#Long Island Digital Experts

[longislandsworld]

Your Top Platform for Business Success: Which One Do You Choose?

Which platform do you use more for your business?

【A】Facebook

【B】Instagram

【C】Both

【D】Neither

Let’s see which platform is the favorite for growing businesses!

Contact Now

Website :- https://www.longislandsseo.com/ Facebook.com :- https://www.facebook.com/longislandsseo/ Twitter.com :- https://twitter.com/longislandsseo Pinterest.com :- https://www.pinterest.com/longislandsseo/ Linkedin.com:- https://www.linkedin.com/company/long-island-seo-inc Instagram.com:- https://www.instagram.com/longislandsseo/

[th3-0bjectivist]

Dear listener, every year I run a fine-tooth comb over the internet to discover one ‘new’ type of music that is without a doubt… good batshit. I have long maintained that there are two kinds of bat guano in music: good batshit and bad batshit. If it’s passionate, experimental, entertaining, bizarre, and scares the piss out of modern puritans… that’s nutrient-rich good batshit! If it’s totally derivative of other acts, openly preachy, and flat-out boring all while desperately trying to be edgy… that’s a festering pile of bad batshit. This week, I’m going to expose you to music by Machine Girl. Smash play on the track just above, it’s a music video for their song Ginger Claps on their 2014 album Wlfgrl. If it doesn't freak you out too much, join me down below for more!

In 2024, I've been looking for gym jams. Y'know, utterly chaotic music you can listen to at the gym that makes you work out harder and longer than usual!? I happen to work with a group of young guys, and they always have the weirdest music playing in the workstation area. Being an old man compared to the pups, I often laugh or cringe at their screamo, emo violence and metalcore garbage. In just the last fortnight or so, I was passing through the workstation area and heard a very peculiar and strangely attractive sound. It reminded me of a hybrid between Aphex Twin and KMFDM. So, I memorized the band name, showed up at the gym to sample their tracks, and ended up staying on the treadmill for an extra hour as my ear canals climaxed at this fast-paced new sound. Their tunes made my body move, and how! I basically just started listening to this duo from Long Island, NY, so I'm hardly a subject matter expert, but despite my best efforts, I just can’t stop sampling this eery and tasty batshit! I can plainly state I have not heard a single other musical act that sounds exactly like this, and as of this posting I will declare it to be the most chaotic music I’ve ever installed on my blog. But there is an order to this chaos, as it is fundamentally rooted in the structures and schools of punk, digital hardcore, rave and industrial. Talk about a messy emotional ride; in some instances, their individual tunes are like listening to 10-20 soundscapes mashed into one 3-minute track. Apparently, if you listen to their tunes deep enough, you’ll find themes of gender identity, sexuality and a criticism of capitalism. So, if you’re into those themes, have at it! Me!? I'm just here for the extremely crazy breakbeats and the total experimental experience they have to offer. Just below, you’ll find Necro Culture Vulture from their 2020 album The Ugly Art. Especially if you’re a fitness-inspired gym rat like me these days, try this batshit on for size when you’re on the tread, it’ll all suddenly make sense if it hasn’t already!

This year, this is the most creative and inspiring new-to-my ears music I’ve had the good fortune to stumble across. I commend them for their explosive tracks that rapidly ascend into something akin to an epic score right out of a modern AAA video game. It’s music that literally sounds like it was produced by extraterrestrials from another dimension. Fuck-to-the-yeah! Image source: https://www.revolvermag.com/music/machine-girl-alien-music-duo-spitting-blood-mashing-genres-transcending-self

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

#15yrsago Interview with the Chicago Tribune https://web.archive.org/web/20080811084607/http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/technology_internetcritic/2008/08/a-long-but-stil.html

#15yrsago Knitting all of Mario level one into a giant scarf https://themarioscarf.blogspot.com

#15yrsago Animatronic waterboarding exhibit at Coney Island https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/06/arts/design/06wate.html

#10yrsago Judge who accepted private-prison bribes to send black kids to jail sentenced to 28 years https://rollingout.com/2013/07/30/judge-must-serve-28-years-after-making-2-million-for-sending-children-to-jail/

#15yrsago The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away — story about geek monasteries for smart people who don’t fit in https://www.tor.com/2008/08/06/weak-and-strange/

#10yrsago Civil Forfeiture: America’s daylight robbery, courtesy of the War on Drugs https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken

#10yrsago US Senate IP address linked to Snowden Wikipedia change from “dissident” to “traitor” https://www.techdirt.com/2013/08/05/someone-using-us-senate-ip-address-edits-wiki-entry-to-change-ed-snowden-dissident-to-traitor/

#10yrsago Jeff Bezos’s letter to the WashPo staff https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/jeff-bezos-on-post-purchase/2013/08/05/e5b293de-fe0d-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html

#10yrsago Why writers should stand up for libraries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vArSULK9Zzk

#10yrsago Ethical questions for security experts https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UfOxCIIlcU-iRcUeA6p6fyEE4qUbSuFMqmSuWjRsL_4/edit?forcehl=1&hl=en#slide=id.p

#5yrsago Facebook to banks: give us our users’ financial data and we’ll let them bank with Facebook https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-banks-give-us-your-data-well-give-you-our-users-1533564049

#5yrsago Betsy DeVos’s summer monstrosity is pure McMansion Hell https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/6/17654434/betsy-devos-yacht-mcmansion-hell

#5yrsago Consumer Reports now evaluates products’ security and privacy https://www.consumerreports.org/digital-payments/mobile-p2p-payment-services-review/

#5yrsago Germany’s top domestic spy advised far right xenophobic political party on how to avoid being billed as “extremists” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html

#5yrsago On the cruelty of ankle-monitors https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-ankle-monitors-are-another-kind-of-jail/

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

[monarch-afterdark]

Superspecies History: Death Jackal

Welcome once again to Monarch: After Dark, the digital gateway between you and the organisation dedicated to understanding and navigating this troubled new world we live in.

We return now to our regular superspecies coverage with a Skull Island denizen that is as much a threat to itself as it is to humans, the Death Jackal.

(Pictured above: A pack of Death Jackals ambushing Aaron Brooks' expedition team, circa. 1995)

Monarch Database File: Death Jackal

Monarch Designation: Spinae mortem

Height: 6-12 feet

Species Designation: Necroserpere dromaeosaurid, Canus (sub-division)

-----

One of a few non-avian dinosaur species that have persisted into the modern age, the Death Jackal is a ravenous pack hunter armed with the speed of a leopard and the bite strength of a great white shark. Having evolved vaguely mammalian traits, milky-white blood and a partially exoskeletal spine tipped with a sharpened mane of fibers running down its back, the Death Jackal is a far cry from the dromaeosaurs of the Cretaceous, while still keeping the core recognisable traits of that family.

Part of the Necroserpere group of superspecies, alongside the Skullcrawlers, the Death Jackals have a ravenous and constant desire to feed, never quite satisfied with any meal. While the Skullcrawlers take to simply hunting anything that moves within their sight, the Death Jackals instead turn to cannibalism during bouts of starvation. Known to quickly turn on members of their packs or even themselves, the Death Jackals are considered by Monarch to be a greater threat to themselves than they are to humans.

Despite their cannibalistic tendencies, the Death Jackals are still a grave threat if they decide to target humans, able to kill with just one bite. They can often be seen flocking to carcasses of larger animals, participating in week-long feeding frenzies alongside other superspecies.

(Pictured above: A taxidermied Death Jackal kept at Monarch Outpost 14, "Hollow Dark", circa. 2014)

In 1995, almost immediately following their crash landing to Skull Island, Aaron Brooks' team were ambushed by a pack of Death Jackals. Their survival expert, Helen Karsten, was killed and dismembered by the pack while everyone else took shelter in a cave. Soon after, Kong had arrived and dispersed the pack after crushing some of them under his fist.

Aaron's team would later encounter Death Jackals descending on a Sirenjaw carcass to feed, alongside Psychovultures. More would appear later, after mythographer Walter Riccio betrayed the rest of the team, but he fended them off with weapons fire.

In 2014, a taxidermied Death Jackal was kept within Monarch Outpost 14, codenamed "Hollow Dark", the site of Dagon's skeleton and the original site of the MUTO spores from 1999.

In 2021, during part of their training for an upcoming Hollow Earth expedition, Audrey Burns was ambushed by a Death Jackal. The creature was shot dead before it was able to cause any bodily harm.

By 2027, Death Jackals residing in the Hollow Earth were among the creatures hunted and taxidermied by Raymond Martin.

-----

And that's all she wrote for the Death Jackals! While certainly a frightening encounter at first glance, you may not have as much to fear from the Death Jackals as you would from some of the other fauna on the island. Sights of Death Jackals that have mangled themselves to try and satisfy their own hunger are common, and quite disturbing.

Until next time,

Monarch: After Dark

[xtruss]

Solar Eclipse Path Map Shows States Where Sun Will Be Blocked Out

— March 16, 2024 | Newsweek

A rare total solar eclipse will take place next month and will be the last chance for Americans to view the natural phenomena for two decades, astronomy experts have said.

A total eclipse will be experienced by millions of Americans on April 8 this year—a rare astronomical event in which the skies briefly turn dark during daylight hours. Next month's eclipse is a rare event, with the last one taking place over the U.S. in 2017.

"You definitely want to be looking at the sky on April 8th because if you miss the solar eclipse this year, you have to wait two decades until the next chance to see a total solar eclipse from the contiguous United States," Brian Lada, AccuWeather astronomy expert, told Newsweek.

"Total solar eclipses themselves are not rare. They happen every year somewhere around the world. What is rare is to have them visible here in the United States."

Total eclipses occur once every other year somewhere on the planet, but for each individual community, they occur once every few centuries with some exceptions, Lada explained.

A solar eclipse is seen at Liberty Island in on August 21, 2017, in New York City. While New York was not in the path of totality for the solar eclipse, around 72 percent of the sun was covered by the moon during the peak time of the partial eclipse. Noam Galai/WireImage/Getty

What Is A Total Solar Eclipse?

According to Jonathan Belles, digital meteorologist for The Weather Channel, a solar eclipse takes place when the moon's orbit "takes it into the same plane as the sun, blocking out the sun."

There are numerous things to look out for - aside from the skies turning dark in the middle of the day - during a solar eclipse. Belles told Newsweek: "During a total solar eclipse, you can see explosions of matter being launched from the sun on some occasions. You'll likely see some eerie shadows in the form of eclipsed discs or even slithering snakes on the ground under trees and other objects. You might see bats and birds head out for food thinking that the sunset has arrived."

"If you look at the horizon, you may see thin clouds of ice that are usually invisible to the naked eye. You may also see clouds shrink over land or grow over the ocean. In elevated locations, you might also be able to tell where the sun is still shining."

Where Can I See The Total Eclipse?

A Map, Provided by NASA, Showing the Trajectory of the Solar Eclipse on April 8, 2024. NASA

According to Lada, those wishing to catch a glimpse of the phenomenon will need to be "in a narrow area called the path of totality", stretching from Texas all the way to Maine in the northeast.

A NASA map shows the full trajectory of the eclipse across the states, including times it will occur on April 8. Starting in Texas at around 1:30 p.m. CDT, the eclipse will occur in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and finally in Maine at 3:30 p.m. EDT. Small parts of Tennessee and Michigan may also experience the total solar eclipse.

"Everywhere outside of the path of totality will only experience a partial solar eclipse, of course, as long as it's not cloudy," Lada told Newsweek.

Americans in 13 States Will Experience a Rare Total Solar Eclipse Next Month. Getty Images/Newsweek

If you're planning to look skyward to see the event, you need to be prepared. NASA advises using the correct equipment to prevent causing serious damage to your eyes.

"When watching the partial phases of the solar eclipse directly with your eyes, which happens before and after totality, you must look through safe solar viewing glasses ("eclipse glasses") or a safe handheld solar viewer at all times," NASA explains. You can also use an indirect viewing method, such as a pinhole projector."

[statenislandwebdesign]

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[wedesignyouny]

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[mariacallous]

Today, President Biden and Xi Jinping met for nearly three hours in Bali, where, facing each other for the first time as top leaders, in a moment of progress, they agreed to restart climate talks. But on the issue of Taiwan, the future remains uncertain. Xi said that Taiwanese independence was as incompatible to peace and stability as “fire and water.” And while Biden noted that an invasion of Taiwan did not appear to be “imminent,” China has long sought reunification with the island—a prospect that Dexter Filkins explores in a deeply reported piece in this week’s issue.

In recent months, Chinese leaders have ramped up air and naval encroachments on the island, but when Filkins visited Taiwan earlier this year—after undergoing a mandatory quarantine—he found it “too caught up in the stresses and entertainments of prosperous modern life to think much about the enemy next door.” The idea of unification usually garners single-digit support in polls; and for the younger generation in Taiwan, “the fear of invasion has simply lasted too long to feel urgent,” Filkins writes. If China invades, will Taiwan be prepared to fight—and for how long would its military, which some experts believe is rooted in outdated strategy from the nineteen-eighties, be able to hold off China? Crucially, will the U.S. intervene? As Filkins writes, “both sides are caught—seemingly unable to back down without appearing to concede.”

