Blinken Visits Beijing

Blinken’s China trip could pave the way for a phone call or in-person meeting between President Biden and Xi, who first met more than a decade ago when they were both vice presidents. The two men have not spoken since meeting in person last November, on the sidelines of a summit in Indonesia.

“Ultimately there’s no substitute for the two leaders speaking directly to each other,” Blinken noted. “That’s especially true in China given the power that Xi Jinping has.”

More than 300 people from Pakistan drowned when a fishing trawler sunk off the coast of Greece last week. Around 750 people had been crowded onto the ship, an extreme example of the refugee crisis still plaguing the European Union.

Pakistan is in the midst of its worst economic crisis in decades, with efforts to secure a financial lifeline from the International Monetary Fund

“They are not sending them to Europe; they are sending them to death. This is what they’re doing, and it’s absolutely necessary to prevent it,” she said.

For now, Greece will be facing inquiries into how the disaster occurred. Some are saying that authorities had attempted to tow the boat, which led to the collapse. Greek authorities had initially said the coast guard kept its distance but their assistance “had been declined” after they threw a rope to the vessel to “stabilize and check if it needed help.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony

Blinken visited China over the weekend, spending two days meeting with senior Chinese officials and President Xi Jinping

The statesman said that his trip was an “important start” in stabilizing ties with Beijing, noting that the two governments should move past the spy balloon incident that had postponed his visit earlier this year.

“That chapter should be closed,” Blinken said on Monday.

Stopping the downward spiral in relations between the world’s two largest economies “is not the product of one visit, even as intense and in some ways productive as this was,” Blinken acknowleged. “But it’s a good and, I think, important start.”

U.S. officials had said in advance that they didn’t expect huge breakthroughs from the trip. And even after Blinken left, the two nations had yet to restore several military-to-military communication channels that China cut last year in protest of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy that Beijing claims as its territory.

Blinken said it was imperative for that communication to be re-established, citing recent encounters in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea that China says were necessary to defend its national sovereignty but the U.S. has labeled dangerous.

“That’s the quickest path to an inadvertent conflict,” said Blinken, who added that restoring the channels was “not something we’re going to drop.”

Blinken’s trip was the first by a U.S. secretary of state since 2018.

Congressional Republicans had expressed opposition to Blinken’s trip, saying the White House needs to take a harder line with Beijing. But Blinken said it would be “totally irresponsible” not to engage with China.

“If we’re not engaging, it makes it that much more difficult to make sure that the competition we’re in doesn’t veer into conflict,” he said.

The Taliban Runs on WhatsApp

The team of Taliban security officers assembled on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s capital to prepare for a raid on an Islamic State group hideout.

The leader, Habib Rahman Inqayad, scrambled to get the exact location of their target. He grabbed his colleagues’ phones and called their superiors, who insisted they had sent him the location pin of the target to his WhatsApp.

But WhatsApp had blocked his account to comply with U.S. sanctions.

“The only way we communicate is WhatsApp — and I didn’t have access,” said Inqayad, 25, whom The New York Times has followed since the Taliban seized power in August 2021.

In recent months, complaints from Taliban officials, police and soldiers of their WhatsApp accounts being banned or temporarily deactivated have become widespread, disruptions that have illuminated how the messaging platform has become a backbone of the Taliban’s nascent government. Those interruptions also underscore the far-reaching consequences of international sanctions on a government that has become among the most isolated in the world.

The United States has long criminalized any form of support for the Taliban. Consequently, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, scans group names, descriptions and group profile photos on the messaging app to identify users among the Taliban and block their accounts, according to a spokesperson for the company.

The policy has been in place since U.S. sanctions were enacted more than two decades ago.

But over the past two years, the Taliban’s reliance on WhatsApp has become even more far-reaching as smartphone use has proliferated and 4G networks have improved across Afghanistan with the end of the U.S.-led war. As the Taliban have consolidated control and settled into governance, the inner bureaucratic workings of their administration have also become more organized — with WhatsApp central to their official communications.

The cat-and-mouse game of shutting down accounts has become a headache for officials in the Taliban administration — an almost daily reminder that the government they lead is all but shunned on the world stage.

Many who have had their accounts shut down have found workarounds, buying new SIM cards and opening new accounts, and turned the ban more into a game of Whac-A-Mole. (© The New York Times)