Worries over efforts to sway upcoming EU elections rise, with MEP Krah also probed over Russian influence operation.
German police have arrested an aide to a far-right Member of the European Parliament on suspicion of spying for China.
Prosecutors announced on Tuesday that Jian G is believed to have repeatedly passed information on the workings of the European Parliament to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). The arrest spurred warnings in Europe that democracy is under threat ahead of EU elections in June, while provoking anger in Beijing.
The German authorities did not specify which politician employed the arrested man. However, media reported that the German national was an aide to Maximilian Krah.
The MEP is the lead candidate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party for the upcoming European Parliament election. Krah is on a list of populist politicians across Europe suspected of taking bribes to push pro-Russian narratives in a scheme uncovered by Czech intelligence earlier this month.
Jian G was arrested in Dresden late on Monday and his apartment was searched, prosecutors said. As well as reporting on negotiations and decisions of the European Parliament in January, he also allegedly spied on Chinese opposition figures in Germany.
Attack on democracy
Berlin’s Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said the spying allegations were “extremely serious”.
“If it is confirmed that there was spying for Chinese intelligence from inside the European Parliament, then that is an attack from inside on European democracy,” she declared in a statement.
“Anyone who employs such a staff member also carries responsibility,” she added. “This case must be cleared up precisely. All the connections and background must be illuminated.”
The AfD said in a short statement that the arrest was “very disturbing”.
“As we have no further information on the case, we must wait for further investigations by federal prosecutors,” said spokesman Michael Pfalzgraf.
China’s foreign ministry dismissed the reported arrest, accusing unnamed forces of efforts to smear Beijing and wreck bilateral relations.
“The intention of this kind of hype is very obvious … it is to smear and suppress China and to destroy the atmosphere of cooperation between China and Europe,” a spokesman said.
Regarding that incident, the Chinese embassy in Berlin declared that Beijing carries out no espionage activities in Germany. It accused Berlin of trying to “manipulate the image of China and defame China”.
On the same day, however, the United Kingdom announced that it had arrested two men on suspicion of providing “prejudicial information” to Beijing.
The series of arrests comes shortly after Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited China to discuss economic relations and to push for Beijing to drop its support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine.
Berlin has warned recently about increasing attempts by Moscow and Beijing to secure political and economic influence, and German intelligence agencies have called for broader powers.
In reaction to Jian G’s arrest, MEPs called for the European Parliament to accelerate a continuing probe into foreign influence in a bid to guard against interference in early June’s vote.
“We demand preliminary results before the elections,” said Green MEP Terry Reintke. “Autocracies like China and Russia are actively trying to undermine our democracies in Europe.”
The Chinese government has issued its highest-level rainstorm warning and evacuated more than 100,000 people as rain continues to lash the south of the country.
Beijing raised the alert on Tuesday as ongoing storms threatened to worsen already massive flooding in Guangdong province. Four people were reported killed over the weekend, while 10 others are missing.
Torrential rains have been swelling rivers in Guangdong, prompting state media to warn of the risk of floods at a level “seen around once a century”.
State news agency Xinhua said 110,000 residents across the province had been relocated since the downpours started. Guangdong is China’s manufacturing heartland, home to about 127 million people.
“Please quickly take precautions and stay away from dangerous areas such as low-lying areas prone to flooding,” authorities in the coastal city of Shenzhen – China’s third largest – said as the red alert was issued.
“Pay attention to heavy rains and resulting disasters such as water logging, flash floods, landslides, mudslides, and ground caving in,” they warned.
Climate change driven by human-emitted greenhouse gases makes extreme weather events more frequent and intense. China is the world’s biggest emitter.
In recent years China has been hit by severe floods, grinding droughts and record heat.
That has helped make the authorities swift to respond, lowering the number of casualties compared with previous decades.
Shenzhen experienced in September its heaviest rains since records began in 1952. The nearby semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong saw its heaviest rainfall in nearly 140 years.
