US Ally Confronts Armed Chinese Ships in Disputed Waters
Newsweek reached out to the Chinese foreign ministry via email with a request for comment.
The uninhabited Senkakus, known in China as the Diaoyu Islands, are at the center of a long-running territorial dispute between the two neighbors. Taiwan also claims the island group.
Tokyo nationalized the islands in 2012, drawing strong protest from Beijing, which has since progressively stepped up patrols by its increasingly assertive coast guard-moves Japan sees as attempts to alter the status quo.
Wednesday morning, four Chinese coast guard cutters sailed "one after the other" into territorial waters off the Senkakus, NHK cited Japan's coast guard as saying.
All four of the vessels were said to have been equipped with deck-mounted guns.
They departed from the zone after about two hours, the Japanese agency said, adding that it had broadcast radio warnings and continues to monitor the situation.
It was the first China coast guard "intrusion" into the territorial waters, or waters extending 12 nautical miles (13.8) off the coastline, since March 7.
Last year, Chinese government ships entered the contiguous zone-an area that extends 12 nautical miles beyond territorial waters-on a record 353 days, according to Tokyo.
Monday marked the 175th consecutive day that Chinese government vessels have been observed in the contiguous zone.
The day before, Japan's coast guard said it had expelled a Chinese oceanographic survey vessel that was operating inside Japan's exclusive economic zone, roughly 140 miles from the Senkakus' Taisho Island.
China operates more than twice as many coast guard vessels over 1,000 tons in displacement as Japan-and many of them are more heavily armed.
China's introduction of a coast guard law, empowering crews to use force to assert Beijing's sovereignty claims, intensified concerns in Tokyo.
China's Coast Guard said in a statement: "The China Coast Guard 1306 fleet patrolled the territorial waters of China's Diaoyu Dao on May 14. This is a rights-protection patrol activity carried out in accordance with the law."
The Senkaku Islands are likely to remain a source of friction as China continues its efforts to normalize patrols there.
U.S. officials have repeatedly affirmed that the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty applies to the Senkakus, though Japan's cautious handling of the dispute suggests the matter is unlikely to escalate into an armed confrontation in the near future.
Related Articles
Map Shows Countries That Prefer China to the USPhotos Show Allied Jets Escorting US Bombers in New Frontline DrillsChina Makes New Move Against US Ally in Disputed WatersUS Stealth Fighters Sent To Allied Base to Counter China Threat
2025 NEWSWEEK DIGITAL LLC.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
3 hours ago
- The Hill
US deadlines in Ukraine are a gift to Putin and Xi
President Trump's announcement this week of a shortened window of '10 to 12 days' for Russian President Vladimir Putin to reach a ceasefire agreement in Ukraine reflects a continued evolution in his rhetoric. His growing frustration with Moscow and his willingness to speak plainly about Russia's escalation send a signal that many in the U.S. and Europe have been waiting to hear. But while the shift in tone signals growing frustration, it has not translated into action. Russia reads the action as a continued pause in pressure, which it has used to intensify its offensive against Ukrainian homes and hospitals. Russian forces are now making their fastest territorial gains in more than a year, and their attacks are becoming more sophisticated. Swarm tactics using Iranian-designed Shahed drones, now mass-produced and adapted inside Russia with Chinese parts, are overwhelming Ukraine's air defenses at an alarming rate. In just one day last month, Russia launched 728 drones, decoys and missiles in a single coordinated wave. Ukrainian interceptors and radar crews are doing heroic work, but they are stretched to the limit. The U.S. has tools at its disposal that remain unused. For months, a bipartisan sanctions bill, co-authored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and backed by 85 senators, a veto-proof majority, has been ready to move. The legislation would impose steep secondary tariffs on countries like China, India and Brazil that continue to buy Russian oil and gas, and would significantly raise the cost of doing business with Moscow. But in July, Senate leadership pulled the bill from consideration after President Trump suggested he would act if Russia failed to move toward peace within 50 days. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he would 'hold off' on advancing the bill, signaling that Congress would defer to Trump's timeline. House leaders followed suit. That decision was a mistake. While it is encouraging to see President Trump express increasing resolve, deferring congressional action in the hope that Putin will suddenly negotiate has only given Moscow more time and space to escalate. Every week of delay is a missed opportunity to tighten the financial pressure on Putin's war machine. And the clock is not just ticking in Ukraine. The broader contest involves China, too. Beijing's role in this war has become increasingly visible. Chinese companies are supplying entire weapons systems, not just components. Chinese-made drones and decoys are helping Russia saturate Ukrainian airspace. Chinese officials have even welcomed delegations from occupied Ukrainian territories and continue to sell heavy machinery to companies operating there. European officials report that China's foreign minister recently told the EU