuesday that "there will be serious consequences if that internationally binding legal agreement were not to be honored."

"The UK signed an internationally binding legal agreement in 1984 that enshrines the 'one country, two systems rule,' enshrines the basic freedoms of the people of Hong Kong and we stand four square behind that agreement, four square behind the people of Hong Kong," added Hunt, who is campaigning to be the next British Prime Minister.

His comments were greeted by outrage in Beijing, which has previously suggested the treaty -- which established a guarantor and observer status for the UK over its former colony -- is no longer applicable.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang on Wednesday accused Hunt of "fantasizing in the faded glory of British colonialism and obsessed with the bad habit of criticizing and lecturing on other countries' affairs condescendingly."

China's ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, followed up with his own criticism, blasting London for its "interference" in Hong Kong and saying the UK-China relationship "has been damaged" because of it.

"I think it's totally wrong for Jeremy Hunt to talk about the freedom (of Hong Kong protesters) ... this is not a matter about freedom it's a matter about breaking laws in Hong Kong," Liu said. "We all remember what Hong Kong was 22 years ago under British rule, there was no freedom (or) democracy."

The UK did not fully democratize Hong Kong during over a century and a half of colonial occupation, only introducing the limited form of democracy that the city enjoys today in the decade leading up to the 1997 handover. Chris Patten, the last colonial governor, did attempt to introduce greater democracy and political freedoms, against London and Beijing's wishes, but his reforms were rolled back when China assumed control of the city.

Liu, who has since been summoned to meet with the UK Foreign Ministry, called on London to "reflect" and "refrain from further damaging the relationship" and "refrain from interfering in Hong Kong internal affairs and Chinese internal affairs."

Responding to his comments on Twitter, Hunt said that "good relations between countries are based on mutual respect and honoring the legally binding agreements between them."

CNN's Milena Veselinovic and Sarah Deane contributed reporting.

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2019-07-04 05:28:00Z
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Boeing dedicates $100 million to victims of 737 Max crashes - CNN

The company said the money will be given to local nonprofits and community groups who will help distribute the funds. They'll be used to support education, including college tuition or other schooling expenses for children of victims, and "hardship or living expenses for impacted families," Boeing (BA) said in statement.

Victim families that accept funds from this pool of money will not be required to give up the right to pursue legal action against the company, a Boeing spokesperson said. The company is facing several lawsuits over the 737 Max incidences.

"We at Boeing are sorry for the tragic loss of lives in both of these accidents and these lives lost will continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and on our minds for years to come. The families and loved ones of those on board have our deepest sympathies, and we hope this initial outreach can help bring them comfort," said Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing's chairman, president and CEO.

Boeing's 737 Max jets were grounded worldwide in March after one of the vehicles, flown by Ethiopian Airlines, crashed shortly after takeoff. It followed a crash in late 2018 of a 737 Max flown by Indonesian airline Lion Air.

The grounding has forced airlines to cancel hundreds of flights, and it's not clear when the 737 Max, which is Boeing's top-selling plane, will be cleared to fly again.

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2019-07-03 16:37:00Z
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Boeing sets aside $100 million for families of 737 Max crash victims - CNBC

Boeing, still reeling from the two deadly 737 Max crashes, is setting aside $100 million to assist the families of victims and communities impacted by the accidents in October and March that killed 346 people.

The funds will be available over the next several years and are not part of any compensation Boeing may have to pay to those who sue the company for damages related to accidents.

Days after the second 737 Max jet crashed in Ethiopian, the FAA and other aviation regulators around the world grounded the airplane until the company could fix defects in the aircraft and prove it is safe for commercial flights. The plane has now been grounded for more than three months and Boeing has said it is unlikely questions about the plane's safety will be resolved until sometime in the September time frame.

"We at Boeing are sorry for the tragic loss of lives in both of these accidents and these lives lost will continue to weigh heavily on our hearts and on our minds for years to come," Boeing Chairman and CEO Dennis Muilenburg said in a release announcing the funds. "The families and loved ones of those on board have our deepest sympathies, and we hope this initial outreach can help bring them comfort."

The victims' families won't have to waive their right to sue Boeing if they take money from the fund, the company said.

The move comes as Boeing continues to feel backlash for how it designed the 737 Max earlier this decade. Critics say the company rushed to build the plane and did not fully disclose issues regarding the the 737 Max MCAS flight control software. That software is suspected of causing the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. In both accidents, investigators have not determined an official cause of the crash.

"We are focused on re-earning that trust and confidence from our customers and the flying public in the months ahead." Muilenburg said in a statement announcing the fund.

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2019-07-03 15:42:50Z
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As Protests Rock Hong Kong, Xi Jinping’s View of History Shows He Will Dig In - The New York Times

BEIJING — When protesters in Hong Kong became more forceful on Monday, the People’s Daily reprised a recent speech of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, calling on party cadres to carry forward the struggle of the Communist revolution fought 70 years ago.