—Jessie Li, newsletter editor

On Kinmen, an outlying island of Taiwan, the Chinese mainland looms so close that you can hear the construction cranes booming across the water. The island, about twelve miles from end to end, sits across the bay from the bustling mainland city of Xiamen. Whereas Xiamen is a place of gleaming high-rises, Kinmen is dotted with low-slung villages and patches of forest; it is famous for kaoliang, a sweet but fearsomely potent liquor distilled from sorghum.

In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Kinmen was the scene of ferocious assaults by Communist China as it tried to seize control. The invading forces, expecting an easy victory, were met with surprising resistance, from fighters dug in behind rows of steel spikes and in cement bunkers along the beach. Frustrated, the Chinese began bombarding Kinmen, flinging thousands of artillery shells across the water in the hope of forcing its people to surrender. When I visited not long ago, an eighty-year-old resident named Lin Ma-teng recalled hearing the shells as a young boy: “I used to hide under my bed.”

The shelling continued for decades. One day in 1975, when Lin was serving in a Taiwanese artillery unit, a shell exploded nearby, tearing off a chunk of his right thigh. He spent a year in the hospital and still walks with a limp. During my visit, he showed me rusting artillery shells that he has piled in his hallway—mementos of the long conflict between the fragile island democracy of Taiwan and the behemoth next door, which has never stopped trying to assert dominion. On the beach near Lin’s house, visitors can still see the bunkers and barriers, where people he knew in his youth fought the Chinese. They’re crumbling now. “Maybe the war is coming back,” he told me. “What would the people of Taiwan do? Jump into the ocean and swim?”

This past summer, the fight for Taiwan flared again. On June 13th, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, declared that the People’s Republic had “sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction” over the Taiwan Strait. Under international law, the strait has long been considered an open waterway; Wang was sweeping that away. “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China,” he said. Two weeks later, the People’s Liberation Army announced that it would hold a live-fire exercise seventy miles off the island’s coast. Then, on August 2nd, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, arrived in Taiwan, making her the highest-ranking American official to visit in twenty-five years. As she greeted officials, an American aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan, loomed offshore.

Soon after Pelosi departed, the P.L.A. test-fired eleven Dongfeng ballistic missiles, which landed in waters around Taiwan; at least four flew over the island itself. Then the P.L.A. initiated a large-scale naval exercise, arraying warships outside Taiwan’s major ports. “The U.S. has made wanton provocations,” Wang said. That same week, Chinese fighter jets undertook flights down the Taiwan Strait, crossing the “median line,” the customary boundary between the two countries; each time, Taiwanese jets scrambled to confront them.

The crisis passed, but it gave some American officials a sense that a confrontation between the two nuclear-armed superpowers was dangerously possible. “It was scary,” a senior Biden Administration official told me. “Not because we thought the Chinese would invade, but we worried there might be an accident, with unpredictable actors all around.”

China’s leaders seized the moment to say that they were “normalizing” these kinds of encroachments. In the next two months, Chinese fighter jets crossed the median line more than six hundred times. The flights were “very close and very threatening,” Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me. Although China claimed that the maneuvers were a response to Pelosi’s visit, Taiwanese officials said that they had almost certainly been in the works for months.

These moves seemed designed to convince the Taiwanese people that their national existence—which grew out of the chaos of the Chinese Civil War, more than seventy years ago—was coming to an end. Physically, too, the provocations took a toll, wearing down the Taiwanese armed forces. “Whenever the Chinese send their planes up there, we have to go out to meet them,” Wu said. “They fly very close, and we have to be careful that we don’t fire the first shot in a war.”

Yet Taiwan’s leaders remained curiously low-key. Tsai Ing-wen, the President, welcomed Pelosi and denounced the Chinese military exercises but otherwise carried on as if little were amiss. When the Chinese test-fired the ballistic missiles, she didn’t tell the public that they flew over the island; that became known only after it was announced by Japanese leaders. When a Chinese drone flew into Taiwan’s airspace, Tsai’s government reacted with similar reserve, announcing the intrusion only after videos appeared online showing soldiers throwing rocks at the drone.

Wu, the foreign minister, told me that Tsai was trying to strike a balance between deterring the People’s Republic and exhausting the Taiwanese people by warning them too often. To some Taiwanese, though, her handling of the missile tests amounted to wishful thinking. “When something like this happens and there’s no response, the government looks like it doesn’t know what it’s doing,” Alexander Chieh-cheng Huang, a former Taiwanese foreign-service officer in the U.S., told me. “The attitude is ‘Don’t look up.’ ”

American observers worried that the Taiwanese weren’t addressing their security with sufficient intensity. “Their military is so conventional and conservative,” the senior Administration official told me. If the U.S. intervened in a confrontation, the realities of economics and distance would weigh in China’s favor: China is closer to Taiwan, its industrial capacity far exceeds the United States’, and its willingness to suffer losses would undoubtedly be greater.

Taiwan’s defeat would dramatically weaken America’s position in the Pacific, where U.S. naval ships guard some of the world’s busiest sea lanes. Taiwan is an anchor in a three-thousand-mile string of archipelagos, known in military parlance as the “first island chain,” that wraps around the Chinese coast and helps constrain naval vessels heading to open sea. Another senior Biden official told me the Administration is worried that China feels increasingly able to seize the territory it has been coveting for much of the past century. “The Chinese hope that within the next five years or so they will be in a position where we cannot stop them from taking Taiwan,” the official said. “The way they see it, they are building up a sufficient capability to be able to execute an operation, and the tyranny of distance is so great that we wouldn’t be able to stop them.”

When I arrived in Taiwan, I found a place consumed not by the threat of societal extinction but by concerns about Covid. Boarding China Airlines, Taiwan’s national carrier, in Los Angeles, I was met by flight attendants in full-body medical suits and plastic visors, who politely chided me every time my mask fell beneath my nose. In Taipei, the capital, I was driven in a “quarantine taxi” to a “quarantine hotel,” where I was escorted to a room and instructed to stay inside. Meals packaged in plastic and Styrofoam were left at my door, and my windows were sealed tight. I emerged four days later into a flourishing city, with high-speed trains, exquisite restaurants, and masked people rushing between appointments, glancing at their phones. Taiwan sits in a climatological region called Typhoon Alley, and soon after my quarantine ended Typhoon Hinnamnor swept the island with wind and rain. No one was fazed.

I’d expected an embattled nation girding for a fight, but Taiwan seemed too caught up in the stresses and entertainments of prosperous modern life to think much about the enemy next door. In everyday conversation, the China question rarely came up. There were few signs of national preparation: military conscription is mandatory for adult men but lasts only four months. The government is considering adopting a policy that would allow it to mobilize its civilian population, but so far has done nothing. According to American and former Taiwanese officials, Taiwan’s defense posture is guided by a strategy that was devised in the nineteen-eighties, when the Chinese military was weak.

One day, I sat with Liao Chung Lun, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of National Chung Hsing University, where he studied environmental engineering. Liao had just completed his mandatory military training, which he described as something similar to summer camp. During the first month, he said, he and other recruits did pushups, a bit of running, and rudimentary combat drills, like thrusting a bayonet. A handful of times, he fired a gun. Liao told me that the course wasn’t especially rigorous. “Nobody fails out,” he said. His main jobs included collecting the day’s dirty laundry and pulling weeds. “They have really high standards for cleanliness.”

Like most of the young people I talked to, Liao said that he felt thoroughly Taiwanese and had almost no connection to China. But, when I asked him if he was worried about Taiwan’s future, he shrugged. “We’ve been hearing this for years—that the Chinese are going to invade,” he said. For much of Liao’s generation, the fear of invasion has simply lasted too long to feel urgent; like the typhoons, it has faded to background noise.

The struggle for Taiwan dates to 1895, when troops from the Japanese Empire wrested control of the island from China. After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, sovereignty over Taiwan returned to China, but it would soon be contested again. The Republic of China was then embroiled in a civil war, which pitted government troops loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek against Communist insurgents led by Mao Zedong. In 1949, Mao won, and the People’s Republic of China was created. Chiang and his allies fled to Taiwan and a handful of other islands, declaring themselves the true representatives of the Chinese republic and vowing to keep up the fight.

In January, 1950, Dean Acheson, President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, drew a “defensive perimeter,” committing the U.S. to protect a huge part of East Asia against Communist aggression. He left South Korea and Taiwan outside of it; Truman, like others, expected Taiwan to fall before long. But, six months later, North Korean troops invaded South Korea, with help from the Soviets, sparking fears of a wider war. Truman ordered an aircraft-carrier battle group into the strait, and in 1954 the U.S. signed a defense treaty with Taiwan, placing troops and even, for a time, nuclear weapons there.

Chiang had brought with him more than a million mainland Chinese to an island with a population of six million; his political movement, the Kuomintang, dominated Taiwan for more than forty years. An austere and unforgiving autocrat, Chiang declared martial law and repressed dissent. During one savage period, known as the White Terror, some twenty-five thousand civilians were killed and tens of thousands imprisoned. There were no free elections, no free press, and no political parties other than the K.M.T.

For years, Chiang fostered the idea that his was the legitimate government of China, even though it exercised no control over the mainland. The state of war with the mainland was constant; sometimes the two sides shelled each other across the strait. With the world divided by the Cold War, Western governments propped up the notion that Taiwan was the true China. For thirty years, the U.S. maintained diplomatic relations with the Republic of China and not the People’s Republic, and until 1971 Taiwan occupied China’s permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. In office, Chiang nurtured the dream that his forces would return to the mainland and overthrow the Communists. Taiwanese children born on the island were taught to believe that they were Chinese, regardless of their origins, and that their true homeland lay across the water.

Among the first generation of children who navigated the puzzle of Taiwanese identity was Lung Ying-tai, who grew up to be, through her books and journalism, a crucial advocate for democracy on the island. I met her in Dulan, a vast stretch of forested mountains along the southeastern coast. The area is home to the Amis, one of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups; according to local tradition, the mountains are inhabited by a benevolent god named Malatao. Lung’s house sits on a hillside overlooking Green Island, where political prisoners were held during the years of Chiang Kai-shek.

Lung was born in southern Taiwan in 1952, to parents who had fled Hunan Province during the civil war. Her father, a member of the K.M.T., became a provincial police officer. In school, she was taught the history and culture of mainland China but little about the island itself; the instruction was in Mandarin, rather than in the Taiwanese dialect.

Lung’s connections to the mainland were not abstract: her parents had left a one-year-old son behind with relatives, fearing that he wouldn’t survive the chaos of the exodus. “My mom thought they would be able to go back to get him,” she told me. Taiwan’s laws prohibited any travel across the strait; even exchanging letters could bring a death sentence. As a result, Lung heard only whispers of a brother she’d never met. “I didn’t even know if he was still alive,” she said.

Chiang died in 1975. That year, Lung travelled to the U.S. to study at Bowling Green State University, and she went on to Kansas State University for a Ph.D. in literature. Freed from restrictions on communicating with the mainland, she wrote a letter to her brother; because she did not know where he lived, she scrawled on the envelope his name, Ying-yang, the county where her family had resided, and “the Lungs’ village.” She figured that it would never reach him, but three months later a reply arrived. “It was like a miracle,” she said. “My brother didn’t even know he had brothers and sisters.”

From abroad, Lung became celebrated for her writing about the politics and history of Taiwan and China; she focussed on the predations of the K.M.T. and on the upheavals that broke so many families apart. Her books sold best on the mainland, and a column she wrote appeared in newspapers throughout China. In 1985, she published a withering criticism of the K.M.T.’s rule, “The Wild Fire,” which was influential in the democratization of the island.

After Chiang’s death, Taiwan entered an era of political ambiguity. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China and severed them with Taiwan; the last U.S. troops withdrew from the island. Still, a succession of Presidents continued to pledge support, giving an impression, if not a promise, that America would help defend against a Chinese attack. The U.S. sold weapons to Taiwan and allowed its diplomats to keep an office in Washington, D.C., as long as it wasn’t called an embassy. Taiwanese leaders performed a delicate balancing act, using their relationship with the U.S. to retain independence while also cultivating economic ties with the mainland.

In 1987, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law and began easing travel restrictions. Lung arranged to bring her parents to Hong Kong, where she met her brother Ying-yang for the first time. “He’d become a thin, dark-skinned, slightly bent peasant, denied education because his father had served in the Republic Army,” she said. He spoke a dialect that his family could barely understand.

The next year, the K.M.T. installed Lee Teng-hui, a Cornell-educated lawyer, as President. Lee moved Taiwan decisively toward democracy but at the same time presided over an improvement in relations with the People’s Republic; Taiwan provided markets for China’s products and investment in its economy, which was largely cut off from the West following the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. Four years into Lee’s tenure, unofficial representatives of the two countries met in Hong Kong and reached an understanding—the 1992 Consensus, as it became known—that Taiwan and China were inextricably linked. The K.M.T.’s leaders had given up fantasies of reconquering the mainland; they hoped instead that the two countries, with their shared history and culture, could find a way to coexist until, at some undefined moment in the future, they became one China again.