Asia was the world’s most disaster-hit region from climate and weather hazards in 2023, according to a report issued by the United Nations on Tuesday, with floods and storms a major cause of casualties and economic loss.
Elon Musk and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese clash over order to remove X posts on church stabbing.
Australia and Elon Musk have escalated their war of words over censorship after an Australian court ordered social media platform X to remove footage of a church stabbing.
An Australian judge on Monday ruled that X must block users worldwide from accessing videos of a knife attack on an Assyrian Christian bishop in Sydney after the country’s internet watchdog sought an injunction.
The Federal Court in Sydney granted the temporary global ban after X had said it would challenge eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s notice to remove posts related to last week’s attack on Mar Mari Emmanuel.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Tuesday that the government was prepared to take on Musk, whom he labelled an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he’s above the law, but also above common decency”.
“What the eSafety Commissioner is doing is doing her job to protect the interests of Australians, and the idea that someone would go to court for the right to put up violent content on a platform shows how out-of-touch Mr Musk is. Social media needs to have social responsibility with it. Mr Musk is not showing any,” Albanese told public broadcaster ABC.
Albanese had earlier said it was “extraordinary” that X had decided to challenge the eSafety commissioner’s notice and denied the issue was a matter of freedom of speech.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has criticised Elon Musk for challenging a takedown notice issued by the country’s internet watchdog [Izhar Khan/AFP]
Musk, who bought the platform formally known as Twitter in 2022, on Tuesday indicated that he would fight the court order.
“Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian ‘eSafety Commissar’ is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?” Musk said on X.
“We have already censored the content in question for Australia, pending legal appeal, and it is stored only on servers in the USA.”
Musk earlier posted a meme depicting X as being pro-free speech and other social media platforms supporting censorship and propaganda, with the caption: “Don’t take my word for it, just ask the Australian PM!”
Australia’s government has blamed social media posts related to the attack on Emmanuel for inflaming community tensions in multicultural Sydney.
Under its Online Safety Act passed in 2021, Australia has been at the forefront of efforts to hold tech companies responsible for the content posted on their platforms.
Emmanuel, a prominent conservative leader of the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley in western Sydney, suffered lacerations to his head when he was attacked last Monday during a mass service that was being broadcast online.
More than 50 police officers were injured and 20 police cars damaged in an ensuing riot outside the church.
Emmanuel, who survived the attack, released a message last week saying he was “doing fine, recovering very quickly” and that he had forgiven his attacker.
Police on Friday charged a 16-year-old with terrorism offences in connection with the stabbing.
Anthony Albanese says decision to challenge takedown order for content related to church stabbing ‘extraordinary’.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has criticised social media platform X for its “extraordinary” decision to fight an order by the country’s internet watchdog to remove footage of a stabbing during a livestreamed church service.
X, owned by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, announced over the weekend that it would challenge the order to take down content related to the stabbing of an Assyrian Christian bishop during a service in western Sydney.
ESafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant said last week that X had been issued notices to remove material depicting “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact or detail”.
“I find it extraordinary that X chose not to comply and are trying to argue their case. We know, I think overwhelmingly, Australians want misinformation and disinformation to stop,” Albanese said during a news conference.
“This isn’t about freedom of expression, this is about the dangerous implications that can occur when things that are simply not true, that everyone knows is not true, are replicated and weaponised in order to cause division and in this case, to promote negative statements and potentially to just inflame what was a very difficult situation. And social media has a social responsibility.”
On Saturday, X said it had “complied with the directive pending a legal challenge” as it did not believe that the orders were within the scope of Australian law.
“This was a tragic event and we do not allow people to praise it or call for further violence. There is a public conversation happening about the event, on X and across Australia, as is often the case when events of major public concern occur,” the social media company said in a statement.
“While X respects the right of a country to enforce its laws within its jurisdiction, the eSafety Commissioner does not have the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally. We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.”
Mar Mari Emmanuel, a prominent conservative leader of the Assyrian Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley in western Sydney, suffered lacerations to his head when he was attacked last Monday during a mass service that was being broadcast online.
