The World Biden: China is ‘ticking time bomb’ posing danger to world

threaten to undercut the work of his administration to stabilize ties. In June, just a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken completed a trip to Beijing to ease tensions, Biden likened Xi to a “dictator” and questioned the Chinese leader’s control over his country and its military.

Murder, cocaine and tears: Ecuador faces a perilous narco-state descent

THE rage was palpable outside the Quito funeral parlor where Fernando Villavicencio’s lifeless body lay. Inside, even close friends were searched with antiexplosives dogs. His widow was rushing to get back from Washington for the wake.

Barely 24 hours had passed since the investigative journalist turned anti-graft crusader turned presidential candidate was gunned down less than two weeks before August 20 elections in the most savage act of political violence that Ecuador has seen since the military dictatorship ended in the 1970s. His assassina tion has thrust unwanted attention on this small Andean state, squeezed between the world’s two biggest cocaine producers. Just a few years ago it had enjoyed the reputation of being tranquil and relatively safe but now its descent toward becoming a narco-state has become evident in the eyes of the world.

Just this week, Dutch authorities seized about $660 million worth of cocaine that had been hidden in a container of bananas from Ecuador. Meanwhile, FBI agents are flying in to help with the investigation as six Colombians were arrested in connection to the killing.

If security was already the top issue in the campaign, the killing is bound to alter the tone and direction of what was already an unpredictable race, begging the question of whether voters will gravitate now more toward the toughest-on-crime candidates.

“We’re indignant with what just happened, and with the country we’re living in,” said David Tituaña, 50, a taxi driver. “This has obviously hit all Ecuadoreans in the heart, that they’ve done this to a brave man who was fighting for the ideals of our country.”

On Thursday, many mourners fought back tears.

Yet ordinary Ecuadorians have become anesthetized to the kidnappings, car bombs and contract killings among drug cartels that have transformed the country into one of the world’s most violent places.

D eath foretold

Videos showed protesters overnight waving flags, but demonstrations were relatively sedate. There was no sign of civil unrest, nor anything that foreshadows an intervention by the military. The election date remains unchanged and a debate will still take place on Sunday.

As the nation comes to terms with a national tragedy, there is a paradox there of how people were shocked and yet not surprised.

T he ultimate fate of Villavicencio, 59, had been something of a death foretold. He had received multiple threats after putting a target on his back with a defiant public pledge to take on the cocaine cartels even if it cost him his life.

“ The people of this country need courageous and honest leadership,” he had told a TV anchor who warned him on air whether his confrontational style put his life at risk. “We survive by casting out fear.”

Three days later, he was murdered. The next steps will involve the inevitable soulsearching among the electorate and test its democratic credentials. Investors too are paying closer attention.

Mexico and Colombia

For Ecuador and the region at large, this is a moment of reckoning, inviting comparisons to what Mexicans endured with the killing of Luis Donaldo Colosio, candidate to the 1994 election, or what Colombians suffered at the peak of the drug war in late 1980s.

T his month, there are three elections taking place within a week of each other, in Ecuador, Guatemala and Argentina. And crime is a top concern.

V illavicencio follows a long line of journalists who’ve been targeted for clashing with dangerous people in Latin America and the rest of the world.

In Russia, ther e is Alexei Navalny, who survived poisoning and is now in jail. In Malta, Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb after exposing corruption on her small island state. There too, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation tried to help uncover the mystery of her death.

Mean while record volumes of cocaine from Colombia keep pouring across Ecuador’s porous border, much of it to be hidden in containers of fruit and vegetables leaving Pacific ports for Antwerp and Rotterdam.

That’s triggered a battle among warring gangs for control of routes and territory.

What Colombia went through in the 1980s, and what Mexico endured in the 1990s, Ecuador is suffering today,” said former vice president Otto Sonnenholzner, who is also on the ballot.

“Our country has been handed over to drug-trafficking, and these are the consequences.” Bloomberg News

In comments that included several major inaccuracies about the world’s second-largest economy, Biden said at a political fundraiser Thursday that China was in “trouble” because its growth has slowed and it had the “highest unemployment rate going.” He also blasted Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative as the “debt and noose,” because of the high levels of lending to developing economies associated with the global investment program.

“China was growing at 8 percent a year to maintain growth, now close to 2 percent a year,” he told donors in Park City, Utah, misstating China’s rate of expansion. “It’s in a position where the number of people who are of retirement age is larger than the number of people of working age,” he added, a statement that was not only incorrect but also off by hundreds of millions of people.

“So they got some problems,” he added. “That’s not good because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things.”

Biden’s comments are some of his most direct criticisms yet about the US’s top geopolitical and economic rival. The President has sought to walk a fine line between using trade curbs to deter China’s high-tech military advancement, while achieving a diplomatic rapprochement with Chinese leaders that could pave the way for a potential meeting this year with Xi, who is expected to visit the US in November to attend the APEC summit.

It’s unclear yet whether that will materialize, particularly after reports the White House will bar sanctioned Hong Kong leader John Lee from the meeting of 21 AsiaPacific economies. While Biden said on Thursday that Washington isn’t looking for a fight with Beijing, a range of issues threaten to derail the relationship yet again, from new investment curbs approved by the US this week to military tensions over Taiwan, which will send Vice President Lai Ching-te — the leading presidential candidate in a January election — to stop in New York and San Francisco in the coming days.

It’s not the first time Biden has made off-the-cuff remarks that

It’s unclear how Beijing will react to Biden’s latest remarks. China largely shrugged off his reference to Xi as a dictator, welcoming US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and US climate envoy John Kerry on separate trips weeks later. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is slated to visit China this month, on Thursday touted an agreement by China to lift restrictions on group travel to the US as a win for engagement between the world’s two biggest economies.

Still, Biden’s swipes at China’s $18 trillion economy come at a particularly sensitive time for Xi. Although Biden misrepresented key statistics about China, the overall outlook remains grim. China’s gross domestic product grew at a slower-than-expected pace of 5.5 percent in the first half of the year, compared with a year earlier, leading to worries about ripple effects for the global economy.

China slid into deflation in July, and is battling slowing exports, high youth unemployment and a slumping property market highlighted by a debt crisis for Country Garden Holdings Co. Once the country’s largest private-sector developer by sales, the company is in danger of defaulting amid an industry cash crunch.

Xi’s government has sought to silence negative economic news, with officials warning mainland