that Beijing does not want Russia to lose the war and fears that a Russian defeat would allow the U.S. to focus more squarely on Asia. Ukraine has responded accordingly. In early July, Kyiv arrested two Chinese nationals on espionage charges after they allegedly attempted to steal information about Ukraine's Neptune missile program. Days earlier, President Volodymyr Zelensky imposed sanctions on five Chinese firms accused of supporting the Russian war effort. These are not symbolic gestures, they are signs that Ukraine is increasingly realistic about the stakes and about China's alignment with Moscow. Support for Ukraine is not a distraction from U.S. competition with China. It is a critical part of it. Weakening Putin's military capacity weakens a key pillar of China's global strategy. And allowing Russia to continue its aggression without consequence would embolden Beijing's worst instincts from the Taiwan Strait to the South China Sea. To its credit, the Trump administration has begun voicing stronger concerns about Beijing's role. In the recently concluded round of trade talks, senior U.S. officials reportedly raised objections to China's purchase of sanctioned Russian oil and its sale of more than $15 billion worth of dual-use technology to Moscow. These are important warnings — but without follow-through, they risk being absorbed into the pattern of delay that Moscow and Beijing are already exploiting. The Graham-Blumenthal sanctions bill should move forward. It represents the most serious effort yet to impose real costs not only on Russia, but on the network of countries (especially China) helping it survive sanctions. It complements, rather than competes with, the administration's efforts to pressure Moscow. And it sends a message that the U.S. is serious about backing up its warnings with action. Countdowns can be useful. They create urgency. But urgency without follow-through is no substitute for strategy. What matters now is not how many days remain on the clock, but whether we are using each one to act. Jane Harman is a former nine-term congresswoman from California and former ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who most recently served as chair of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. She is the author of 'Insanity Defense: Why Our Failure to Confront Hard National Security Problems Makes Us Less Safe.'
Newsweek
4 hours ago
- Newsweek
Alligator Alcatraz Hunger Strike: What to Know
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Detainees at the controversial immigration facility known as "Alligator Alcatraz" have reportedly been on a hunger strike for more than 10 days, protesting conditions at the center. Newsweek has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' office for comment via email on Saturday. Why It Matters There have been allegations of medical neglect, verbal abuse, and poor conditions inside the Everglades immigration facility, and human rights advocates have repeatedly raised concerns about the center. Alligator Alcatraz was quickly created and holds an estimated 1,000 beds. The bunkbeds are stacked together in wire-fenced cages. The remote facility is expected to cost Florida about $450 million annually to operate. The center is part of the Trump administration's effort to crackdown on illegal immigration. President Donald Trump has vowed to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, an initiative that has seen an intensification of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests across the country, including people with valid visas and documentation. What To Know Several detainees at the relatively new facility are refusing food as part of a hunger strike to protest conditions inside the center, with reports noting the strike has entered its 11th day. Pedro Lorenzo Concepcion one of the detainees, was hospitalized during the strike, and told El Pais in a call from inside the facility, "I feel weak, with a lot of heartburn." He told the outlet that he has refused to eat since July 22. He continued: "I don't want food, I refuse any treatment. I didn't even ask to be taken to the hospital, because I'm fighting for my family and all Cubans, and I belong where my people are, in prison, suffering the same hardship they are." His wife, Daimarys Hernández, has told the outlet and NBC that she is afraid he may die in custody or be deported back to Cuba alone. Lorenzo Concepcion, who NBC identified as Pedro Hernández, came to the U.S. from Cuba nearly two decades ago, in 2006. He was detained on July 8 after showing up at an ICE appointment in Miramar, Florida. So far this year, there have been 10 confirmed deaths in ICE detention, per the agency. "These deaths are clearly attributable to the Trump administration's increased and aggressive detention policies, and I have no doubt that when more complete investigations take place, it will likely provide information that these deaths were likely preventable," Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Prison Project, told Newsweek in July. Democratic leaders and human rights activists have called out the center over reported conditions. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly defended the center and has promoted the facility as a model for other states as a way to increase ICE detention capacity. "We need to double our capacity in detention beds because we need to facilitate getting people out of this country as fast as possible," Noem said in July during a press conference. ICE is struggling with limited capacity and resources to fulfill its mission of millions of deportations. President Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others, tour "Alligator Alcatraz," a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, on July 1 in Ochopee, Florida. President Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others, tour "Alligator Alcatraz," a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, on July 1 in Ochopee, Florida. AP Photo/Evan Vucci What People Are Saying Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst and consultant at the Florida Immigration Coalition, wrote in an X post Saturday: "People detained at Alligator Alcatraz have had to remove fecal matter from the toilets with their bare hands because the toilets lose pressure due to lack of water. That's the sort of depraved conditions that drove those in detention there to ten days of hunger strike so far." Derrick Evans, former member of the West Virginia House and pardoned January 6, 2021 Capitol riot participant, wrote in an X post: "I'm glad the illegals at Alligator Alcatraz are on a hunger strike. Just saves the tax payers money by not having to feed them. I have no sympathy for any of them." Representative Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a Florida Democrat, wrote in an X post about the center on Saturday: "438 veterans in Florida are taking a stand against the unconstitutional and illegal use of our military for immigration enforcement. I stand with them. We should be defending our nation, not using Marines to cage people." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in a July 25 X post: "We stood up Alligator Alcatraz in just eight days as a centralized facility for deportation staging. The facility has a two-mile runway that allows federal military aircraft to transport illegal aliens out of the country, right on site. These deportation flights operated by DHS are underway, and we will support efforts to increase cadence of the flights so that the number of illegal aliens deported keeps increasing." What Happens Next? It remains unclear when the hunger strike will end. In late July, deportation flights from the facility began and are expected to continue. Civil rights groups, including the ACLU, have filed lawsuits alleging "inhuman conditions" and lack of legal counsel at the center.
Atlantic
4 hours ago
- Atlantic
This Is the News From TikTok
When he learned one night this summer that the United States had bombed Iran, the content creator Aaron Parnas responded right away, showing what's bad and what's good about using TikTok for news. Shortly after 7:46 p.m. ET on June 21, he saw Donald Trump's Truth Social post announcing the air strikes. At 7:52, according to a time stamp, Parnas uploaded to TikTok a minute-long video in which he looked into the camera; read out the president's post, which identified the suspected nuclear sites that the U.S. had targeted; and added a note of skepticism about whether Iran would heed Trump's call for peace. As traditional media outlets revealed more details that night, Parnas summarized their findings in nine more reports, some of which he recorded from a car. Parnas wasn't adding elaborate detail or original reporting. What he had to offer was speed—plus a deep understanding of how to reach people on TikTok, which may not seem an obvious or trustworthy source of news: The platform is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which lawmakers in Washington, D.C., fear could be manipulated to promote Beijing's interests. TikTok's algorithm offers each user a personalized feed of short, grabby videos—an arrangement that seems unlikely to serve up holistic coverage of current events. Even so, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last fall, 17 percent of adults—and 39 percent of adults under 30—regularly get informed about current affairs on the app. Fewer than 1 percent of all TikTok accounts followed by Americans are traditional media outlets. Instead, users are relying not only on 'newsfluencer s' such as Parnas but also on skits reenacting the latest Supreme Court ruling, hype videos for political agendas, and other news-adjacent clips that are hard to describe to people who don't use TikTok. Last summer, after the first assassination attempt on Trump, one viral video fused clips of the bloody-eared Republican raising his fist with snippets of Joe Biden's well wishes. Simultaneously, Chappell Roan's ballad for the lovestruck, 'Casual,' played, hinting at a bromance. On my For You page in June, as U.S.-Iran tensions flared, I saw a string of videos known as 'edits'—minute-long music montages—on the general topic. One spliced together footage of zooming F-16s, Captain America intimidating his enemies in an elevator, and bald eagles staring ominously while AC/DC's 'Thunderstruck' blared. Skeptics might wonder: When people say they get their news from TikTok, what exactly are they learning? Frequent consumers of current-affairs content on TikTok insist that they can decipher what's going on in the world—that, even if they have to extrapolate facts from memes, the brevity and entertainment value compensate for a lack of factual detail. 'A lot of things are in simpler terms on TikTok,' Miles Maltbia, a 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Chicago, told me. 'That, and convenience, makes it the perfect place to get all my news from.' And as more and more users turn to TikTok for news, creators such as Parnas are finding ways to game the algorithm. Parnas, who is 26, is a lawyer by trade. He told me that he monitors every court case he deems significant with a legal tracker. He was immersed in politics at an early age. (His father, Lev Parnas, gained brief notoriety as an associate of Rudy Giuliani during Trump's first term. 'I love my dad,' Aaron Parnas has said. 