In 2008, another K.M.T. candidate, Ma Ying-jeou, was elected President on a promise of greater integration. Ma, who trained as a lawyer at Harvard and New York University, told me in his office, “This was my vision—that bringing the two sides closer together would make war impossible.”

It would also help Taiwan prosper. At the time, Western economies were grappling with a steep recession, while China, Taiwan’s largest trading partner, was growing. In the next six years, Ma negotiated dozens of agreements with the mainland. Airlines began running daily flights across the strait, and thousands of Chinese visited Taiwan for the first time. In 2015, Ma met Xi Jinping, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, in Singapore; it was the first such meeting since the end of the civil war. To avoid any awkwardness in the use of official titles, Ma was referred to as “the leader of Taiwan” and Xi as “the leader of mainland China.”

Ma told me that during his time in office Taiwan’s birthrate began to rise, after years of decline. “That’s how hopeful people were,” he said. But the island was restive. Lung said, “As China became more repressive, the Taiwanese people began to feel more and more separate from the mainland.” Lung became Ma’s minister of culture, and initiated programs for Chinese artists, writers, and filmmakers to come to Taiwan. “I especially supported documentary filmmakers in China because they were so critical of the establishment,” she said.

There was also a growing political opposition in Taiwan. In 1986, a group of activists, some of them former political prisoners, had founded the Democratic Progressive Party (D.P.P.), which called for a stronger Taiwanese identity. With democracy flourishing, and a greater share of the population born on the island, a sense of nationhood had taken hold.

In 2013, Ma announced his most ambitious plan, the Cross-Strait Services Agreement, a measure that would have lowered barriers for Chinese to invest in such things as banks, shopping centers, and construction firms. Lin Fei-fan, a graduate student at National Taiwan University, helped lead a revolt. Lin told me he and his allies feared that the law would open Taiwan to a flood of Chinese money and people. “The feeling was that we were going to be swallowed by the mainland,” he said. “And the deals were being made over our heads—we didn’t ask for them.” The following March, Lin and about two hundred other students occupied the parliament building, vowing to stay until the Agreement was shelved and a mechanism was established to allow for public input. Tens of thousands more joined demonstrations in the streets, and after twenty-four days legislators agreed to put the plan on hold.

The Agreement proved to be the apex of coöperation between the two countries. In 2016, Ma’s party was swept from office by the D.P.P., a movement formed expressly to make Taiwan independent. Tsai Ing-wen, the new President, made Lin the Party’s deputy secretary-general. For Lin, the results confirmed that many other Taiwanese felt the same way that he and his fellow-protesters did: “We don’t want to be part of China.”

Reserved and cerebral, Tsai Ing-wen seemed an unlikely national leader. Born in 1956, she was one of eleven children. Her father was a member of the Hakka, a historically marginalized Indigenous Taiwanese group. Her mother doted on her, making her lunches into her college years. Tsai studied law, earning degrees from Cornell and the London School of Economics, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on international trade. As a young official, she attracted attention for her role in negotiating Taiwan’s tortuous entry into the World Trade Organization, where it was admitted not as a country but as a “separate customs territory.”

Tsai claimed to dislike the spotlight; in her memoir, she described herself as “a person who liked to stick close to the wall when walking down the street.” Elsewhere in the book, she wrote of the joys of toiling in obscurity: “This is Tsai Ing-wen, always proving herself in the quietest way.” People who know her did not disagree. “She’s most at home with her cats and dogs,” a friend told me.

As a Presidential candidate, in 2015, Tsai said that she supported the status quo in Taiwan’s relationship with China. She passed notes, through Taiwanese academics, to senior leaders in China, telling them that she wanted good relations. In public statements, Chinese officials suggested that those relations rested on her affirming that Taiwan and China were part of the same country.

The prevailing idea in China was that Taiwan would eventually join the mainland, much as Hong Kong had when it ceased to be a British colony, in 1997—an arrangement known as “one country, two systems,” in which a democracy could, at least rhetorically, coexist with a dictatorship. Tsai was faced with a conundrum. Bonnie Glaser, the director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund, who has known Tsai for years, told me that Tsai was under pressure to placate the Chinese but couldn’t call Taiwan and China “one country” without splitting her own party. And she knew that Beijing was wary of the D.P.P. “The Chinese had already made up their minds that this woman was pro-independence to the core,” Glaser said.

In Tsai’s inaugural speech, she declared, “The two governing parties across the strait must set aside the baggage of history.” China’s leaders swiftly broke off contact. “The mainland and Taiwan belong to the same China,” Ma Xiaoguang, China’s Taiwan-affairs spokesman, said. “There is no room for ambiguity.” Tsai was vilified in official news outlets. A piece published by the Xinhua News Agency blamed her policies on the fact that she is unmarried and lives alone. “As a single female politician, she lacks the emotional encumbrance of love, the constraints of family, or the worries of children,” an analyst with the People’s Liberation Army wrote. “Her style and strategy in pursuing politics constantly skew toward the emotional, personal, and extreme.”

In fact, as a public speaker, Tsai was often dull. But she posted regularly on social media, pressing into crowds and posing for selfies with supporters. As she resisted Chinese pressure, her popularity surged. In 2019, when Xi said that he might use force to compel reunification, Tsai issued a sharp retort, insisting that China “must accept the existence” of Taiwan and acknowledge it as a democratic state. “Taiwan absolutely will not accept ‘one country, two systems,’ ” she said. Admirers began calling her Spicy Taiwanese Girl, borrowing a lyric from a popular song.

A pivotal moment came later that year, when Chinese security forces crushed peaceful protests in Hong Kong. Tsai became even more emphatically opposed to integration. Official contact between her government and China’s dropped to nothing, cross-strait travel and cultural exchanges plummeted, and eventually Tsai allowed American Special Forces to come train Taiwanese soldiers. The details of that program, and of many others the Americans are overseeing to help the Taiwanese strengthen their defenses, are kept quiet. “We probably do more diplomatically and more behind-the-scenes stuff with Taiwan than almost any other place—and we talk very little about it,” a senior American official told me.

Although Tsai maintained that she was willing to talk to the Chinese, there seemed to be a growing sense that the time had passed. “The moment we sit down with the Chinese, it’s over,” Lin told me. “There’s only one thing they want to talk about.”

During Tsai’s tenure, Chinese diplomats have worked to deepen Taiwan’s isolation. One by one, Chinese diplomats have persuaded Taiwan’s diplomatic partners to abandon her; the latest, in 2021, was the government of Nicaragua, which had maintained relations with the Republic of China for most of the past century. The senior American official said that the Nicaraguan government could expect to be rewarded with generous Chinese aid. “It’s very transactional,” Glaser told me. Only fourteen countries now have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, many of them island nations like Tuvalu. Under Chinese pressure, Taiwan has been excluded from the United Nations General Assembly and from formal membership in most international institutions, including the World Health Organization.

The result has been an uncomfortable paradox: even as Taiwan has developed a sense of nationhood, much of the rest of the world has pulled away. Earlier this year, President Biden dispatched a group of prominent former officials to reassure Tsai and to assess the situation. One of the officials on that trip told me that he was unnerved by what he saw: “What you notice when you’re in Taiwan is the profound sense of isolation. They’re alone.”

In 2015, two Taiwanese university students, Truman Chen and Sandra Ho, attended a journalism conference in Fujian, China. It was the height of Taiwanese and Chinese coöperation, and the students were obliged to sit through a performance of propaganda tunes like “The Embrace of the Motherland Always Welcomes You.” “It was so silly, we couldn’t stop laughing,” Ho told me. Back in their dorms, she and Chen poked fun at the exercise on WeChat, the social-media platform, and their riffs were a hit.

When they returned home, they kept up their act, imitating the newscasts on CCTV, the state-run Chinese channel. Chen played a straight-faced anchorman, narrating the preposterous reports that appeared onscreen. “Our feeling was that so much of the news was really funny and absurd, and we could tell people what was happening and have fun at the same time,” Ho told me.

Their posts grew into a comic newscast, “Eye Central TV,” which airs several times a week on YouTube; the most popular episodes get a million views apiece. Chen and Ho often taunt Taiwanese politicians, especially for their historic obsession with returning to liberate the mainland; China is referred to as the “occupied area,” with maps of Taiwan’s territory altered to include everything from Fujian to Mongolia. But the absurdities of the People’s Republic supply most of the material. Xi Jinping is referred to as Winnie-the-Pooh and the government as the Red Bandit. A recent segment took aim at Xi’s draconian “zero Covid” policy: video clips showed Chinese health workers, wearing rubber gloves and dressed in suits and masks, performing PCR tests on roosters, crayfish, lake trout, even cabbage. Then a clip rolled of a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs explaining the policy. Chen referred to him as a “male publicist”—Mandarin slang for a male prostitute.

The creators of “Eye-C TV,” like much of its audience, are under the age of thirty-five, and the show is emblematic of Taiwan’s generational divide over ties with China. To Chen and Ho, the People’s Republic is a slightly crazy neighbor, whose main purpose is to provide fodder for jokes. “We don’t feel connected to China, but there is no way for us to say that we are not related to China, because many people’s ancestors are immigrants from there,” Ho said. Chen added, “None of my friends want to be a part of China. We’re different countries.”

In polls, the prospect of unification generally garners single-digit support. But many Taiwanese, particularly older ones, believe that President Tsai’s refusal to appease China is putting them at risk. “The D.P.P. is painting the Chinese into a corner,” Lung, the writer, told me. “The danger is that they’ll conclude they have no options except war.”

On paper, the Taiwanese military is overmatched. It has about two hundred thousand active-duty soldiers, sailors, and airmen; the P.L.A. is thought to have more than two million troops. Ian Easton, a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute, a China-focussed think tank, told me that Taiwan could mobilize as many as four hundred thousand reservists within seventy-two hours. The trouble is that there is little infrastructure to accommodate a large-scale mobilization, and no weapons. “They are very big, but not very good,” he said.

Taiwanese leaders have so far refrained from establishing any kind of militia to provide guns and training to civilians who could be deployed in a crisis. And while there has been some discussion of extending the period of mandatory conscription to at least a year, that, too, has failed to materialize. Enacting either of those measures would require a substantial political commitment. “No leader wants to be the bad guy and ask people to sacrifice,” Chang Yen-ting, a former deputy commander of the Taiwanese Air Force, said.

As tensions with China have risen, some private citizens have begun acting on their own. One Saturday morning, in the basement of the Chi-Nan Presbyterian Church, in Taipei, I visited a course in first aid and rudimentary civil defense. An instructor showed some sixty concerned civilians how to move a person who has been wounded and how to stanch bleeding; other courses were dedicated to operating two-way radios and preparing to live in community shelters. Several similar groups have formed. One of those who signed up was a woman who asked not to be named, for fear of retribution. She grew up in Taipei, attended college in Hong Kong, and went on to work for a bank there. “When the Chinese came to Hong Kong, they brought in their surveillance cameras and their facial-recognition software,” she told me. “That’s what they want to do here.”

Robert Tsao, a billionaire founder of one of Taiwan’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, U.M.C., pledged more than thirty million dollars to lay the groundwork for a territorial-defense program. Tsao was born in Beijing and did business with China as he built his fortune, but, since the crackdown in Hong Kong, he has begun referring to Chinese leaders as a “gangster mafia.” He told me that he envisioned a force of three million women and men; his funding would supply a down payment on housing and firearms training. “I don’t care if the government isn’t ready,” he said. “We have to act.”

President Tsai is constrained in part by pockets of pro-unification sympathy—particularly among her rivals in the K.M.T. In August, Andrew Hsia, a K.M.T. leader, travelled to China and met with government officials—one of the first such meetings in years. Hsia was vilified by Tsai’s supporters for the meeting, but he told me that his Chinese interlocutors were frustrated that they had no one to talk to in the Taiwanese government. “It’s a dangerous situation,” he said. “There’s no dialogue. That’s when accidents happen.”

The most powerful constituency for closer ties with China is the business community. Since the nineteen-eighties, Taiwan has invested tens of billions of dollars in China, and thousands of companies have opened operations there. Among them are some of the largest and most successful businesses in the world, including Foxconn, whose factories on the mainland assemble millions of cell phones a year. More than two hundred thousand Taiwanese live in China, many of them working in tech jobs. Taiwan is a net beneficiary of this economic relationship, with a trade surplus of a hundred and four billion dollars last year.

Many businessmen with operations in China are close to the K.M.T. and hold more positive views of China. Sheen Ching-jing was born in China in 1947 and fled to Taiwan with his parents two years later. He returned in the early nineteen-nineties and built the Yangzhou Core Pacific City Development Co. With more than six thousand employees, Sheen’s company has constructed apartment complexes, shopping centers, and homes. Sheen told me that good relations with China were essential to Taiwan’s prosperity. “This is an era of economics,” he said. “We share the same culture. We are of the same tribe. There’s no reason for us to be separate countries.” The widespread opposition to unification would inevitably fade away, and military force would be unnecessary, Sheen said: “The question will be naturally resolved.”

