United States and Russia concluded two days of arms control talks Tuesday with the two sides still at odds over the US demand to include China in any new treaty, but showing signs of a possible willingness to extend the existing New START deal, which expires next year.
In its ongoing persecution of Chinese Christians, China’s government is inspecting and restricting the publication and distribution of books and other Christian literature produced by churches, CBN News reported Monday.
In the first half of 2020, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials intercepted almost 20,000 false driver’s licenses that were sent mostly from China and Hong Kong, but also from the UK and South Korea, Just the News reported Monday. The licenses were sent in 1,513 shipments between January 1 and June 30, CBP officials said in a statement.
The United States on Tuesday circulated a revised resolution that would extend a UN arms embargo on Iran indefinitely, seeking to gain more support in the 15-member Security Council where veto-wielding Russia and China have voiced strong opposition.
Six Arab Gulf countries sided with the US in sending a letter to the United Nations Saturday, asking for a continued arms embargo on Iran, the Washington Examiner reports. The embargo was scheduled to expire once the 2015 Iran deal comes into force.
The U.N. Security Council is preparing to vote this week on a U.S. proposal to extend an arms embargo on Iran, a move that some diplomats say is bound to fail and put the fate of a nuclear deal between Tehran and world powers further at risk.
Chinese authorities have sentenced a Christian to 10 days of administrative detention for “illegal evangelism,” a well-informed advocacy group told Worthy News on Friday.
China’s Communist leadership has ordered devoted Christians not to believe in God, well-informed activists, and local believers say. “Attacks on house churches have intensified across China. Police and government officials raid places of worship and intimidate congregations,” added Shen Xiang, who writes for Bitter Winter, a respected religious rights magazine on China.
At a time when the Chinese Communist Party is eyeing another three-year term on the U.N. Human Rights Council, a pledge in the Democratic Party’s draft 2020 platform for the U.S. to return to a body plagued by the presence of rights-abusing regimes is drawing some criticism.
Looking to strengthen its space cooperation with China amid heightened geopolitical tensions with the United States, Russia is in talks with Beijing about the possibility of building a joint lunar research base.
The International Christian Concern (ICC) non-governmental organization has received a new report that Chinese authorities threatened to send children from a church in Chengdu to re-education camps, Christian Today reports. ICC has previously reported that Chinese authorities had removed children from Christian families on the grounds that they were “trapped by an evil religion.”
Chinese officials entered and took control of the U.S. Consulate in the city of Chengdu early on Monday, 72 hours after ordering its closure in retaliation for the U.S. decision to shut China’s consulate in Houston. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had called the mission in Houston a “hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”
President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on the phone Thursday and discussed arms control and economic recovery in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the Washington Times reports. Although this is the first time the two leaders have talked since allegations emerged that Russia had offered bounties for Afghan militants to kill US soldiers, neither the White House nor the Kremlin made mention of this issue in their statements about the call.
China on Friday ordered the United States to close its consulate in the western city of Chengdu, in retaliation for the closure of China’s Houston consulate earlier this week.
China was among a range of topics discussed by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London Tuesday, VOA News reports. Pompeo arrived for talks only days after Johnson finally decided to exclude Chinese tech giant Huawei from developing the UK’s 5G phone network, a move Washington has been exhorting for some time.
The U.S. ordered the Chinese Consulate in Houston, Texas, shut down because of the persistent problem of Bejing’s theft of U.S. intellectual property, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday.
The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday indicted two Chinese nationals over their role in what the agency called a decade-long cyber espionage campaign that targeted defense contractors, COVID researchers and hundreds of other victims worldwide.
The Chinese government is reported to have told poor Christian families they must give up their faith or lose state aid, CBN News reports. In a report published Monday, the Bitter Winter human rights group said: “People on social welfare [have been] ordered to worship the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), not God.” This latest action follows longstanding persecution of Christians by the communist regime in China.
Christians in eastern China were recovering of their injuries Thursday after trying to prevent the removal of crosses from churches by Chinese government forces.
In 2018 President Trump signed a secret authorization, known as a presidential finding, which granted the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sweeping freedom to conduct covert cyber operations against Iran and others, Yahoo News reports.