'And I'm not my dad.') C-SPAN is on 'all day every day.' And he's enabled X and Truth Social notifications for posts from every member of Congress and major world leader. When he decides that his phone's alerts are newsworthy, he hits the record button. His rapid-reaction formula for news has made him a one-man media giant: He currently has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He told me that his videos on the platform have reached more than 100 million American users in the past six months. His Substack newsletter also has the most subscriptions of any in the 'news' category, and he recently interviewed Senator Cory Booker, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and this magazine's editor in chief. Still, Parnas's TikTok model relies heavily on reporting by other outlets. And Parnas's 24/7 information blitz may be jarring for those whose media-consumption habits are not already calibrated for TikTok. There's no 'Good evening' or 'Welcome.' But he's reaching an audience who other media don't: Many of his viewers, he thinks, are 'young people who don't watch the news and never have and never will.' He added, 'They just don't have the attention span to.' Ashley Acosta, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she liked the fact that Parnas is his own boss, outside the corporate media world. She contrasted him with outlets such as ABC, which recently fired the correspondent Terry Moran for an X post that called Trump a 'world-class hater.' Nick Parigi, a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, also sees Parnas as a valuable news source. 'You're getting less propagandized,' he told me. 'It's not pushing an agenda.' Last year, Parnas explicitly supported Kamala Harris's presidential candidacy, but he prides himself on delivering basic information in a straightforward manner. 'I wish we would just go back to the fact-based, Walter Cronkite–style of reporting,' he told me. 'So that's what I do.' For Parnas to sound like the CBS News legend, you'd have to watch his TikToks at half speed. If Parnas is a genre-defining anchor, Jack Mac is the equivalent of a shock jock. A creator with 1.1 million followers, he uses the term 'jo urnalisming' to describe his work, which amounts to commenting on stories he finds interesting or amusing—such as a 'patriot' New York firefighter being suspended for letting young women ride in his firetruck. 'Do I think TikTok is the best source for news? No,' Olivia Stringfield, a 25-year-old from South Carolina who works in marketing, told me. But she's a fan of Mac because he offers 'a more glamorous way to get the news'—and a quick, convenient way. 'I don't have time to sit down and read the paper like my parents did,' Stringfield said. Robert Kozinets, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Gen Z's media consumption on TikTok, told me that users rarely seek out news. It finds them. 'The default position is: Algorithm, let the information flow over me,' he said. 'Load me up. I'll interrupt it when I see something interesting.' On a platform where little content is searched, creators dress up the news to make it algorithm friendly. The Washington Post is one established media brand that has leaned into the growing format of TikTok news skits. In one video about the Supreme Court, a Post staffer wearing a college-graduation robe wields a toolbox mallet as a gavel to channel Chief Justice John Roberts, and when she mimics him, her background turns into red curtains. 'South Carolina can cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood,' she says. Dave Jorgenson, who launched the Post 's TikTok channel in 2019, announced recently that he's leaving to set up his own online-video company —a testament to the demand for this new style of content. From the January 2025 issue: The 'mainstream media' has already lost The Post 's embrace of TikTok has been unusual for an outlet of the newspaper's stature. The prevalence of vibes-based content on the video platform raises obvious questions about truth and accuracy. Many users I spoke with trusted crowdsourced fact-checking to combat misinformation, via the comments section. I asked Maltbia, the analyst from Chicago, how he knows which comments to trust. 'I'll usually look at the ones that are the most liked,' he said. 'But if it still sounds a little shady to me, then I'll probably Google it.' Parnas defended the integrity of TikTok news. 'There's no more misinformation on TikTok than there is on Twitter, than there is on Fox News, than sometimes there is on CNN,' he told me. That claim is impossible to verify: TikTok's factual accuracy is under-researched. One assessment by the media watchdog NewsGuard found that 20 percent of TikTok's news search results contained misinformation—but no user I spoke with bothers with the app's search function. Whether TikTok will continue to gain popularity as a news outlet isn't yet clear. Citing fears of hostile foreign control over a major communications platform, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation aimed at forcing TikTok's Chinese owners to sell. But Trump has now delayed implementation of the law three times since he took office. In the meantime, users of the platform keep stretching the definition of news. On TikTok, 'news is anything that's new,' Kozinets, the USC professor, told me. Entrepreneurial creators who care about current events will keep testing delivery formats to gain more eyeballs on the platform. And even if TikTok is sold or shuts down, similar apps are sure to fill any vacuum. The challenge of packaging news for distribution by a black-box algorithm seems here to stay.
