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Sydney - The search zone for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has been limited to a narrow strip of the Indian Ocean, with the authorities confident that they will find the aircraft “in a matter of days” after two new sets of underwater signals were detected. :snip: They have all been heard within an area about 20 miles long and 10 miles wide, about 650 miles off the north-west coast of Australia, although a final search zone is yet to be demarcated. :snip: All the signals have been detected along a narrow strip of the Indian Ocean in an area...

....The southern tip of the Ryukyu Islands sits only about 80 miles east of the Senkakus. Unlike the uninhabited Senkakus, the Ryukyus host not only roughly 1.5 million Japanese residents, but also the U.S. Marine and Air Force bases that anchor the U.S. presence in the East China Sea. Occupying the Ryukyus would fracture the U.S. strategic position in East Asia -- separating U.S. forces based in Japan (to the north) from those at Bahrain, the other permanent U.S. hub in Asia, far to the west. At a bare minimum, U.S. ships and aircraft would have to detour around Chinese-held...

TOKYO - Japanese fighter jets were scrambled a record high 415 times in response to Chinese aircraft approaching Japanese airspace in fiscal 2013, the Defense Ministry said Wednesday. That surpassed the previous record of 306 times the previous year, said the ministry which began releasing such data by country in fiscal 2001.

This is a bad morning. I was greeted by a headline in the New York Times that said Defense Secretary “Chuck Mullet” Hagel was planning to submit a budget to Congress to cut the size of the military to a level not seen since 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II. The article went on to say that the Pentagon realized that this would be an inadequate force for even very small wars and certainly would not allow the U.S. to police the world and keep control of contingencies like a North Korean attack on the South or a...

Australian official says since Ocean Shield vessel has reacquired signal he is 'optimistic' plane will be found soon The search area for the missing Malaysia airlines flight MH370 has been drastically reduced after two further detections of pings consistent with those of a black box from a plane late on Tuesday. The head of Australia’s Joint Agency Co-ordination Centre, Angus Houston, said on Wednesday the Australian defence vessel Ocean Shield had detected two further pings on Tuesday – one in the afternoon and one in the late evening – that had allowed the search area to be further refined to...

After learning of the Chinese government’s plan to bulldoze a church in Wenzhou, China, thousands of people have gathered to form a 24/7 human chain to protect it: Officials claimed the church had been built illegally and used red paint to daub the words: “Demolish” and “Illegal construction” onto its towering facade. Wenzhou’s underground “house” churches – those unwilling to comply with Communist Party rules – have long been subjected to sporadic crackdowns, such as one in 2000 that saw hundreds of churches and temples demolished across Zhejiang province. However, the Sanjiang church is part of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, China’s...

Essayist Gerald Early said that the history of the United States will one day be reduced to the Constitution, jazz, and baseball. If someone had made the same summary of Chinese history 30 years ago, the trio would likely have been the Great Wall, Maoism, and famine. Over the past 2,000 years, China has suffered almost one famine per year. Severe drought killed as many as 13 million Chinese in the two-year famine beginning in 1876. The 1927 famine killed as many as 6 million. There were significant famines in 1929, 1939, and 1942. The Great Famine, which began in...

Tensions between China and the United States were on full display on Tuesday as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel faced questions in Beijing about America's position in bitter territorial disputes with regional U.S. allies. Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan, standing side-by-side with Hagel, called on the United States to restrain ally Japan and chided another U.S. ally, the Philippines. Then, Hagel was sharply questioned by Chinese officers at the National Defense University. One of them told Hagel he was concerned that the United States was stirring up trouble in the East and South China Sea because it feared someday "China will...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Monday warned Russian President Vladimir Putin against moving "overtly or covertly" into eastern Ukraine and said there was strong evidence that pro-Russian demonstrators in the region were being paid.

In swift reaction to North Korea's most recent flouting of international law, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced today from Japan that the U.S. will deploy two additional AEGIS ballistic missile defense ships to Japan by 2017 as part of an effort to bolster protection in the region. The response comes in wake of Pyongyang's repeated provocations, including recently test-firing two ballistic missiles, as US President Barack Obama hosted a landmark Japan-South Korea summit. The move is meant to send a strong signal, not only to Kim Jong-Un, but Russian leader Vladamir Putin as well. Hagel, in Japan to meet...

The Australian navy picked up extended underwater signals in the search zone for Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU +2.44% Flight 370, in what authorities said Monday was the best lead yet in the hunt for the missing jet's "black box" flight recorders. The naval ship Ocean Shield—fitted with U.S. Navy black-box detector equipment able to pick up signals far beneath the ocean surface—has been searching an area of the southern Indian Ocean off the coast of Western Australia for nearly two days. Investigators believe the area is the most likely spot where the plane may have run out of fuel, more than...