“We must overcome all kinds of difficulties, risks and challenges,” he said.

It was the latest signal that Mr. Xi has no intention of bowing to the protesters’ demands for greater rights. On the contrary, the storming of Hong Kong’s legislature on Monday night seems to have given ammunition to hard-liners and prompted the sharpest denunciations in Beijing so far, suggesting the ruling Communist Party’s patience was wearing thin.

“I think they have realized it is time to take measures” to restore order, Song Xiaozhuang, a professor in the Center for Basic Laws of Hong Kong and Macau at Shenzhen University, said in a telephone interview, referring to the authorities in Beijing.

“This does not mean there is no patience, or that they want to get it done promptly, but it does mean that they cannot wait for long.”

Mr. Xi has not publicly addressed the political tumult in Hong Kong. Nor have officials disclosed any options they might be considering. But there is little doubt about Mr. Xi’s convictions, which are shaped by history and a deeply felt sense of the perils of popular uprisings.

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Protesters used a steel cart to breach the doors of the Legislative Council building in Hong Kong on Monday.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times

“I have heard him talk at length, and passionately, about the challenges of governing China, and the need to maintain order in order to keep the country together,” said Ryan L. Hass, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as the director for China at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

He noted that the mass protests that toppled authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 coincided with Mr. Xi’s ascent to the presidency and were “seared into his brain.”

Mr. Xi’s stance is not without risks, but he has governed with a millenarian sense of destiny, regularly exhorting the Communist Party to return to its original mission to transform a once-humiliated nation into the global power it is meant to be.

While the events in Hong Kong have generated considerable sympathy for the protesters, forcing the city’s leader to back down and suspend the bill, Mr. Xi still has most of the advantages of power on his side.

Those include time and influence. The central government can still mobilize a vast network of supporters in Hong Kong, including civil servants and business people beholden to the central government, economically or politically.

In a last resort, there is also the Chinese military. Few analysts expect that Mr. Xi intends to use force, but few doubt that he would if security significantly deteriorated in the city.

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The newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army disclosed that troops from its Hong Kong garrison had conducted training exercises last week.CreditPeople's Liberation Army Daily

The People’s Liberation Army disclosed on Tuesday — certainly not by coincidence — that troops from its Hong Kong garrison had conducted training exercises last week. One photograph accompanying an article in the official military newspaper showed soldiers aboard a gunboat in Victoria Harbor, weapons drawn, with the city’s skyline in the background.

After weeks of relative restraint, officials in Beijing have also begun to warn of grave repercussions. A spokesman for the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, warned that the defacing of the legislature was “a blatant challenge” to Beijing’s red line: its sovereignty over the territory.

The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Communist Party, called for “a zero-tolerance policy,” warning that more violence could open a Pandora’s box.

That the protests in Hong Kong took place shortly following the 30th anniversary of the bloody suppression of the protests in Tiananmen Square and other cities in China has only hardened official views. This year is also the anniversary of the popular movements that swept Eastern Europe in 1989, toppling not only the Berlin Wall but also, ultimately, the Soviet Union itself two years later.

“There has also been a tendency to present these struggles — and Tiananmen was presented this way — as not being spontaneous expressions of the popular will,” Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an email, “even in cases when that is clearly what they are.” Rather, he wrote, Beijing describes such protests as “illegitimate efforts by small sets of malcontents spurred on by mysterious foreign forces.”

Mr. Xi, who has steadily amassed greater power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, is acutely aware of that history.

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Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Hong Kong on Monday.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?” he asked in a secret speech in 2013 that later leaked. “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered.”

He belittled the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, for allowing it to happen on his watch. “In the end, nobody was a real man,” he said then.

Weeks before the bloody crackdown protests in Tiananmen in 1989, Mr. Xi delivered a warning about the folly of popular mass movements, according to research by Joseph Torigian, an assistant professor at American University in Washington who is currently writing a book about Mr. Xi’s father.

“This kind of ‘big democracy’,” Mr. Torigian quoted Mr. Xi as saying then, “‘is not in accord with science, not in accord with the rule of law, but is instead in accord with superstition, in accord with stupidity, and the result is chaos.’” Mr. Xi, a city official at the time, was speaking of the Cultural Revolution, but the message carries resonance today.

“Without stability and unity, nothing is possible!”

As the party’s leader, he has sought to extend its grip over virtually every corner of Chinese society, underscoring his view that stability can only be by eliminating threats to the party’s rule.

Hong Kong has become such a symbol of China’s success in reclaiming “lost” territory, Julian G. Ku, a law professor at Hofstra University, said, that the government today would be “loathe to admit any kind of limits to its sovereignty of this territory, lest it tarnish its success in recovering.”