More than 50 police officers were injured and 20 police cars damaged in an ensuing riot outside the church.
Emmanuel, who is recovering in hospital, last week released a message saying he was “doing fine, recovering very quickly” and that he had forgiven his attacker.
Redang Island, Malaysia – Under a full moon, a bulbous creature emerges from the South China Sea onto a quiet beach on the Malaysian island of Redang.
Watched closely by a team of volunteers, the green sea turtle moves slowly up the fine white sand to the top of the beach, using its flippers to dig into the sand before laying its precious cargo of eggs.
The watchers, from the Chagar Hutang Turtle Sanctuary in the northeastern state of Terengganu, creep close, recording the number of eggs and measuring the turtle as she nests on the sand.
“Redang is known for its turtles. We want to protect our treasure here,” Muhammad Hafizudin Mohd Sarpar, 24, a ranger at the sanctuary, told Al Jazeera a little later that night.
But such sights might soon become a thing of the past as Malaysia’s already endangered sea turtles face a new threat from the rising temperatures caused by climate change. Scientists in the Southeast Asian nation say the heat is warming the sand and disturbing the balance of male and female hatchlings the turtles need to survive.
A ranger with the Chagar Hutang Turtle Sanctuary monitors the eggs being laid by a green turtle nesting on the beach as university students, staff and others look on [Patrick Lee/Al Jazeera]
Observations from Chagar Hutang, one of the country’s most important nesting sites, show very few males have hatched from nests in recent years. It is a similar story on other beaches along the east coast.
“For many areas on the east coast of the peninsular from 2019 until 2022, the number of male turtles hatched is almost zero,” Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) turtle expert Mohd Uzair Rusli said.
“With global warming, this will result in no males being hatched.”
Eggs laid by turtles incubate for as long as 60 days in the sand and are extremely sensitive to temperature.
At 29.2 degrees Celsius (84.6 Fahrenheit), a green turtle nest will result in an equal share of males and females, but a single degree in temperature change can completely shift the hatchlings’ sex in one or another direction.
Uzair said this narrow range was believed to be “an evolutionary adaptation that balanced the advantages of producing both males and females”.
He added that Malaysian beach temperatures were not being monitored, given that turtles nested at random sites even on the same beach, and that UMT relied on sea surface temperature reports over the decades.
The turtles, which when fully grown return to the same beach they were hatched to lay their eggs, already face enormous challenges. On average, only one out of every 1,000 turtle hatchlings will survive the 15-year journey to adulthood. Uzair worries that, with the higher temperatures, one day there may not be enough males in Malaysian waters to mate with the females.
“We predict that if we still fail to see males being hatched, maybe in about 10 to 15 years, turtles may lay their eggs but they won’t hatch,” he said.
Malaysia is home to four species of sea turtles, with the country’s beaches once visited by thousands of the sea reptiles every year, especially in Terengganu.
Their numbers have dwindled over the decades mainly as a result of human activity – from fishing to pollution and habitat loss as well as people stealing their eggs to eat.
As turtle numbers have fallen, environmentalists have scrambled to help Malaysia’s turtle populations recover.
Rubbish is also a big problem for the turtles so there are regular clean-ups [Patrick Lee/Al Jazeera]
In 1993, the isolated 350m-long Chagar Hutang beach was chosen by authorities as a conservation site to be managed by UMT, with a volunteer programme set up a few years later.
Since then, the university has been recording turtle arrivals and relocating nests away from predators – monitor lizards are partial to the eggs – as well as human threats.
Their efforts have paid off. From a few hundred nests every year in the 1990s, there were a record 2,180 nests in 2022.
But their success is being overshadowed by global warming and other man-made factors.
A record daily sea surface temperature of 21.07C (69.93F) was recorded in March, according to the United States’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Last month was also the planet’s warmest March in 175 years of climate data, the NOAA said, warning there was a 99 percent chance that 2024 would be among the top five hottest years on record.
