Blinken reschedules visit to Beijing for June 18

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China next week, rescheduling a visit that was canceled in February after a saga over a suspected surveillance balloon, US officials said Friday.

Blinken is expected to arrive in Beijing on June 18, the first trip by a top US diplomat to China since his predecessor Mike Pompeo in October 2018, US officials said on condition of anonymity.

The State Department has not officially announced his travel. National

Security Council spokesman John Kirby recently said the United States would announce travel by senior officials “in the near future” without giving details.

Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping met in Bali in November and agreed to try to stop high tensions from soaring out of control, including by sending Blinken to Beijing.

Blinken abruptly canceled a trip scheduled in early February after the United States said it detected – and later shot down – a Chinese surveillance balloon flying over the US mainland, drawing fury from US lawmakers and denials by Beijing.

But the two sides have more recently looked again to keep tensions in check including with an extensive, closed-door meeting between Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan and top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi in Vienna last month.

Tensions have risen sharply between the world’s two largest economies in recent years, especially over

UK’s Boris Johnson quits as MP, claiming witch-hunt in parliament

BRITAIN’S former prime minister Boris Johnson angrily quit as a member of parliament on Friday, claiming he had been forced out in a stitch-up by his political opponents.

The 58-year-old populist politician has been under investigation by a cross-party committee about whether he repeatedly lied to parliament over COVID lockdown-breaking parties when he was in office.

In evidence earlier this year, he angrily insisted he had not.

But as the committee prepares to make public its findings, he said they had contacted him “making it clear... they are determined to use the proceedings against me to drive me out of parliament.”

The Privileges Committee, which has a majority of MPs from his own Conservative party, has powers to impose sanctions for misleading parliament, including suspension.

Ordinarily, suspension of more than 10 working days leads to a by-election in the MP’s constituency.

Johnson, though, pre-empted any finding – or the consequences of a humiliating fight to remain an MP in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency in northwest London where he holds a slim majority of just over 7,000 – by quitting.

He denounced the committee, chaired by veteran opposition Labour MP Harriet Harman, as a “kangaroo court.”

“It is very sad to be leaving Parliament –at least for now – but above all I am bewildered and appalled that I can be forced out, anti-democratically... with such egregious bias,” he said.

The committee’s report, which has not been published, was “riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice,” he said, complaining he had “no formal ability to challenge anything they say.”

Their “purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts,” he added.

Responding to the resignation, the Privileges Committee said Johnson “impugned the integrity of the House by his statement.”

The committee said it would meet on Monday to conclude its inquiry and would publish its report “promptly.”

The announcement came just hours after Johnson controversially rewarded his closest Brexit allies – and officials implicated in the “Partygate” saga – in his prime ministerial resignation honours list.

At the same time, his former culture secretary Nadine Dorries announced that she was quitting as an MP with immediate effect. AFP

Taiwan, the self-governing democracy that Beijing claims and has not ruled out seizing by force.

The two countries are also at odds over China’s increasingly assertive posture in the region and over trade and human rights.

Biden, however, has looked to limited areas for cooperation with China, such as climate change, in contrast with the more fully adversarial position adopted at the end of the administration of his predecessor Donald Trump. AFP

A COURT in France sentenced a man to 18 years in prison on Friday for stabbing and then burning alive his 15-year-old girlfriend.

The 2019 killing of the secondary school pupil, identified in court only as Shaina, revived outrage in France over the number of women who die at the hands of intimate partners.

The court was told that the accused, a 17-year-old high school student at the time, had lured Shaina to a shed in the town of Creil north of Paris to kill her and burn her body.

Post-mortem forensic examination revealed “multiple wounds” inflicted by a knife, but also that Shaina was still breathing at the start of the fire. AFP

Children lost for 40 days in Colombian Amazon found alive

FOUR Indigenous children who had been missing for more than a month in the Colombian Amazon rainforest after a small plane crash have been found alive, President Gustavo Petro said Friday.

“Today we have had a magical day,” Petro told the media in the capital Bogota after announcing their rescue.

“They are weak. Let’s let the doctors make their assessment,” he added.

The president earlier posted a photo on Twitter showing several adults, some dressed in military fatigues, tending to the children as they sat on tarps in the jungle. One rescuer held a bottle to the mouth of the smallest child, whom he held in his arms.

“A joy for the whole country! The 4 children who were lost 40 days ago in the Colombian jungle were found alive,” he wrote on Twitter. AFP