Some Taiwanese businessmen told me privately that Chinese officials had pressured them to avoid political positions that ran counter to China’s foreign policy. One businessman, who called himself Winston, said that China favored K.M.T. candidates—and made it clear that supporting the D.P.P. would invite punishment. Winston, who oversees an operation with thousands of employees on the mainland, said a government official approached him after discovering that one of his employees had contributed to a pro-independence Presidential candidate in Taiwan. The official threatened heavy punishment if the donations continued. “It was very sensitive,” Winston said.

During the 2020 election campaign, Winston recalled, his company’s leaders declined a request from President Tsai to appear with them in Taiwan, for fear of angering the Chinese: “It put us in a very tricky position.” He told me that his operations in China were under constant threat of inspections and fines, and that it was sometimes necessary to bribe officials to keep them from causing trouble. “We are dealing with people who are trying to make as much money as possible in the jobs they have, before they are moved out,” he said. “It’s a very difficult environment.”

The K.M.T. says that it is committed to preserving Taiwanese sovereignty. But some of its leaders have grown remarkably close to China. In May, Hung Hsiu-chu, a former K.M.T. chairwoman, toured Xinjiang, where Western governments have accused the Chinese government of committing genocide against the Uyghur minority and maintaining an archipelago of forced-labor camps. Speaking to Chinese media afterward, Hung dismissed claims of genocide, saying that she saw only “bright smiles on everyone’s faces, full of hope for the future.” She didn’t notice any Uyghurs working against their will, either: “If they are, why do they all show satisfied looks on their faces?”

Suspicions abound that pro-Chinese leaders have quietly accepted money from the mainland. One of them is Zhang Xiuye, a native of Shanghai who married a Taiwanese man and, in 2018, ran for a seat on the Taipei City Council. That October, she and a colleague in the Patriotic Alliance Association, which advocates unification, were charged with accepting sixty-two thousand dollars from a source in China, apparently to help their candidacies. Both denied wrongdoing; Zhang posted bail and disappeared, presumably to the mainland. “We suspect the Chinese are doing a lot of this,” Syu Guan-ze, an independent researcher, told me. “But it’s nearly impossible to track all the money flowing into Taiwan.”

At a conference in Beijing in 2019, a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party exhorted Taiwanese media executives to advance China’s plan for the island. “We want to realize peaceful unification—one country, two systems—and we need to rely on the joint efforts of our friends in the media,” the Chinese leader said, according to a video of the meeting. “I believe you understand the situation. History will remember you.”

Much of the suspicion about Chinese efforts to co-opt the media has fallen on Tsai Eng-meng, a Taiwanese billionaire who built a sprawling conglomerate, called Want Want, of snack-food factories, hotels, and real estate on the mainland. Beginning in the two-thousands, Tsai bought several large Taiwanese media properties, including the China Times newspaper and CTi TV, which became known for a sharply pro-China slant. In 2019, it was reported that Want Want had received more than half a billion dollars in subsidies from the Chinese government since 2004; during the most recent Presidential campaign, CTi TV devoted nearly three-quarters of its coverage to the K.M.T. candidate. “It’s an outlet for Chinese propaganda,” K. C. Huang, the head of TAWPA, an organization dedicated to fighting corruption, said. In 2020, the Taiwanese government declined to renew the broadcasting license for the company’s news network, after receiving hundreds of complaints from citizens.

Misinformation is ubiquitous on Taiwanese social media. This summer, an audio recording widely suspected of coming from China gave instructions on how to prepare for an impending invasion. “Everyone must stay away from military facilities, sit quietly in their homes, and wait for liberation,” a Chinese-accented voice said. “If you have children in the Army, be sure to tell them if the People’s Liberation Army attacks Taiwan to hand over their guns and they won’t be killed.”

In 2013, Chinese construction crews arrived at a shoal in the South China Sea known as Mischief Reef. It was a speck in the ocean—so shallow that at high tide it disappeared below the water—but that didn’t last. The Chinese crews began piling sand atop the reef, and eventually poured acres of concrete to build it into an island—attempting to create a new political entity in one of the world’s busiest shipping corridors, on the southern approach to Taiwan. Mischief Reef was also claimed by the Philippines, which sued China in the International Court of Arbitration. But the Chinese crews carried on, even firing water cannons at Filipino boats sailing to a nearby reef. Within a few years, they had built a runway and brought in radar and anti-aircraft missiles, along with troops to man them; over time, two more artificial islands were fully militarized.

The construction was part of a long-running effort to claim jurisdiction in the South China Sea, which is rich in fishing beds and oil deposits. For decades, China’s government has been declaring that tiny spits of land in the sea are in fact islands, entitled to territorial waters that extend out for miles. The Chinese have made more than two hundred such claims, giving them jurisdiction over international waters and making it increasingly difficult for other nations to operate. In 2016, the International Court of Arbitration ruled that the claims had no validity. The Chinese government ignored the ruling, which the vice foreign minister dismissed as “a scrap of paper.”

On September 1, 2021, China declared that any foreign vessel sailing in the territorial waters of the reclaimed reefs and shoals would be required to identify itself. The U.S. refused. As a former senior naval officer told me, “We made it absolutely clear that we weren’t going to abide by that.” A week later, an American destroyer called the U.S.S. Benfold sailed past Mischief Reef without providing identification. Chinese forces went on high alert, and the People’s Liberation Army declared the ship’s presence “the latest iron-clad proof of attempted U.S. hegemony and militarization of the South China Sea.” The U.S. Navy said that the mission was intended to “demonstrate that the United States will fly, sail, and operate wherever international law allows.”

As China stepped up its claims in the Pacific, Western leaders responded. In September of 2021 alone, the U.S. Navy sent aircraft carriers, destroyers, and other warships into the waters around Taiwan or the South China Sea at least six times; the British, at least twice. The next month, ships from the U.S., the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Japan gathered in the Philippine Sea for a sprawling multinational naval exercise, one of the largest since the end of the Cold War.

This year, the U.S. has sent warships into the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea seventeen times and has routinely sent aircraft to patrol there. The naval activity has sometimes been so intense that each side appeared to be reacting to the other. A former senior American naval officer insisted that this wasn’t the case, as the Navy planned each mission weeks in advance. “I think they are reacting to us,” he said. Whenever Americans have appeared, a Chinese vessel or aircraft has invariably come to shadow them.

Occasionally, the encounters have been humorous. In 2015, a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane was patrolling the South China Sea when it received a radio message. “This is the Chinese Navy,” a voice said in heavily accented English. “Please go away quickly in order to wrong judgment.”

An American officer gave a carefully parsed response: “I am a United States military aircraft, conducting lawful military activities outside national airspace.”

The voice over the radio replied, “Meow.” It was followed by a series of mysterious beeps: the sound of Space Invaders, the nineteen-seventies video game.

In 2020, the Chinese military issued a harsher provocation: a propaganda video, in which nuclear-capable H-6K jets carried out simulated missile attacks. In the video, which the P.L.A. titled “The God of War H-6K Goes on the Attack!,” the warplanes strike what appears to be Guam, the home of Andersen Air Force Base, one of a handful of major U.S. bases in the Pacific. The ground erupts; a block of waterfront warehouses bursts into a fireball, and then a column of smoke rises toward the planes. American observers responded bluffly to the simulation. “We could have killed them six times,” a U.S. military officer told me. Still, China’s belligerence reflected how the balance of military power had shifted since the late nineties, when the two countries got into a dispute over Taiwan, and China was forced to give way.

It began in 1995, when President Lee Teng-hui sought a visa to the U.S. to deliver a speech at Cornell. The Clinton Administration at first refused, but after an uproar in Congress it agreed to grant him one. The Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, enraged by what he regarded as Lee’s show of independence, ordered missile tests near the island and instructed the P.L.A. to stage military exercises, one of which mimicked an amphibious assault. President Clinton responded by sending a Marine landing ship and two other warships into the Taiwan Strait, followed a week later by an aircraft carrier.

Jiang backed down, but the crisis wasn’t over. The next March, after Lee declared his intention to enter Taiwan’s first free Presidential election, Jiang ordered new missile tests, along with further exercises. This time, Clinton responded with even greater force, sending two aircraft-carrier battle groups into the waters near Taiwan. Amid the crisis, thousands of Taiwanese requested visas to flee the island, and the stock market plummeted. But Jiang backed down again. “The Chinese were humiliated,” a former senior official in the Clinton Administration told me. “They vowed, ‘Never again.’ ”

Since then, China has undertaken an ambitious military buildup that has brought its conventional forces to near-parity with the United States’. The Chinese Navy is now the largest in the world, and, as the U.S. Navy prepares to decommission more of its own ships, the gap is expected to grow. China’s ships and submarines are widely regarded as less effective than their American equivalents, but the Chinese are rapidly modernizing.

China’s growing capabilities have coincided with an increasingly aggressive approach to foreign policy. For years, its leaders seldom boasted of their country’s military prowess, following the dictum of the former leader Deng Xiaoping to “hide your strength, bide your time” as the economy grew.

Since becoming the head of the C.C.P., in 2013, Xi Jinping has abandoned that precept. He set no deadline for bringing Taiwan into China but suggested that he intended to be in office when it happened. The Taiwan question, he said, “cannot be passed from generation to generation.” Last year, in a speech commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party, he warned, “The Chinese people will never allow any foreign forces to bully, coerce, and enslave us. Whoever attempts to do that will surely break their heads on the steel Great Wall built with the blood and flesh of 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

Xi’s reëlection as Party chairman in October appeared to herald a new era of assertiveness. He emerged from the Party Congress, held in the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, stronger than ever; he purged his main rivals in the Politburo and its Standing Committee, many of them market-oriented technocrats, and elevated loyalists, most of them drawn from the military and security establishment. In one highly visible moment, Xi looked on as his aging predecessor, Hu Jintao, was roughly escorted from the stage. Several of Hu’s allies, most of them relative moderates, were soon expelled from the Party.

In his speech to the Party Congress, Xi warned of “dangerous storms” ahead and ordered leaders to prepare for an era of “struggle,” a word that was edited into the Party’s charter in seven places. Phrases that suggested stability, like “peace and development will remain the themes of the era,” were removed from a report accompanying the speech. “Our country has entered a period when strategic opportunity coexists with risks and challenges,” Xi told the Party’s leaders. “The world has entered a period of turbulence and transformation.”

Western experts say that Xi’s ultimate ambition is for China to supplant the United States as the world’s preëminent power. His goal is what he calls China’s “great rejuvenation,” the recovery of national power, pride, and territory that fell away in the nineteenth century, with much of it surrendered to the West. Making Taiwan part of China, Xi has said, is one of his project’s crucial chapters.

For many China specialists in the West, the speech was a watershed. “There are no longer any checks on Xi’s power within the system,” Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national-security adviser under President Donald Trump and is now a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me. “Any checks that now exist are external to China. Inside the system, Xi can do what he wants, including start a war.”

Several times a year, David Ochmanek, a former Pentagon official who is now at the Rand Corporation, in Washington, assembles Navy and Air Force officers and officials to conduct war games between the U.S. and China over Taiwan. The participants gather around a large map showing forces arrayed across the region. Those playing the Chinese leaders are steeped in knowledge of China’s decision-making; all have access to the U.S. government’s best information. “The war games are so real that the participants are exhausted and stressed out—they take them very seriously,” Ochmanek told me.

The simulations take many forms, but usually start with a crisis, like the election of a pro-independence President of Taiwan, or with an outright invasion. Many of them end badly for the United States, Ochmanek said: “We usually lose.” Sometimes the Chinese military is able to keep the U.S. Navy at bay and capture Taiwan. Sometimes the Chinese sink U.S. aircraft carriers. This puts the burden on the participants who are mimicking American officials. Do they give up, or escalate? Do they strike China itself? “Sometimes, when the U.S. attacks the Chinese mainland, the Chinese attack Alaska and Hawaii,” he said. “The losses are very heavy.”

It’s not always so dire, Ochmanek said. In some cases, the United States prevails. And even the games that the U.S. loses are not necessarily reflective of how a war would unfold in real life; the main purpose is to evaluate American vulnerabilities. “We learn a lot from these,” Ochmanek said.

Like the war games, almost everything about a potential war with China over Taiwan is theoretical. For the Americans and the Taiwanese, gauging whether and how a war might start involves assessments of each country’s capabilities and objectives, as well as some calculation of the costs that each side would be willing to bear. For American policymakers, that means trying to determine what is required to dissuade China from attempting to change the status quo by force, or, if it does, how to make any war so painful that China would stop without achieving its goals.

American and Taiwanese experts agree that an invasion of Taiwan would be a colossal gamble for the Chinese leadership. A full-scale invasion would likely begin with cyber and missile attacks on Taiwanese military infrastructure, and possibly with an assault by airborne troops. But eventually an invading force of tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of soldiers would have to cross a hundred miles of water, capture the island’s difficult terrain, and sustain an occupation, presumably while under constant attack.

In testimony before Congress last year, Admiral Phil Davidson, then the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, expressed concern that China could try to take Taiwan before 2027—the year its military modernization is scheduled to be complete. “I think our conventional deterrent is actually eroding,” he said. “I worry that they are accelerating their ambitions to supplant the United States and our leadership role in the rules-based international order, which they have long said that they want to do by 2050. I am worried about them moving that target closer. Taiwan is clearly one of their ambitions before then.”