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and absorb 90 percent of the excess heat resulting from carbon dioxide and methane emissions produced by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
Plastic
Plastic is compounding the problem. Improperly managed waste floating in the oceans will eventually wash ashore, absorbing even more heat and releasing it into the sand.
Volunteers have been trying to clear the rubbish.
A mass of tangled nets that washed up from the South China Sea are loaded onto a large boat for disposal on the mainland [Patrick Lee/Al Jazeera]
One morning in late March, students and university staff gathered on Chagar Hutang to clean the beach. In a single morning, they gathered enough rubbish – rope, nets and plastic – from the South China Sea to fill several small boats.
“We didn’t get anywhere near all of it, and that’s just from a few hundred metres of coastline,” visiting Belgian student Jonas Goemans, 22, told Al Jazeera as the team stuffed the waste into bags and loaded it onto a larger boat to be disposed of on the mainland, some 50km (31 miles) away.
“It’s horrifying, and especially finding it in a place that’s supposed to be a sanctuary, it’s even worse,” Goemans said.
Research from the US-based Florida State University in 2023 found that large amounts of microplastics, fragments of plastic less than 5mm (0.2 inches) in length, could critically raise beach sand temperatures.
The study found samples with a 30 percent concentration – nearly six times the highest-reported amounts – of black microplastics were 0.58C (33F) warmer than sand that was not contaminated with plastic.
Some studies have suggested making sand cooler for nests by shading them, although doing it for hundreds or even thousands would be difficult. Nests under trees risk hatchlings becoming entangled in their roots and could be a target for invading ants.
Improper artificial shading can also prevent rainfall from cooling hot beaches, while excess water unable to evaporate quickly enough could cause fungal infections in the nests.
“It’s going to take a lot of effort to make sure that we’re managing nests to produce hatchlings at cooler temperatures,” said Nicholas Tolen, a researcher and PhD student with UMT.
Vital role
Having existed since the time of the dinosaurs, sea turtles play a vital role in the world’s oceans and marine food chains.
Leatherbacks, for example, control jellyfish populations, while green turtles feed on seagrass beds, stimulating the growth of these saltwater plants.
Among other things, seagrass helps to clean surrounding waters, reduce coastal erosion and provide habitat for small fish and other marine species.
A female green sea turtle makes her way back to the sea after laying her eggs on Chagar Hutang beach [Patrick Lee/Al Jazeera]
Even before the climate crisis, Malaysia was seeing fewer and fewer turtle landings, particularly of the leatherback, the world’s largest turtle, which is considered critically endangered.
Uzair said the last two leatherback turtle nests discovered in Terengganu were recorded in 2017, with eggs in both found to be infertile. In 1953, there were some 10,000 nests, according to NOAA.
Only a few sites around Malaysia still see large numbers of turtles coming ashore, and total landings are much fewer than generations before.
Even on Chagar Hutang, only the green turtle lands in large numbers with a handful of hawksbills coming ashore there every year. The green turtle is considered endangered, while the hawksbill is listed as critically endangered.
Hafizudin says he cannot imagine a Malaysia without turtles.
A Redang local himself, he says tourism is the island’s main source of income, with visitors arriving primarily to catch a glimpse of its sea reptiles.
“They are like my siblings. Like my second family. When I became a ranger, I developed these feelings for them, especially when I learned they were [in danger] of becoming extinct,” he said.
“If there are no turtles, the tourists will not come. There will be no attraction.”
Sydney, Australia – Sall Grover says she did not think twice when she blocked Roxanne Tickle, a transgender woman, from her Australian-based women-only app Giggle for Girls.
“It did not register, as we get men trying to enter all the time. Mr Tickle passed our AI facial recognition test, which was deliberately set at 94 percent accuracy, meaning that some men will get through,” Grover, who refuses to refer to transgender women as women, told Al Jazeera.
“The rest we remove manually.”
“When he contacted me by phone and I heard a man’s voice, I hung up, but again, this was not unusual,” Grover added.