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Protesters who stormed Hong Kong’s legislature on Monday left pictures of local officials.CreditLam Yik Fei for The New York Times

When Britain’s foreign minister this week called on China to honor its commitments under the treaty that ceded British control of the city in 1997, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pointedly replied that Britain no longer had any say in the matter.

Mr. Ku, who has written on China’s adherence to the treaty, said the spokesman’s bluntness was striking. “They might have always had this legal position but they never, as far as I recall, said this sort of thing out loud.”

Allowing Hong Kong a greater degree of autonomy over its own affairs, as even some pro-Beijing lawmakers suggested, could open the Pandora’s box, the Global Times warned. Hard-liners would argue that it would be seen as rewarding civil disobedience, which security officials on the mainland act quickly to snuff out, at times ruthlessly.

To be sure, Mr. Xi’s record of increasingly authoritarian rule — not least the detention of more than 1 million Muslims in Xinjiang — has raised alarms internationally about the direction he is taking China.

In Taiwan, a self-ruled island that Beijing also considers part of China, the unrest in Hong Kong has further undermined the appeal that Mr. Xi made in January to unify under the same “one country, two systems” arrangement.

President Tsai Ing-wen, who is seeking re-election next January, has styled herself as a defender of Taiwan’s sovereignty. Her standing in the polls rose following the Hong Kong police’s heavy-handed response to protesters on June 12.

The protesters’ brief siege of the city’s Legislative Council had echoes of the much longer occupation of Taiwan’s Parliament in 2014, which helped catapult Ms. Tsai to the presidency.

Mr. Wasserstrom said that the Communist Party’s old saying, “Today, Hong Kong; Tomorrow, Taiwan,” now “has a very ominous meaning.”

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2019-07-03 15:03:13Z
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Iran's Rouhani defies US by upping uranium output - The Sun

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2019-07-03 14:52:57Z
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Iran will start enriching uranium at higher levels after this weekend, Rouhani says - CNN

The announcement comes two days after Iran announced it had exceeded limits on its low-enriched uranium stockpiles. Under the 2015 deal, Iran agreed to slash its stockpile of enriched uranium by 90%, and cap uranium enrichment at 3.67%. The agreement also reduced the number of its centrifuges by two-thirds.

Rouhani said the enrichment limits would be surpassed after Sunday. He has also vowed to revive work on the Arak heavy-water reactor, which had been suspended under the nuclear deal.

"We will raise the level of enrichment to the amount we want and need," Rouhani said at a government meeting according to semi-official Tasnim News Agency.

He urged the Americans and the Europeans to "go back to their commitments in the nuclear deal."

"If you do not do so, the Arak reactor will go back to its previous state, starting from July 7," he said.

Iran's partial withdrawal from the nuclear deal -- known officially as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) -- follows US President Donald Trump's pull-out from the agreement in May 2018. Trump has imposed crippling sanctions on Iran, prompting an exodus of foreign companies from the country, causing inflation to skyrocket and the economy to contract.

After Monday's announcement, Trump said Iran was "playing with fire."

"They know what they're doing. They know what they're playing with. And I think they're playing with fire," he said.

French President Emmanuel Macron "noted with concern" Iran's move to increase its stockpile of uranium, and urged the country to reverse it.

But Iranian officials say they have not breached the agreement. "We have NOT violated the #JCPOA," Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said in a post on Twitter, sharing the text of paragraph 36 of the deal, which provides a dispute resolution mechanism when parties believe that other signatories aren't meeting their commitments.

Zarif added that Iran took steps to exceed uranium caps 60 days after Trump pulled out of the deal. "As soon as E3 abide by their obligations, we'll reverse," Zarif said. The E3 refers to Germany, Britain and France, countries that Tehran accuses of failing to uphold its commitments to the deal.

CNN's Henrik Pettersson and Sheena McKenzie contributed to this report.

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2019-07-03 14:08:00Z
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Hurricane Barbara pushing across Pacific as powerful Category 4 storm - Hawaii track, Barbara path, models, latest forecast of Category 4 hurricane today – live updates - CBS News

Hurricane Barbara was pushing across the Pacific as a powerful Category 4 storm Wednesday, but it was very far from land. The U.S. National Hurricane Center said the storm had maximum sustained winds of 155 mph early Wednesday and may have reached its peak intensity.

Barbara's maximum sustained winds were just under the 157 mph threshold for a Category 5 storm. The storm was located about 1,995 miles east of Hilo, Hawaii, and was moving to the west-northwest at 14 mph.

It was about 1,175 miles west-southwest of the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula. The forecast track carries the storm roughly in the direction of Hawaii, but it's expected to dissipate over the weekend before reaching those longitudes.

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Gradual weakening was expected Wednesday followed by faster weakening Thursday and Friday. Barbara was forecast to weaken to a tropical storm Friday.

A map shows the projected path of Hurricane Barbara as of 5 a.m. ET July 3, 2019. National Weather Service

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2019-07-03 13:46:00Z
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