Some American officials and experts believe that China’s advantages will begin to wane later in the decade. A new generation of U.S. defense improvements is scheduled to come online, and America’s defense industrial base, now attenuated, will be revived—or so goes the hope. Many of the same experts believe that China might be entering a long-term economic slowdown, brought on by a rapidly aging population and a maturing economy. “My sense is that the window is opening now, and that it won’t be open forever,” Elbridge Colby, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Trump, told me.

Taiwanese officials say that they are determined to repel an invasion on their own. “We think we would win,” Wu, the foreign minister, told me. But almost no one outside Taiwan believes this. “There is no scenario in which Taiwan can defend itself,” Oriana Skylar Mastro, a fellow at Stanford University and a strategic planner for Pacific Command in the Air Force reserves, told me. A more realistic goal would be to slow down a Chinese invasion, in order to give the U.S., if it chooses to intervene, time to marshal its forces and cover the vast distances to get there. A senior American military officer told me that Taiwan would have to hold off the Chinese for about six weeks. “We think it’s in our favor if it takes forty-five days,” the officer said.

China’s goal would likely be to seize Taiwan as quickly as possible, to present the U.S. with a fait accompli. According to American officials, Beijing worries that it would be unlikely to win a protracted conflict, as the U.S. gathered its allies and revitalized its industrial base. “The longer it goes, the more difficult it gets for the Chinese,” Mastro told me.

For years, Taiwan’s plan for its defense was to attack the mainland bases that would support an invasion. “The strategy is to go to the origin,” Chang, the former deputy commander of the Taiwanese Air Force, told me. The Taiwanese military maintains a formidable conventional force, consisting of fighter bombers, cruise missiles, and anti-ship missiles. But Taiwan’s strategy was designed in the years when its military was closer to parity with China’s. Lee Hsi-Min, who served as chief of the general staff of the Taiwanese military until he retired in 2019, told me that he had pushed for reform without success. “The government didn’t listen to me,” he said.

As China’s capabilities have raced ahead, American officials have begun prodding Taiwan to rely instead on a defensive “porcupine strategy,” which would aim to slow down an invading force using sea mines, anti-ship missiles, and other inexpensive weapons. Taiwanese defense officials have resisted, according to officials in both countries. Earlier this year, Taiwan asked to buy a number of American MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, used for hunting submarines. The State Department rejected the request, which officials considered emblematic of the old strategy. “They’re stuck in the nineteen-eighties,” the senior American official told me.

This year, as pressure from China has increased, the Taiwanese government has acted more urgently. The legislature has approved eight billion dollars in emergency defense spending, for such things as drones, anti-ballistic-missile radar, and patrol boats, all made domestically. But these programs will take time. Until then, the biggest obstacle to preparing Taiwan for a conflict appears to be supplies from the United States. Taiwanese officials told me that they were waiting on the delivery of fourteen billion dollars’ worth of military hardware, including scores of sea mines and anti-ship missiles—the very weapons the Americans have been urging them to buy. One reason, officials say, is that U.S. warehouses have been stripped bare by the conflict in Ukraine. “The Ukraine war has showed us that we don’t have the ammunition stocks to sustain a medium-sized war,” the senior Administration official said. “We don’t have the industrial base.” But Pottinger noted that the demands of supplying Ukraine didn’t explain all the delays: “Stingers and Javelin anti-tank missiles are going to Ukraine, but Harpoon anti-ship missiles are not. The Pentagon procurement system is so screwed up and totally bizarre. Our procurement is asleep. Saudi Arabia is in line to receive the Harpoons before Taiwan. We are not arming ourselves or our friends for the most dangerous fight.”

The biggest question of all is whether America would intervene. Since the early nineteen-eighties, the U.S. has had no legal obligation to defend Taiwan, but, because the American Navy was overwhelmingly dominant, the question wasn’t urgent. As China has grown more powerful, and Xi’s rhetoric more threatening, the matter has become more acute. In recent months, Biden has publicly promised on four occasions to defend Taiwan. Biden’s statements buoyed Taiwanese officials—“fourth time!” one texted me after the latest pledge—but White House officials say publicly that American policy remains unchanged.

The Biden White House seems sharply aware of the consequences of failing to insure Taiwan’s independence. Allowing the island to fall would give the Chinese Navy unrestricted access to the open oceans, as well as effective dominance in the sea lanes of the western Pacific, through which more than three trillion dollars’ worth of goods passes each year. It would also signal to America’s democratic allies in the region—including South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines—that the U.S. could not protect them. Many of the pro-Western countries nearby are under pressure from China as it is. “China is influential in the region, but it is not trusted,” Bilahari Kausikan, a former senior Singaporean diplomat, told me. “Once you display animosity in a naked way, people don’t forget it.” He added, “The leaders in Southeast Asia want American leadership.”

But that doesn’t mean these countries would provide assistance if the U.S. went to war with China. Neither Japan nor South Korea—which have formidable militaries, and which host large American bases—have committed to helping. “With the Japanese, even an attack on the U.S. base in Okinawa would not necessarily trigger self-defense,” Mastro told me. The concern is partly that the U.S. would not win a fight against China. The irony, Mastro said, is that a Japanese decision to join in would likely be decisive. “We would win every time,” she said.

A war to defend Taiwan would put the United States in direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China for the first time since the Korean War, when tens of thousands were killed in face-to-face battles. U.S. officials won’t discuss their battle plans in detail, but experts say that an American response would almost certainly involve missile strikes on the Chinese mainland. “Hundreds of thousands of people would die,” Mastro said.

Likewise, experts say that if the Chinese invaded they would probably attack American bases in Guam and Japan, as they try to keep the Navy at bay. The U.S. military would likely strike back hard and fast, the senior American official said: “We would destroy a lot of their assets immediately.”

But some experts believe that America’s strategy, organized around aircraft carriers, has grown dangerously obsolete—that carriers, while capable of delivering enormous firepower, are increasingly vulnerable to attack. In some of the scenarios that strategists have explored, American carriers could be attacked by Chinese hypersonic missiles that can damage ships even if they’re intercepted. These strategists imagine something akin to the episode in 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, when the Imperial Japanese Navy sank almost the entire Russian Pacific fleet in a single battle. “If we don’t change, we will lose,” Lieutenant General S. Clinton Hinote, a deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, told me.

There’s another concern for some American officials: that the United States does not have the industrial capacity to sustain a longer war with China, which maintains the world’s largest steel and shipbuilding industries. “Who can rebuild their losses faster?” a senior military officer said. “Who can lay steel for new ships? Who can make carbon fibre faster for new aircraft? Aircraft carriers? Against China, we’re not in a position to take one for one.” The problem, experts say, stretches across the spectrum of manufacturing capability; a recent report by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an American research firm, said that, in a war with China, the U.S. Air Force would run out of advanced long-range munitions in less than two weeks.

China has its own reasons for caution. Richard Chen, a former deputy defense minister of Taiwan, told me that the most basic obstacle to an invasion was geography. Only about a dozen of Taiwan’s beaches are suitable for landing soldiers and material in large quantities; the water is too shallow for ships to come in close, and the beaches are too narrow to hold more than a battalion—about eight hundred troops—at a time. The beaches that might accommodate larger numbers lie in underdeveloped areas hemmed in by mountains and jungle. “Invading Taiwan would be a disaster for them, and I think they know it,” Chen said.

Some experts believe that, for Chinese leaders, the risks and uncertainties of starting a war are still too great. “My sense is that the Chinese don’t know what they don’t know—and that is the primary deterrent right now. They cannot, with confidence, predict the outcome,” an American naval officer told me. “If the generals tell Xi Jinping, ‘If you invade Taiwan, you’re going to lose one and a half million members of your armed forces,’ then Xi can decide whether that is a price he is willing to pay.”

But Chen believes that China could try to strangle Taiwan without invading. The island, he said, is vulnerable to a blockade, because so much of what it needs must be imported. The most glaring concern is energy: Taiwan’s power plants run almost entirely on liquefied natural gas and coal. Taiwan has no more than eleven days’ worth of gas in reserve, and about six weeks’ worth of coal. In addition, Taiwan imports two-thirds of its food. “In two weeks, Taiwan would start to go dark,” Chen told me. “No electricity, no phones, no Internet. And people would start to go hungry.” Chen said that the U.S. could protect cargo ships travelling to Taiwan, but he expressed skepticism that such an arrangement would last very long. “The U.S. Navy is going to escort ships into Taiwanese ports?” he said. “For how long? Months? Years?”

If China imposed a full naval blockade, it would constitute an act of war under international law. But a more targeted measure—stopping gas and oil tankers, or blocking arms deliveries—would be enough to cripple Taiwan. Dan Patt, a former deputy director at DARPA and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, in Washington, believes that this would pose the most difficult challenge for American leaders hoping to rally a response. “If it’s not happening on YouTube or social media, there won’t be anything for people to see,” Patt said. “Do you think American voters are going to want to go to war over a commercial cargo vessel being stopped on its way to Taiwan?”

China is also vulnerable to a blockade: it imports more than seventy per cent of its oil from the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Malacca, a narrow waterway that could be blocked with relative ease. Other routes, through Indonesia, would be slower and more expensive. But China has a hundred-day supply of oil, and much of the shortfall could be made up by Russia. “China could last a long time,” Mastro told me.

A larger concern is feeding the populace. China is the world’s largest importer of food, especially from the United States. Peter Zeihan, a demographer who has written extensively about China, told me that a cessation of imports would likely result in famine. “A war with the U.S. would be the end of China as a modern state,” he said.

One of the most important deterrents to war is Taiwan’s role in producing semiconductors. Seventy per cent of the world’s most advanced chips are manufactured there, many of them at the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. “Banks, iPhones, laptops, cars—almost every piece of modern equipment has a chip from Taiwan,” an executive in the industry told me. “A world without Taiwan is a world back to the Stone Age.” America has purchased some three hundred billion dollars’ worth of chips from Taiwanese factories in the past twenty years. “Apple, Dell, Google—they wouldn’t know how to function without them,” the executive said.

China is similarly reliant on the highest-end chips produced in Taiwan; it doesn’t have the equipment or the expertise to manufacture them. If China seized control of Taiwan’s semiconductor factories, it could conceivably force local workers to run them. But the factories depend on a constant flow of Western material, software, expertise, and engineers, without which production would cease in a matter of weeks. Pottinger told me, “If the Chinese took the factories, there’s no way the West would help run them.” The industry executive wasn’t so sure, given the harm that their loss would do to the global economy. “It’s mutually assured destruction,” he said. Colby, the former official in the Trump Defense Department, went so far as to suggest that perhaps it was best for the U.S. to destroy the plants itself: “If we’re going to lose them, we should blow them up.”

Some Western experts fear that a Cold War dynamic has developed, in which the United States, trying to deter what it sees as aggressive behavior, is taking steps that seem aggressive to Chinese leaders, who then take their own steps to deter the U.S. This year, as China squeezed Taiwan, the Biden Administration took two steps that Chinese leaders are likely to regard as extremely hostile.

The first was a decision, in October, to ban sales to China of sophisticated semiconductors related to A.I., supercomputing, and chip manufacturing, if any part of them is produced in the U.S. Biden officials have said that the measure, which will likely prevent Beijing from buying billions of dollars’ worth of microchips, was intended to curb China’s military modernization. “These are unlike any export regulations we’ve ever had,” Patt, the former DARPA official, said. How will China react? “If you’re China, one reason not to invade Taiwan is that you have a good relationship with the Taiwanese, and they supply a lot of high-end technology,” Patt said. “The Chinese might not want to go to war, but they might be tempted to escalate.”

The second measure, now working its way through the American bureaucracy, would provide Taiwan with some ten billion dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry and training. In the past, Taiwan paid for most of the weapons that the U.S. supplied; under the proposal, the U.S. would give Taiwan money to cover the purchase. “The Communist Party could decide that this is a red line,” Patt said. “They could decide to quarantine all ships carrying American weapons to prevent them from entering Taiwan. What would we do then?”

An open confrontation would have enormous implications. “A war would fundamentally change the character and complexion of global power,” Pottinger said. “If China loses, it could lead to the collapse of the Party and the end of Xi. If Taiwan falls, we are in a different world, where the tide of authoritarianism becomes a flood.” Once engaged, a fight would be difficult to control. If leaders on either side began to believe that they were losing, they could feel pressure to escalate; China might attack Americans overseas, and the U.S. might intensify attacks on the Chinese mainland. Countries throughout the region, and perhaps the world, would be forced to decide whether and how to join the fight.

Even a minor crisis over Taiwan would likely spur large increases in the cost of insurance for ships in the area, potentially driving up the price of many goods in ways that would ripple through the world economy. Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former diplomat in China, told me, “China’s economy is sagging—there’s low consumption right now, and the principal driver of growth is exports. Would they want to destroy maritime insurance by making it impossible for ships to flow in and out of China? They’d be shutting down their own economy.”