Grover’s decision to restrict her app to “cisgender” women – women whose birth sex aligns with their gender identity – has not only put her at the centre of the culture war over gender, but in the legal crosshairs as well.
As someone who identifies as a woman, Tickle argues that she is legally entitled to use services meant for women and has been discriminated against on the basis of gender identity.
In a case being watched around the globe, Tickle is suing Grover under Australia’s Anti-Discrimination Act, relying on a 2013 amendment that added gender identity to the list of protected categories.
At stake are contested definitions of sex and gender and, ultimately, the very question of what it means to be a woman.
For trans activists, a ruling in favour of Tickle, who is seeking 200,000 Australian dollars ($128,320) in compensation, would be a vindication of their long struggle to be treated just like other women.
For so-called gender-critical feminists, a win for Grover would affirm the need for female-only spaces that take into account the essential differences between men and women.
After hearing several days of arguments by the two sides at the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney earlier this month, a judge is expected to hand down his decision in Tickle v Giggle in three to six months.
Grover created Giggle in 2020 upon returning to Australia after a stint working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where she says persistent social media abuse by men landed her in therapy.
“I wanted to create a safe, women-only space in the palm of your hand,” Grover who spent 500,000 Australian dollars ($320,800) on building the site, said.
As far as Grover is concerned, “women-only” spaces should not include trans women like Tickle.
Tickle, who has undergone vaginal and labial surgery and changed her sex to female on her birth certificate, joined the app in 2021 after her application was accepted by gender recognition software designed to screen out men.
Tickle’s account was restricted about six months later after manual screening.
“The evidence will show that Ms Tickle is a woman,” Tickle’s barrister Georgina Costello told the court, according to local media reports.
“She perceives herself as a woman. She presents herself as a woman.”
Costello also told the court that Grover had mounted a “global campaign” against Tickle, including persistently misgendering her in public statements and selling offensive merchandise featuring her image.
“We say because of the way Grover views transgender women, she was unable to see that a transgender woman is a woman,” Costello said.
Tickle’s lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
Hilary Kincaid, principal solicitor at Sydney firm Kincaid Legal, said the case is complicated for multiple reasons apart from its contentious subject matter.
“It would be far more clear cut if there were physical premises,” Kincaid told Al Jazeera.
Kincaid said Australia’s arcane laws and regulations for community and sporting clubs will be among the relevant considerations in the case.
“Speaking very generally, you can exclude someone from private premises, depending on the terms of the admission,” she said.
“So if there’s a sign up in a club, saying you have the right to refuse admission at the club’s discretion, that can be allowed.”
The case has drawn significant international attention, particularly through social media, not least because of Grover’s openness to giving media interviews and her efforts to raise funds for her legal defence.
Grover said she has raised about 546,000 Australian dollars ($350,314) so far but initially struggled when she was kicked off a number of fundraising platforms.
“Luckily we had the skills, so we were able to build our own platform,” she said.
The Australian legal stoush is seen as a test case by gender-critical feminists, also known as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF), both at home and in other countries such as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
They argue that businesses and organisations should be able to exclude transgender women for reasons including safety and fairness.
“Gender identity is overriding sex and nobody’s explained why,” Angela Jones, a women’s rights activist and supporter of Grover who co-hosts the TERF Talk Down Under podcast, told Al Jazeera.
“Women’s rights have been taken away, and this has impacted women who are in the lowest socioeconomic background or victims of domestic violence or whatever. We always thought ‘that the rules are reasonable’ and our rights would be granted but in the last three or four years we have found we have no rights at all. We have no single-sex spaces”.
ACON and Transgender Victoria, two of Australia’s leading trans activist groups, declined to comment on the case.
Grover accused trans activists of doing “everything they can” to shut her business down.
“They have taken away not just a valuable service for women, but my livelihood,” she said.
“But if I was just in it for business, I would let others in, it’s important to me that the space is female only. I am in fact the one here who is suffering financial loss.”
While many corporations have expressed their support for trans rights amid growing public acceptance of LGBTQ people in recent years, businesses have also faced blowback for associating themselves with the issue.
