Asia

Chinese President Xi Jinping ignored overtures by the Vatican, meeting with state leaders but avoiding Pope Francis during his visit to Rome this week.

A massive explosion at a pesticide plant in Yangcheng, China killed 47 people and injured 640 others on Thursday, with more fatalities expected as rescue workers comb through the rubble. Sensitive to growing public outrage over a series of industrial accidents, Chinese President Xi Jinping ordered an investigation of the accident on Friday. Several employees of the plant were immediately detained by police.

Google is reportedly set to meet with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, next week to discuss Google’s work with China in the development of artificial intelligence.

The U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions on Thursday against two Chinese shipping companies that helped North Korea evade its own sanctions.

The election body of Afghanistan decided this week to delay the country’s presidential election for a second time — to September 28 from its original scheduled date of April 20 and first delay to July 20.

Politicians in northwestern Pakistan have denounced the women’s marches that took place around the country earlier this month as “anti-Islamic,” after people took to the streets to celebrate International Women’s Day.

An off-duty pilot in the cockpit of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed in Indonesia the next day, killing 189 people, reportedly saved the plane the day before by telling the crew “how to disable a malfunctioning flight-control system.” 

The European Union has decided to get a little tougher with China, although its members are divided on exactly what that means. The international organization apparently wishes to curtail Chinese political influence without unduly interfering with anyone’s ability to take Chinese money.

Facebook has rejected calls for a time delay feature on Facebook Live videos, after the Christchurch mosque massacre was livestreamed on the platform.

National Security Adviser John Bolton discussed China’s role in the Venezuelan political crisis and North Korean denuclearization with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily.

Facebook reportedly used experimental audio technology to find and remove videos of the New Zealand mosque shooting that the company’s A.I. missed.

Former  Philippine officials Albert del Rosario and Conchita Carpio Morales announced on Thursday they have filed a human rights complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Chinese President Xi Jinping over his government’s actions in the South China Sea.

U.S. and Chinese trade officials will meet in Beijing next week and the following week in Washington, DC, for another round of pre-tariff increase trade talks.

Acting Pentagon chief Patrick Shanahan delivered a sobering statistic on Wednesday at a think-tank in Washington: Last year, China put 34 rockets into orbit — more than double the 17 that the U.S. put into orbit the same year.

Chinese state media has declared that the shooting that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week “exposes Western flaws” surrounding the integration of Muslims into foreign societies.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration privately requested a formal apology from a top Afghan official who accused the United States of sidelining Kabul during the ongoing negotiations with the Taliban to end the war in Afghanistan, NBC News reported Wednesday.

The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan was rocked on Tuesday by the surprise announcement that longtime President Nursultan Nazarbayev has decided to resign after 30 years in power.

The Trump administration will not immediately lift tariffs even if the China trade talks are successful, the president said.

About 1,600 hotel guests in South Korea were secretly recorded, with the footage of their every move live-streamed online to paying customers, police said Wednesday.

The Swedish government will be opening the doors to China’s persecuted Uyghur Muslims and allow them to claim asylum in the country.

Hate crimes and targeted violence against Christians in India during the first two months of 2019 showed a jump of 57 percent over the same period in 2018, a new report revealed.

Some members of the United States-funded and trained Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) reportedly terrorized and robbed local Afghan personnel hired under U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) contracts of nearly $1 million in property and equipment between 2010 and March of this year.

A top Indian official on Tuesday suggested New Delhi is planning to take more military action against Pakistan in retaliation for the terrorist attack in the disputed region of Kashmir controlled by India that triggered reciprocal air operations by the two nuclear-armed neighbors earlier this year and prompted concerns of another war between the two rivals.

Even as U.S. and Chinese officials have planned meetings in D.C. and Beijing, there are reports of trouble for the trade talks.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a pair of Internet censorship bills on Sunday, equipping his government with powerful new tools to control online speech.

A Pentecostal Christian with a mental disability was beaten up by a Muslim crowd in Pakistan last week, after a neighbor accused him of blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad.

The Afghanistan government on Monday contested reports claiming that the Taliban captured a record 150 American-trained and supplied Afghan border police officers and confiscated their U.S.-supplied weapons and military equipment after they surrendered over the weekend when the narco-jihadis chased them into neighboring Turkmenistan following ongoing battles in Badghis province.

U.S. President Donald Trump held an hourlong classified meeting on Afghanistan with his national security team over the weekend in the wake of complaints by a top Afghan official that the American envoy charged with leading peace negotiations is “elevating” the Taliban at the expense of sidelining Kabul.

The Chinese government published a policy paper on Monday claiming it has arrested 13,000 “terrorists” in Xinjiang province since 2014. The paper is part of China’s effort to defend the massive re-education camps that currently hold up to a million members of the Uighur population, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group.

South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo told his parliament on Monday there is no sign of an imminent missile launch from North Korea, despite some provocative activity spotted by satellite at the rocket launch facility in Tongchang-ri.