In the Ukraine conflict, the West has had some success imposing sanctions on Russia. Christopher K. Johnson, the head of China Strategies Group and a former China analyst for the C.I.A., said that the Chinese are concerned about sanctions but believe that the U.S. can go only so far without harming its own businesses: “My sense is that Xi and the Politburo have decided that there is no way the West would dare to enact the types of comprehensive financial sanctions they have on Russia.”

Pottinger believes that if there is a war it will be because Xi misreads the conditions. “Xi has huge ambitions,” he told me. “But he has not shown himself to be a reckless gambler. He calculates.” Good bets require precise assessments of risk, though, and it is not clear that Xi is able to make them. “Information is like oxygen,” Pottinger said. “The higher up you go, the thinner it gets. Xi lives on the summit of Mt. Everest.” His officials are unlikely to give him bad news, and his American counterparts are unable to reliably communicate with him: “We came to the determination during the Trump Administration that messages we were sending through diplomatic channels were not reaching Xi. The Biden Administration has come to a similar conclusion.” The senior Administration official told me that the hotline between the two countries is unreliable, because sometimes the Chinese don’t pick up.

In October, Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, said that China had made “a fundamental decision that the status quo was no longer acceptable and that Beijing was determined to pursue reunification on a much faster timeline.” In recent months, China has begun integrating its fleet of civilian ferries, thought to number in the thousands, into military command. Its army has been staging exercises that feature amphibious invasions, practicing air drops for large numbers of ground troops, and moving military formations on railroads to Fujian Province, which sits just across the Taiwan Strait. The practical effect of these moves is to make it harder to tell the difference between an exercise and the real thing. “That’s the problem with these military exercises—you just extend them and extend them, you normalize them,” Mastro said. “To figure out what they are doing, we are forced to look at much smaller stuff. Are they stockpiling plasma? Are they moving forward medical supplies?” In the Biden Administration, the concern is that the Chinese will abruptly turn an exercise into an invasion. The other Administration official explained the fear: “At some point, they’ll decide, ‘We have to do this,’ and they’ll just look for a casus belli.”

But Johnson suggested it was dangerous to read these incursions as evidence that the Chinese were planning an imminent invasion. “As Marxists, they believe in the value of agitation and propaganda,” he said. “The goal is to wear down Taiwanese resolve and our willingness to intervene. They don’t mind if takes years or a decade.”

Both sides are caught—seemingly unable to back down without appearing to concede. Ryan Hass, the former diplomat, said, “China has a strategic dilemma. They’re frustrated by the status quo, and they’re probing for ways to change it. But taking big, bold actions would come at an extraordinary cost to them. You can’t eliminate the possibility that they would be willing to pay that cost, and so we have to be prepared for it. But if you accept the proposition that war is inevitable, and we must do everything we possibly can to prepare for it now, then you risk precipitating the very outcome that your strategy is designed to prevent.” ♦

[newstfionline]

Thursday, August 22, 2024

Millions of Americans face blistering temperatures as heat dome blankets Gulf Coast states (USA Today) A heat dome blanketing the southwest and Texas has caused widespread hazardous conditions for tens of millions of Americans as forecasters predicted record highs in the regions. More than 23 million Americans were under some level of heat advisory or warning early Wednesday, according to Heat.gov. The National Weather Service is warning of “major” and “extreme” levels of heat risk in large swaths of the southwest and Texas as well as parts of the Gulf Coast. “Hazardous heat continues across Texas and the Gulf Coast with temperatures in the triple digits,” the weather service said Tuesday. Sweltering conditions were expected to continue through the week with near record to record temperatures forecast for portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, according to the weather service.

Troubled waters: The Navy is struggling to build warships (The Week) While the United States Navy is still considered the most powerful on Earth, there is concern among military officials that the Navy’s longstanding prowess in building warships is sinking. Some experts now believe that the Navy’s shipbuilding is in its worst state in 25 years, allowing the Chinese Navy to leapfrog some of the naval fleet capabilities of the U.S. Leaked intelligence seen by Business Insider reportedly shows that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times greater than the United States, a far cry from America’s oceanic dominance of years past.

Why Amtrak’s System Keeps Breaking Down: It’s 100 Years Old (NYT) It was just before rush hour on a Thursday afternoon, and all of the trains between Philadelphia and New Haven, Connecticut, were at a standstill. But the alert Amtrak sent out did little to calm seething commuters: All it said was that service was suspended because of an “overhead power outage.” What it did not mention was that a giant circuit breaker—a critical piece of Amtrak’s system for powering trains along the nation’s busiest stretch of passenger railroad tracks—had blown up a few miles from midtown Manhattan, causing catastrophic damage to an electrical substation and wreaking havoc up and down the Northeast Corridor. The explosion that day showed that much of Amtrak’s vulnerabilities along the Northeast Corridor can be traced back to the system’s astonishing age and long-outdated technology. Long stretches of that system are unchanged from when the defunct Pennsylvania Railroad first electrified it a century ago in the 1920s and ‘30s, The New York Times has found. “It’s staggering; it’s just staggering that we’re still having antique technology controlling our rails,” said John Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Tens of thousands remain without power in Puerto Rico, a week after tropical storm swiped the island (AP) Tens of thousands of people in Puerto Rico have now been left without power for a full week in the wake of Hurricane Ernesto. The powerful storm made landfall in the U.S. territory as a tropical storm a week ago, ripping roofs off of buildings and tearing down power lines. Schools were without power through most of yesterday, though 80% of emergency medical clinics (not including hospitals) had power. A total of 40,000 people out of Puerto Rico’s population of 3.2 million are surviving without electricity, but the U.S. National Weather Service issued an excessive heat advisory for the island warning of  “dangerously hot and humid conditions,” meaning the situation might get worse.

Nicaragua’s crackdown on NGOs (Foreign Policy) The Nicaraguan government banned 1,500 nongovernmental organizations on Monday as part of its latest crackdown against civil society groups. The Nicaraguan Red Cross and several Catholic charities were among those barred, as well as some sports associations, chess clubs, and private universities. The Interior Ministry claimed that the organizations had failed to disclose financial information, including donations. President Daniel Ortega increased crackdowns on perceived threats to his administration after deadly anti-government protests broke out in 2018. Since then, authorities have shuttered more than 5,000 civil society groups, media outlets, and private universities. And more than 300 politicians, journalists, and activists were expelled last year due to alleged treason. Last week, Managua also passed a law requiring nonprofits to exclusively work in “partnership alliances” with state entities.

A Swiss Dilemma: How to Get Old Bombs Out of Deep Lakes? (NYT) Switzerland’s lakes reflect its craggy mountains and lap against its cities. Their blue surfaces are peaceful. And the waters are, seemingly, pristine. But the placid exterior covers an explosive problem: Unspent military munitions lie deep below the waters, a fact that could eventually damage the lakes’ fragile ecosystems. So Switzerland is trying to crowdsource ideas for how to eventually extract the weapons if they begin contaminating the water. The country has kicked off a competition with a cash prize of 50,000 Swiss francs, or about $58,000, to be shared by the three best proposals for removing ammunition that was dumped in the lakes over decades. But it must be done in an environmentally friendly and safe way. There is no immediate need, the announcement stressed: Switzerland monitors the waters and officials said that a leak of pollutants from the munitions would be “against all expectations.”

Ukraine attacks Moscow in one of largest ever drone attacks on the Russian capital (Reuters) Ukraine attacked Moscow on Wednesday with what Russian officials said was one of the biggest drone strikes on the capital since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022. Russia’s defence ministry said it destroyed a total of 45 drones over Russian territory, including 11 over the Moscow region, 23 over the border region of Bryansk, six over the Belgorod region, three over the Kaluga region and two over the Kursk region. Some of the drones were destroyed over the city of Podolsk, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said. The city in the Moscow region is some 38 kms (24 miles) south of the Kremlin. The attack comes as Russia is advancing in eastern Ukraine, where it controls about 18% of the territory, and battling to repel Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, the biggest foreign attack on Russian territory since World War Two.

Ukrainians Who Fled Putin Get Caught in Economic Tug of War (Bloomberg) Lidiia Vasylevska was working as an accountant in Kyiv when Russian forces invaded Ukraine. She fled to Prague, found a different job and settled in a small apartment in a quiet district of the Czech capital. But more than two years after escaping the bombs, she finds herself caught in potentially a different kind of conflict: an economic tug of war between her home country and the country that’s sheltered her. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wants refugees to return to keep the war-torn economy running and resist Russia. Much of central and eastern Europe, meanwhile, is enduring a labor shortage, and countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic are reticent to lose people. At the start of the war, as many as 17 million Ukrainians—more than a third of the prewar population—fled their homes. More than 6 million remain refugees abroad, according to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR. Politicians from Poland to Hungary have said they won’t send refugees back as long as the war rages on.

Golden Triangle corruption (Bloomberg) The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone is a region of Laos near the border with Myanmar and Thailand that has been effectively handed over to a Chinese businessman named Zhao Wei, who has constructed a city there with an airport, casinos, and mounting evidence of thousands of people held against their will and forced to work for scammers or drug smugglers. The Laotian police need dispensation from Zhao to even enter, and it essentially operates autonomously within the 39 square miles of the zone. The U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded research group, estimates that the amount of money stolen by scam centers in the Mekong countries is over $43.8 billion per year, much of it through fake romance schemes and pig butchering schemes that con people out of money. The Laotian authorities have conducted some raids of scam operations in the GTSEZ and arrested over 1,000 Chinese citizens, but there are an estimated 85,000 people being held against their will in Laos working for scammers, mostly believed to be in the GTSEZ.

China’s rising youth unemployment (Reuters) Rising unemployment in China is pushing millions of college graduates into a tough bargain, with some forced to accept low-paying work or even subsist on their parents’ pensions, a plight that has created a new working class of “rotten-tail kids”. The phrase has become a social media buzzword this year, drawing parallels to the catchword “rotten-tail buildings” for the tens of millions of unfinished homes that have plagued China’s economy since 2021. The jobless rate for the roughly 100 million Chinese youth aged 16-24 crept above 20% for the first time in April last year. When it hit an all-time high of 21.3% in June 2023, officials abruptly suspended the data series to reassess how numbers were compiled. “For many Chinese college graduates, better job prospects, upward social mobility, a sunnier life outlook—all things once promised by a college degree—have increasingly become elusive,” said Yun Zhou, assistant professor of sociology, University of Michigan. Some jobless young people have returned to their hometown to be “full-time children”, relying on their parents’ retirement pensions and savings. Others have turned to crime.

Japan sees record visitors for second straight month on weak yen (Reuters) Japan set a second-straight monthly record for visitors in July, official data showed on Friday, as the weak yen and summer holidays propelled a tourism boom. The number of foreign visitors for business and leisure was 3.29 million, an all-time high for any month and topping the previous record of 3.14 million in June, data from the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO) showed. More than 21 million visitors have arrived in Japan through July, on pace to smash through the annual record of 31.9 million in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic shut global borders.

Iran signals promised strike on Israel may not be imminent (Washington Post) Iran is signaling that its promised strike against Israel may not be imminent, with comments from senior officials temporarily easing fears of escalation into a wider regional conflict. Iran for weeks has warned of a “devastating” reprisal to “punish” Israel after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh while visiting Tehran in late July—as officials in Israel, Washington and the wider Middle East have nervously waited for a response. In a statement Wednesday, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said that any response “must be carefully calibrated to avoid any possible adverse impact that could potentially influence a prospective cease-fire,” referring to ongoing negotiations to pause the fighting in Gaza. Still, the mission insisted that a response would come. “The timing, conditions, and manner of Iran’s response will be meticulously orchestrated to ensure that it occurs at a moment of maximum surprise,” it said.

Undiplomatic typos (Foreign Policy) The Indian Express might be wishing it had better copy editors right about now. On Monday, the English-language daily newspaper published an article by Japanese Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa on her first visit to India while in office. But in a glaring spelling mistake, the byline read “Yoko Kamikaze” instead. This was not the first time that New Delhi’s media has misspelled a foreign politician’s name. In 2016, an Indian TV anchor was fired after referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping has “Eleven” Jinping, confusing his name with the Roman numerals. Big yikes.