Last year, Bud Light suffered a plunge in sales after a conservative backlash to a brief partnership with trans activist and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney had a partnership with Bud Light [Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP]
In the US, Republican-led states have introduced dozens of laws to curtail trans rights, many of them aimed at restricting trans women’s participation in women’s sports and gender-affirming care for minors.
In Australia, the debate has also been polarised, as evidenced by the background of Grover’s lawyer, Katherine Deves, a former parliamentary candidate for the main conservative party.
But while conservative-run businesses pushed back against having to serve LGBTQ people in years gone by – such as, for example, refusing to cater to same-sex weddings on religious grounds – the fight over trans rights has followed a less predictable ideological script.
Many of the critics of trans activism are not religious, or even necessarily conservative, with radical feminists among those leading the charge.
Kincaid, the lawyer, said Tickle v Giggle has parallels with a recent case involving a man who took legal action after being denied entry to an art installation where women are pampered by male butlers and served champagne.
The Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal ruled that the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) had discriminated against patron Jason Lau and that men should be allowed to view the installation.
“If MONA had created the Ladies Lounge as a club, the result may have been different,” Kincaid said.
Still, even if the court finds in Tickle’s favour, the level of compensation she might receive is unclear.
“If you are successful under the Act, you are compensated for loss, yet it would be difficult to make an argument that she [Tickle] suffered a specific financial loss,” Kincaid said.
Whatever the outcome of the case, it is all but certain to inflame the acrimonious debate over trans inclusion versus sex-based rights.
Grover said she is ready for any outcome and prepared to fight the case all the way to the High Court of Australia if necessary.
“But if we lose eventually, I will have to reincorporate the business somewhere else,” she said.
Vivaldi’s, Four Seasons, re-composed by AI using 2050 climate data to create a disturbing musical performance in Seoul.
Antonio Vivaldi published, The Four Seasons, in 1723, celebrating the natural world and the four distinct seasons. But what would this music sound like today in our age of climate crisis? The “Uncertain Four Seasons” global project uses climate modelling data to generate a 2050 version of, The Four Seasons, for orchestras around the world according to their climate projections.
Dystopia of Seoul is the story of this piece of AI music in the South Korean capital which suffered devastating floods in 2022. The melodies, energy and tempo are twisted by the sophisticated algorithm to reflect Seoul’s climate predictions. The result makes for disturbing listening and is another stark warning to humanity about climate change.
Search operation under way after the SH-60 patrol helicopters possibly collided with each other during antisubmarine exercise off Izu Islands.
Two Japanese navy helicopters carrying eight crew members crashed into the Pacific Ocean during a night-time training exercise after possibly colliding with each other, killing one person, the defence minister said on Sunday.
Rescuers on Sunday searched for seven others who were still missing.
The two SH-60 patrol helicopters were conducting antisubmarine exercises on Saturday night near Torishima in the remote Izu island group, off the southern coast of central Japan.
Defence Minister Minoru Kihara said rescuers “spotted what are believed to be part of the aircraft in the sea, and we believe that the two helicopters crashed”.
“At this point the cause is unknown, but firstly we do our best to save lives,” Kihara told reporters. Hours later, Kihara told reporters that the crew member who was rescued “was confirmed dead”.
A Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) vessel conducts a search and rescue operation at the site where two JMSDF helicopters crashed [Handout/Kyodo via Reuters]
He also said the ministry “discovered the flight recorders in places close to each other”, and so the “possibility is high that [the two helicopters] collided”.
“The flight recorders are being analysed,” Chief of Staff Ryo Sakai of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) told reporters, as officials are interviewing the crew of a third helicopter that was joining the drill but was not involved in the accident.
Communication with one chopper was lost at 10:38pm (13:38 GMT) off the island of Torishima, and one minute later an emergency signal was received from this aircraft, broadcaster NHK reported.
Approximately 25 minutes later, at about 11:04pm, the military realised that communication with the other aircraft was also lost in the same area.