(Additional reporting by Lincoln Feast in Sydney; Editing by Michael Perry) Sydney/Perth(Reuters) - An Australian ship searching for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has picked up signals consistent with the beacons from aircraft black box recorders, in what search officials said on Monday was the most promising lead yet in the month-long hunt. The U.S. Navy "towed pinger locator" connected to the Australian ship Ocean Shield picked up the signals in an area some 1,680 km (1,040 miles) northwest of Perth, which analysis of sporadic satellite data has determined as the most likely place Boeing 777 went down. :snip: The...

Christians have flocked to defend a church in eastern China after Communist Party officials claimed it was an "illegal construction" and announced plans to demolish it Thousands of Chinese Christians have mounted an extraordinary, round-the-clock defence of a church in a city known as the 'Jerusalem of the East' after Communist Party officials threatened to bulldoze their place of worship. In an episode that underlines the fierce and long-standing friction between China's officially atheist Communist Party and its rapidly growing Christian congregation, Bible-carrying believers this week flocked to the Sanjiang church in Wenzhou hoping to protect it from the bulldozers....

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 flew around Indonesian airspace apparently to avoid detection after vanishing from radar screens on March 8, a media report said today, suggesting the possibility of a more sinister reason behind the jet's disappearance..... After reviewing radar data provided by neighbouring countries, investigators have now found that the jetliner curved north of Indonesia before turning south toward the southern Indian Ocean, CNN quoted a Malaysian official as saying. The official also suggested the possibility of a more sinister reason behind MH370's disappearance a month ago. The plane's flight path clearly showed that someone on the plane was...

Shocking enough are the allegations that a long-perceived unassuming state senator tried brokering an international arms deal with military-style rifles and rocket launchers, but Leland Yee may have narrowly escaped an even more ominous label: supporter of terrorism. Yee, whose arrest after an FBI undercover sting shook the California political world last week, would likely have been charged with aiding terrorists if not for a bureaucratic label missing from the militant Filipino group that he is accused of sourcing for an international arms deal, counterterrorism experts told this newspaper. His ties to the group, whose leader has said he personally...

In a sudden development, US Ambassador to India Nancy Powell on Monday resigned in the midst of general elections in India in which Narendra Modi is perceived to be a front runner for the post of Prime Minister. The announcement of her resignation to her colleagues in the US mission here today came a week after media reports here that she may be shipped out by the Obama Administration to “clean the state” with India. Powell has been in India for less than three years. “US Ambassador to India Nancy J Powell announced in a US Mission Town Hall meeting...

(CNSNews.com) – Defunding United Nations agencies that admit “Palestine” is not in the interests of the U.S., Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power argued Wednesday, because doing so constitutes a “double win” for the Palestinians. Not only do they score by gaining admission to a U.N. body, she told the House Appropriations’ subcommittee responsible for foreign operations, they also benefit by having U.S. influence in that body reduced, making way for the likes of Russia, China and Cuba to take the lead. Power was arguing for lawmakers to support a waiver to provisions in U.S. law that prohibit funding for...

TOKYO — When President Bill Clinton signed a 1994 agreement promising to “respect” the territorial integrity of Ukraine if it gave up its nuclear weapons, there was little thought then of how that obscure diplomatic pact — called the Budapest Memorandum — might affect the long-running defense partnership between the United States and Japan. But now, as American officials have distanced themselves from the Budapest Memorandum in light of Russia’s takeover of Crimea, calling promises made in Budapest “nonbinding,” the United States is being forced at the same time to make reassurances in Asia. Japanese officials, a senior American military...

Charred grains of barley, millet and wheat deposited nearly 5,000 years ago at campsites in the high plains of Kazakhstan show that nomadic sheepherders played a surprisingly important role in the early spread of domesticated crops throughout a mountainous east-west corridor along the historic Silk Road... "Ancient wheat and broomcorn millet, recovered in nomadic campsites in Kazakhstan, show that prehistoric herders in Central Eurasia had incorporated both regional crops into their economy and rituals nearly 5,000 years ago, pushing back the chronology of interaction along the territory of the 'Silk Road' more than 2,000 years," Frachetti said... ...several strains of...

A Chinese ship searching for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 detected a "pulse signal" in the southern Indian Ocean on Saturday, but there was no evidence yet that it was linked to the missing plane, state media said. The signal picked up by the vessel's black box detector had a frequency of 37.5kHz, the official Xinhua news agency said -- identical to the beacon signal emitted by flight recorders. The announcement came nearly a month after the Malaysian jetliner disappeared off radar screens en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board, triggering an unprecedented international search. Australian...