[sa7abnews]

Summer vacation ideas while there's still time: Here are 6 smart spots to consider

New Post has been published on https://sa7ab.info/2024/08/16/summer-vacation-ideas-while-theres-still-time-here-are-6-smart-spots-to-consider/

Summer vacation ideas while there's still time: Here are 6 smart spots to consider

There’s still plenty of time this summer to make topnotch travel getaway plans. Sure, a road trip to the mountains or a week at the beach is ideal for a well-deserved summer vacation — but if you’re looking for some suggestions that are an airplane away, read on. Fox News Digital spoke to several travel experts to find out how to pursue your wanderlust, whether it’s a solo trip, a couple’s escape, a friends’ getaway or a special family vacation.INTERNATIONAL DESTINATIONS YOU CAN TRAVEL TO THIS SUMMER FOR THE ULTIMATE VACATIONCheck out these six intriguing options, each with plenty to offer.Whether you want to explore your (or a friend’s or family member’s) Irish heritage, play golf or immerse yourself in the food and drink scene, the Emerald Isle is a place to consider.It offers a unique blend of bustling cities such as Dublin and Belfast, charming coastal cities like Cork and Galway, and rolling countryside towns throughout the spectacular island. Getting there is a cinch, as there are direct flights from Midwest and East Coast airports — making it easy for the young and the young at heart. TRAVELING TO PARIS? 6 THINGS TO DO ASIDE FROM WATCHING THE OLYMPICS While in Ireland, be sure to visit the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, which offers a “brewery experience” while sharing tales of “Ireland’s famous beer” with tastings and a rooftop bar, according to its website; and consider a visit to the whiskey distilleries of Jameson, Teeling and Pearse Lyons. Afterward, consider the centrally located Grafton Hotel for a peaceful night’s rest. The summer months are considered the best time to travel to Ireland, according to Intrepid Travel, an agency based in Canada. While you might enjoy nice weather, summer is also peak season — so you can expect crowds at popular destinations. WORLD TRAVELERS GAVE UP EVERYTHING TO SEE 92 COUNTRIES AND COUNTING: ‘WHY NOT?’If you want to avoid the crowds, look into traveling during the “shoulder” season in autumn, according to Tourism Ireland.Another destination to consider as a summer escape is Catalina Island, which is about 50 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. It’s roughly an hour’s ferry ride. Offering something for almost every type of traveler, the versatile destination has fine dining and luxury hotels. Visitors can also camp within the island’s wild terrain.Other highlights are water activities like swimming, snorkeling, kayaking or paddleboarding.ARE YOU PLANNING A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA? HERE’S A GUIDE TO ATTRACTIONS TO ADD TO YOUR VISITWhile on land, consider touring the Wrigley Memorial and Botanic Gardens, plus savor the natural beauty of more than 100 hiking trails on the island. “Catalina Island provides a Mediterranean-style escape closer to the West Coast and is a good alternative to Capri, Italy,” said Christie Hudson, travel expert at Expedia in Seattle. “Both destinations offer breathtaking coastal views, clear waters ideal for snorkeling and a relaxed island atmosphere.”Yet the price difference is huge. FROM FLORIDA TO CALIFORNIA: THE MOST POPULAR VACATIONS IN AMERICA TO BOOK RIGHT NOWA flight from Austin, Texas, to Los Angeles is $310 compared to a flight from Austin to Naples, Italy — which averages $1,870, said Hudson.   If you dream of a splurge-worthy dream trip to Italy but don’t want to face the crowds this summer — consider an alternate Italian trip. Zicasso CEO Brian Tan, based in Mountain View, California, said that while Italy remains a high-demand destination for Zicasso travelers, the travel company is seeing a rise in slightly lesser-known regions, such as the Dolomites in northern Italy. DOG MOM SPENDS $900 TAKING HER PUP ON MONTH-LONG EUROPEAN VACATION ACROSS ITALY: ‘GREAT COMPANION’”It’s off-the-beaten path from the usual Rome/Florence/Venice crowds, has cooler temperatures, amazing mountain vistas, lush valleys, memorable drives, and charming towns, including Cortina D’Ampezzo, host of the 2026 Winter Olympic Games,” said Tan. Furthermore, a region like the Dolomites can be paired easily with traditionally popular major gateway cities like Rome, he said. Copenhagen is likely the most visited city in Denmark. This Scandinavian country offers endless opportunities for culture, history and foodie experiences, plus coastal benefits. “Denmark is a surprisingly good place for a beach holiday in peak summer, with over 4,500 miles of coastline and uncrowded, white, sandy beaches,” said Daniel Burnham, senior flight expert with Going.com. “Within the past 10 days we’ve seen nonstop fares to Copenhagen from $375 nonstop out of Boston, New York, Miami, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles for travel from July-November 2024,” he also said.  TRAVELING INTERNATIONALLY? IT COULD BE ILLEGAL TO BRING ALONG THESE MEDICATIONS, ACCORDING TO A PHARMACISTIn addition, a Denmark trip can be a launching point for seeing other European countries,c such as Finland, Norway, Sweden or the United Kingdom.If you’re a Caribbean enthusiast but don’t want the same “been there, done that” island experience, it might be time to consider Saint Vincent — where the “Pirates of the Caribbean” was filmed. “There’s a new Sandals there now, and it’s a sweet property,” said Kelley Connor, a travel adviser with AAA Club Alliance in Marlton, New Jersey. For more Lifestyle articles, visit www.foxnews.com/lifestyle”It’s the first all-inclusive [offering] on the island, located on 50 lush acres with a beautiful beach and surrounded by mountains and rainforest.”Saint Vincent is south of St. Lucia in the Eastern Caribbean. “Right now, it’s pure and undisturbed, providing a relaxing vacation that offers the best of all beach vacations without the hordes of tourists,” Connor said. “The rainforest is filled with tropical birds and cascading waterfalls, and the snorkeling and scuba diving is sublime, due to the exotic beauty beneath the quiet turquoise waters.”Gulf Shores, Alabama is gaining popularity among travelers who are seeking a blend of pristine beaches, outdoor activities and southern hospitality, according to Booking.com information shared with Fox News Digital. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTERIt’s a quintessential beach escape — with 32 miles of white, sandy beaches perfect for swimming, sunbathing and water sports. Be sure to make time for Gulf State Park, a must-visit for nature enthusiasts — plus it offers kayaking, fishing and hiking. Also, a dolphin cruise showcases the region’s scenic beauty of the Gulf while offering the chance to spot these adorable mammals. This destination is very family-friendly and ideal for a multi-generational trip.

[boldlyburningtheorist]

Unlocking Your Business's Potential with IT Consulting in Very long Island

Introduction

IT service solutions

In modern rapid-paced and know-how-driven entire world, organizations want to stay in advance in the curve to survive and prosper. One of several important approaches To do that is by harnessing the ability of data technological know-how (IT) to unlock your business's total probable. Having said it services long island that, taking care of and leveraging It may be a fancy and overwhelming undertaking, especially for modest enterprises with limited methods. This is when IT consulting in Lengthy Island arrives into play. By partnering with a reliable IT consulting agency, you'll be able to attain usage of qualified tips, strategic organizing, and comprehensive solutions that will propel your organization forward.

Unlocking Your enterprise's Potential: The strength of IT Consulting

What can it be Consulting?

IT consulting refers back to the observe of giving expert assistance, assistance, and help to businesses on how to greatest benefit from facts technologies programs and solutions. It entails examining a company's latest IT infrastructure, figuring out parts for advancement, establishing customized strategies, applying slicing-edge systems, and delivering ongoing guidance and routine maintenance.

How Can IT Consulting Assist Your organization?

Long Island IT Support: With responsible IT aid in Extensive Island, you'll be able to be certain that your online business's engineering infrastructure operates effortlessly and successfully continually.

Computer Restore Very long Island: Once your Laptop or computer systems stop working or come upon technological glitches, prompt Personal computer restore expert services in Extended Island can help you save time, revenue, and frustration.

Managed IT Expert services Extended Island: Managed IT providers provide proactive monitoring, servicing, and management of your small business's IT devices, guaranteeing exceptional effectiveness and reducing downtime.

IT Options Prolonged Island: Custom made IT methods built especially for your online business's distinctive wants can boost productivity, streamline operations, improve communication, and drive expansion.

Tech Guidance Lengthy Island: Reputable tech guidance in Long Island makes sure that any specialized challenges or worries are instantly tackled by well-informed gurus, allowing your workers to aim on their core duties.

Network Help Prolonged Island: A robust and secure community infrastructure is important for seamless conversation, info sharing, and collaboration inside of your Group. Network aid products and services in Long Island will help you Construct and preserve such an infrastructure.

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Cloud Computing Extended Island: Leveraging cloud computing systems can provide your small business with scalability, versatility, Price personal

[dasooneggssupplier]

5 Best Places to Buy Salted Eggs in Singapore

Salted eggs have long been a beloved staple in Asian cuisine, known for their unique flavor and versatility. Whether used in traditional dishes or contemporary recipes, they add a savory depth that is hard to match. In Singapore, the demand for high-quality salted eggs has only increased, making it essential to know where to find the best suppliers. This article explores the top five places to buy salted egg in Singapore, ensuring you get the best quality for your culinary needs.

1. Dasoon

A Convenient Choice

Dasoon is a well-known onlinemarket in Singapore, offering a wide variety of eggs, including salted eggs. With numerous outlets across the island.

Quality and Price

Dasoon prides itself on offering products at competitive prices without compromising on quality. Their salted eggs are consistently fresh, and they often have promotions, making it an affordable option for families.

Customer Experience

Shopping at Dasoon is a pleasant experience with well-organized aisles and friendly staff. The onlinemarket offers online shopping, providing added convenience for those who prefer home delivery.

2. Giant Hypermarket

A One-Stop-Shop

Giant Hypermarket is another excellent place to buy salted eggs in Singapore. Known for its extensive range of products, Giant is a one-stop-shop for all your grocery needs, including high-quality salted eggs.

Freshness Guaranteed

Giant ensures that their salted eggs are always fresh, sourcing them from reputable suppliers. This commitment to quality makes it a reliable choice for those who want the best for their culinary creations.

Accessibility

With multiple locations across Singapore, Giant Hypermarket is easily accessible to most residents. Their large stores and ample parking make shopping here a breeze.

3. NTUC FairPrice

A Trusted Name

NTUC FairPrice is one of Singapore's most trusted supermarket chains, known for its commitment to quality and customer satisfaction. When it comes to salted eggs, FairPrice offers some of the best options available.

Value for Money

FairPrice is dedicated to providing value for money, and their salted eggs are no exception. They offer a variety of packaging options, allowing you to buy in bulk or in smaller quantities as needed.

Community Focus

FairPrice also engages in various community initiatives, making it a socially responsible choice for your grocery shopping. Their customer loyalty programs and promotions add extra value to your purchases.

4. Hockhua Tonic

Speciality Store

Hockhua Tonic specializes in health foods and traditional Chinese medicine, making it a unique place to buy salted eggs. Their focus on quality and health benefits sets them apart from typical supermarkets.

Premium Quality

At Hockhua Tonic, you can expect premium quality salted eggs, often sourced from traditional farms. Their eggs are known for their rich flavor and excellent texture, perfect for gourmet cooking.

Expert Advice

The staff at Hockhua Tonic are knowledgeable about their products and can offer expert advice on how to use salted eggs in various recipes. This personalized service enhances the shopping experience.

5. Online Platforms

The Digital Marketplace

In today's digital age, online platforms have become a popular way to buy groceries, including salted eggs. Websites like RedMart, Shopee, and Lazada offer a wide range of salted eggs suppliers, providing the convenience of shopping from home.

Variety and Convenience

Online shopping platforms offer a vast variety of salted eggs, including organic and specialty options. This variety allows you to find exactly what you need without the hassle of visiting multiple stores.

Delivery Services

Most online platforms offer reliable delivery services, ensuring that your salted eggs arrive fresh and on time. This service is particularly beneficial for busy individuals and families.

How to Choose the Best Salted Eggs

Quality Indicators

When choosing salted eggs, look for indicators of quality such as firm texture, vibrant yolk color, and a balanced saltiness. High-quality salted eggs should have a rich, creamy yolk and a pleasant aroma.

Packaging

Proper packaging is crucial for maintaining the freshness of salted eggs. Opt for eggs that are well-sealed and stored in cool conditions to ensure they remain fresh until use.

Price vs. Quality

While price is an important consideration, it's essential to balance it with quality. Cheaper options might not always provide the best flavor or texture, so be willing to invest a little more for premium quality.

Popular Recipes Using Salted Eggs

Salted Egg Prawns

Salted egg prawns are a popular dish in Singapore, combining succulent prawns with a rich, savory salted egg sauce. This dish is perfect for dinner parties and special occasions.

Salted Egg Yolk Chicken

Another favorite is salted egg yolk chicken, where crispy chicken pieces are coated in a luscious salted egg yolk sauce. It's a crowd-pleaser that’s easy to make at home.

Salted Egg Fish Skin

Salted egg fish skin has gained popularity as a snack, offering a crunchy, addictive treat. It's perfect for snacking or as an appetizer.

Health Benefits of Salted Eggs

Nutritional Value

Salted eggs are rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals, making them a nutritious addition to your diet. They provide essential nutrients that support overall health and well-being.

Energy Boost

The high protein content in salted eggs makes them an excellent source of energy, perfect for an active lifestyle. Including them in your meals can help maintain energy levels throughout the day.

Culinary Versatility

Salted eggs can be used in a variety of dishes, from traditional Asian cuisine to modern fusion recipes. Their unique flavor enhances both savory and sweet dishes, making them a versatile ingredient in the kitchen.

Storage Tips for Salted Eggs

Refrigeration

To keep salted eggs fresh, store them in the refrigerator. This helps maintain their quality and prevents spoilage.

Avoid Freezing

Freezing salted eggs can alter their texture and flavor, so it's best to avoid freezing them. Instead, store them in a cool, dry place if refrigeration is not available.

Proper Handling

Handle salted eggs with care to prevent cracks and contamination. Always check the eggs for any signs of damage before use.