The Mitsubishi SH-60K helicopters from the JMSDF are mainly based on and operate from naval destroyers.
The JMSDF said as there were no other aircraft nor vessels in nearby waters, involvement of another country in the incident is unlikely, NHK added.
US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel said in a message on social platform X that the United States had offered to help with the search and rescue.
“We will stand together, side by side, with our friend and ally, Japan. My thoughts are with the crew members, and their families and friends during this challenging time,” he said.
The crash comes a year after a Ground Self-Defence Force UH-60 Blackhawk crashed off the southwestern Japanese island of Miyako, due to an engine output problem known as “rollback”, leaving all 10 crew members dead, which shocked the nation.
In 2017, a Japanese navy SH-60J, an earlier generation Seahawk, crashed during a night-time flight training off Aomori due to human error.
The Democratic-majority Senate is expected to vote on the bill next week, sending it to President Joe Biden to sign into law.
The United States House of Representatives with broad bipartisan support has passed a $95bn legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, despite bitter objections from Republican hardliners.
The legislation proceeded on Saturday to the Democratic-majority Senate, which passed a similar measure more than two months ago.
US leaders from Democratic President Joe Biden to top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell had been urging embattled Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to bring it up for a vote.
The Senate is expected to pass the measure next week, sending it to Biden to sign into law.
The bills provide about $61bn to address the conflict in Ukraine, including $23bn to replenish US weapons, stocks and facilities; $26bn for Israel, including $9bn for humanitarian needs; and $8bn for the Asia Pacific, including Taiwan.
Zelenskyy thanks the House
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expressed his thanks, saying US lawmakers moved to keep “history on the right track” by supporting his country after it was invaded by Russia.
“The vital US aid bill passed today by the House will keep the war from expanding, save thousands and thousands of lives, and help both of our nations to become stronger,” Zelenskyy said on X.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, meanwhile, said the new US legislation would “deepen crisis throughout the world”.
“Military assistance to the Kyiv regime is direct sponsorship of terrorist activity,” Zakharova said on Telegram.
It was unclear how quickly the new military funding for Ukraine will be depleted, likely causing calls for further action by Congress.
Biden, who had urged Congress since last year to approve the additional aid to Ukraine, said in a statement: “It comes at a moment of grave urgency, with Israel facing unprecedented attacks from Iran and Ukraine under continued bombardment from Russia.”
The vote on passage of the Ukraine funding was 311-112. Only 101 Republicans supported the legislation, with 112 voting against it.
Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington, said the number of Republicans who voted against the bill at the House is significantly high.
“It is very notable that 112 Republicans voted ‘no’ for different reasons,” she said.
“Some believe the European Union should do more to help Ukraine, while some others said the money should be spent at home and Ukraine has no accountability on how it spends the funds.
“This package passed, but it calls into question what might happen next if Ukraine needs more funds in the future,” our correspondent added.
House backs Israel
Meanwhile, the House’s actions during a rare Saturday session put on display some cracks in what is generally solid support for Israel within Congress.
Saturday’s vote, in which the Israel aid was passed 366-58, had 37 Democrats and 21 Republicans in opposition.
Al Jazeera’s Culhane said the Democrats who voted against the bill on Israel were very vocal in their criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The number might not sound like a lot … but this is really remarkable. It would be unimaginable a decade or two ago,” she said. “I believe it shows a great shift in the Democratic Party.”
Passage of the long-awaited legislation was closely watched by US defence contractors, who could be in line for huge contracts to supply equipment for Ukraine and other US partners.
House Speaker Johnson this week chose to ignore ouster threats by hardline members of his fractious 218-213 majority and push forward the measure that includes funding for Ukraine as it struggles to fight off the two-year Russian invasion.
The unusual four-bill package also contains a measure that includes a threat to ban the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok and the potential transfer of seized Russian assets to Ukraine.
Some Republicans repeatedly raised the threat of remove Johnson, who became speaker in October after his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, was taken down by party hardliners.
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This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