Conclusion

In Singapore, the demand for high-quality salted eggs is met by several excellent suppliers. Whether you prefer the convenience of supermarkets like Sheng Siong, Giant Hypermarket, and NTUC FairPrice, the specialty offerings at Hockhua Tonic, or the ease of online shopping platforms, you have plenty of options to choose from. By considering factors such as quality, price, and packaging, you can ensure that you select the best salted eggs for your culinary needs. With their rich flavor and versatility, salted eggs are a valuable addition to any kitchen, enhancing a wide range of dishes with their unique taste.

[interiortodayindia]

CPHI 2024, Milan, Italy Exhibition Stand Builder

CPHI 2024 Exhibition Stand Builder,  Are you looking for an exhibition stand builder then Interior Today is one of the best options for you. Here you can fulfill all your needs and requirements for exhibition stands. We offer all services related to exhibition such as: booth installation and removal, furniture arrangements, audio-visual setups, User-friendly touchscreens, interactive displays, 3D visualizations, and on-site management. We always use high quality materials to create your stand unique and eye-catching. All of these services make your exhibition stand more modern and attractive. Our on-site management is one of the most important parts of the exhibition because this service helps you to face any issue that may arise during the trade show. We make all this possible because we have an expert team of design and builders who are experts in creating any kind of stand designs. Trust us to represent your brand value, services and products on any crowded event floor. Apart from this, we handle everything carefully with your 3D visuals to final installation and our team uses the latest technologies and the high-quality eco-friendly materials to ensure that your booth not only looks great but sturdy as well as. Our goal is to provide a budget-friendly exhibition stand and make your exhibition stand unique and attractive. If you choose Interior Today as your exhibition stand designer and builder needs then you get an amazing booth design and trustworthy partner who focuses on making your presence successful and memorable at CPHI 2024 Exhibition Stand. 

About CPHI 2024, Milan, Italy

CPHI 2024 creates connections and inspires partnerships across the global pharma community. We champion innovation at the heart of pharma at our in-person and online events, granting you access to endless opportunities. Our powerful digital solutions help you to stay connected with your industry at every step in your journey. To get more from CPHI Milan join our global network of pharma professionals year-round through our online platform and take it to the next level at CPHI 2024 Fiera Milano, Italy. Connect with thousands of industry leaders and expand your network with endless opportunities to learn, innovate, and collaborate online and in-person. CPHI facilitates opportunities for you to grow your business and develop meaningful connections at the heart of pharma. It's the leading international Global pharma professionals show which will be attended by 166+ exhibitors from 166+ countries and 62,000+ trade visitors from 150 countries. 

Why Choose Interior Today as Stand Builder in CPHI 2024, Milan, Italy

Interior Today is a professional stand designer and builder company for CPHI 2024. The 1st reason is that we have a total of 20 years of experience in this field. Regarding the CPHI Exhibition 2024, we will help you with your design and builder requirements. You can trust us and give us a chance to make your exhibition presence successfully. Our professional team knows how to design and build high-quality exhibition stands for any events. Who will help you to make your business and also make your presence memorable so that visitors and industry experts remember you long after finishing the trade show event. The 2nd reason is that our expert designers and builders team make a Stand according to your requirement. Such as: peninsula stands, custom-made stands, shell scheme stands, tension fabric displays, portable displays, island stands, modular stands, double-decker stands Etc. If you have your old design, our team can also develop it to suit your current needs. Choose Interior Today as your trusted exhibition stand designer and builder and get an amazing booth design on your budget. We focus on making your presence at CPHI 2024 successfully.

Benefit of Exhibiting at CPHI 2024, Milan, Italy

Valuable Lead Generation

Access To The Global Supply

Increase Brand Awareness

Seal Valuable Contract Deals

Meet Qualified Leads

Increase Brand Visibility

Face-To-Face Networking

Get Unrivalled Knowledge

Showcase Your Products

Benefit of Attending CPHI 2024, Milan, Italy

Get the latest insights into the pharmaceutical industry.

CPHI Exhibition Milan, you can discover new markets, products, and technologies.

CPHI 2024 Exhibition allows you to connect with the entire pharmaceutical industry.

Participate in the largest gathering in the pharma industry to make powerful new connections.

The CPHI 2024, Fiera Milano, Italy will allow you to meet innovators, thought leaders, and those who are anticipating future trends.

The CPHI Exhibition can help advance your business by networking with global experts, discovering the latest innovations, and finding new suppliers.

Source Link: https://interiortoday.in/cphi-milan-italy-exhibition-stand-builder/

[novumtimes]

Surfer loses leg in shark attack in Australia helped by man who used dogs leash as tourniquet

An Australian surfer is in serious condition after a shark attack on Tuesday.  Kai McKenzie, 23, was surfing near New South Wales’ Port Macquarie when he encountered a nearly 10-foot-long great white shark, CBS News partner BBC News reported. The shark bit his leg off, the BBC said.  McKenzie was able to catch a wave into shore after losing his leg. An off-duty police officer at the scene made a makeshift tourniquet out of his dog’s leash, the BBC reported, stemming the bleeding until emergency responders arrived.   McKenzie’s leg “washed up a short time later,” after he had already been taken to an area hospital, according to the BBC. Locals found the limb and put it on ice, then brought it to the same hospital. Doctors are now working to see if the limb can be reattached, the BBC reported.  Kai McKenzie GoFundMe McKenzie’s surf team, RAGE, said on social media that they are “sending love” his way. The team also noted that McKenzie broke his back last year.  “He never once complained, always just got on with doing what he loved as soon as possible,” the team said, alongside a series of photos of McKenzie. “He is an inspiring person.”  McKenzie remains in a serious but stable condition at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, Australia, according to the BBC.   A GoFundMe to support McKenzie’s recovery has been created. It has raised about $76,000 as of Wednesday morning.  The attack comes just weeks after surfer Tamayo Perry died after sustaining fatal injuries in a shark attack off the island of Oahu in Hawaii. Shark attacks are generally rare, experts say, but the International Shark Attack File reported in February that there has been a “disproportionate” increase in fatal encounter in Australia. Surfers have borne the brunt of that increase, CBS News previously reported. Australia accounted for about 22% of the world’s unprovoked shark attacks in 2023.  Kerry Breen Kerry Breen is a news editor at CBSNews.com. A graduate of New York University’s Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism, she previously worked at NBC News’ TODAY Digital. She covers current events, breaking news and issues including substance use. Source link via The Novum Times

[amplab]

Strength Training in Singapore: Building a Stronger You

In the bustling city-state of Singapore, where the pace of life is fast and the demands on our bodies are high, strength training has emerged as a powerful tool for maintaining health, boosting confidence, and enhancing overall quality of life. Whether you're a fitness enthusiast or a newcomer to the world of exercise, incorporating strength training into your routine can yield impressive benefits. Let's explore why strength training is gaining popularity in Singapore and how you can get started.

The Rise of Strength Training in Singapore

Singapore's fitness scene has evolved dramatically over the past decade. While cardiovascular exercises like running and cycling have long been popular, there's been a noticeable shift towards strength training. This change is driven by a growing awareness of the comprehensive benefits that strength training offers, including:

Improved muscle tone and strength

Enhanced metabolism and weight management

Better posture and reduced risk of injury

Increased bone density

Boosted mental health and stress relief

Getting Started with Strength Training

If you're new to strength training, Singapore offers numerous resources to help you begin your journey:

1. Public Gyms and Fitness Corners

Singapore's public housing estates and parks are equipped with fitness corners that include basic strength training equipment. These free-to-use facilities are excellent starting points for beginners.

2. Commercial Gyms

For those seeking a more comprehensive range of equipment and professional guidance, commercial gyms are available island-wide. Many offer introductory packages and personal training sessions to help newcomers get started safely.

3. Group Fitness Classes

Numerous fitness studios in Singapore offer strength training classes, from bodyweight exercises to weightlifting. These classes provide a supportive environment and expert instruction, making them ideal for beginners and intermediate fitness enthusiasts alike.

4. Online Resources

With the rise of digital fitness, many Singaporeans are turning to online platforms for strength training guidance. From YouTube tutorials to fitness apps, these resources offer flexibility and convenience for those with busy schedules.

Building a Sustainable Strength Training Routine

To make the most of your strength training journey in Singapore, consider these tips:

Start slow: Begin with bodyweight exercises or light weights to build proper form and prevent injury.

Be consistent: Aim for at least 2-3 strength training sessions per week.

Focus on compound movements: Exercises like squats, deadlifts, and push-ups work multiple muscle groups simultaneously, offering efficient full-body workouts.

Progressive overload: Gradually increase the weight, reps, or sets as your strength improves.

Rest and recover: Allow adequate rest between sessions and prioritize sleep for optimal muscle recovery.

Balanced nutrition: Support your training with a balanced diet rich in protein, complex carbohydrates, and healthy fats.

Embracing the Strength Training Community

One of the most rewarding aspects of strength training in Singapore is the vibrant community that comes with it. From gym buddies to online forums, you'll find a supportive network of individuals sharing tips, celebrating achievements, and motivating each other to push beyond their limits.

Conclusion

Strength training in Singapore is more than just a fitness trend; it's a pathway to a stronger, healthier, and more confident you. Whether you're looking to build muscle, improve your overall health, or simply challenge yourself in new ways, Singapore's diverse fitness landscape offers something for everyone. So why wait? Take that first step towards a stronger future today, and join the growing community of strength training enthusiasts in Singapore.

Remember, every fitness journey is unique. Listen to your body, celebrate your progress, and enjoy the process of becoming the strongest version of yourself in the Lion City.

[shatterthefragments]

🎵💛🌴

🎵 Last song you listened to?

Bad Omens’ Kingdom of Cards (I’ve been singing it to myself all day at work whenever alone ish) (I typed this yesterday after work but passed out)

(Like I am half considering recording myself singing this and seeing if it’s any good as I continue to think about my “record one song” mini project/assigned resolution plus once I figure out which daw I’ll use I can practice layering vocal lines for this too… but also I have been Very Wrong about all significant amount of lyrics oops) (…or I could just play Stardew valley it’s been so long 😭)

But also The Room Below’s Blood Sport video that I need to queue still UPDATE I HAVE QUEUED IT ♥️😭

But since I’m sort of going back and forth between tumblr and working on writing this I am BACK to kingdom of cards 💖

(When this fades a bit I’ll be back to Turntail probably or perhaps listen to something I’ve intended to or the new music from artists I follow or something. But today again has been Kingdom of Cards)

💛 Do you have any piercings?

I do not!

But I may get my ears done so that I can eventually switch to little gay silver hoop earrings arrrrrrr (<- meant to be read like a gay pirate)

Even my sister is so enabling of this that she has offered (unsure if still willing to) pay for it but I couldn’t take her up on it because it’s Jump In The Ocean Sail Away time for me soon!! (She has several ear piercings)

If I didn’t have major hang ups over stuff being inside my body and healing I would’ve probably had several many ear piercings by now at the least. (And started getting tattoos before uh. This year ✌️) but in my head I WILL get at least the one hopefully :) (fuck I want to do a semi impulse trip to go get another (my artist is in [redacted from public] which I love but that means I have to travel there… but I think I can make it work… if they haven’t filled up all their space for tomorrow…)

🌴 Desert island item?

I adore your answer of a sturdy knife. 100/10 very practical, so I’m going to go for some whimsy and rambling!

I’d love a ship. If it’s too cheating for it to be like. A yacht that has capabilities to make it easier to sail on one’s own (wait am I alone on the island or do I have a friend? If so: a nice, sturdy house) then a semi-cheat is a tall ship. It has enough space for me and all my stuff (probably) but is too difficult/LITERALLY NOT MADE (or able??) to be sailed on one’s own. (Literally the crew has to be at least 6 or seven people and we the 30+ trainees have to help too bc otherwise the whole thing doesn’t really work.)

Or if it’s not cheating to have to sail a ship on my own. Then a small sailboat that in theory can be sailed on one’s own. (I am… not a good skipper based on my dinghy sailing. I am good at following directions from the actual captains of tall ships. I primarily rely on other people knowing more than me bc even if I *should* be one with the ocean, I don’t truly retain enough of the knowledge I’d need to safely and reliably sail myself any distance. But if given long enough (and if there’s a desalinator on board 👀) with the sheets mostly in so I can keep relative control and uh. Hopefully not die. It could maybe be possible? Us sailing with only the jib on stormy days has opened up Options. (I was with a coach though so we got to go ZOOM and hike out and that was super fun!! Would be less fun if not with an expert though ahaha. Like these people have sailed since before they reached double digits. I started at. 22 I think)

If that or the house is too cheating.

Then. A lifetime supply of Tokyo Milk Cheese Factory cookies. (The single best thing I’ve ever eaten …honestly I think I just want one right now brb I have had one 😌)

Or An indestructible book with all the knowledge I’d need to survive (if I can’t refer back to something does that information truly exist?? It goes POOF!)

Or A storage container I guess.

Or for my entertainment (Assuming I have a dry space) a cello 👀 strings my BELOVED!!

Actually. Adding desalinator. Dehydration incapacitates me by lowering the threshold for my headaches by a lot so that would probably be the most important thing for me.