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      Biden says three objects shot down over US ‘most likely’ private, and not more Chinese spy balloons – live

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      Joe Biden says the intelligence services haven’t determined the purpose of the three objects American planes shot down in recent days, but there’s no sign they were used for surveillance or connected to China.“Our intelligence community is still assessing all three incidences. They’re reporting to me daily and will continue the urgent efforts to do so, and I will communicate that to the Congress,” Biden said in an address from the White House.“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were, but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program, or they were surveillance vehicles from other any other country. The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”01:19In a White House address, Joe Biden tried to reassure Americans about what fighter jets shot down over North America in recent days, saying there were no signs the still-unidentified objects were connected to China or used for surveillance. Earlier in the day, a Georgia court released portions of a special grand jury’s report into Donald Trump’s election meddling campaign, which indicated jurors were worried about being lied to, but did not reveal if they think the former president or his allies committed crimes. The ball is now in Atlanta-area district attorney Fani Willis’s court, since she’s using the document to determine the next steps in her investigation of the former president’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.Here’s what else happened today:
      Senator John Fetterman checked himself into the hospital to receive treatment for depression. The Democrat’s election in Pennsylvania last November was crucial to the party gaining an outright majority in the Senate.
      Biden wants to speak with China’s president Xi Jinping after the spy balloon incident, though it’s not clear when the leaders plan to jump on the phone.
      Nikki Haley thinks Trump could pass one of the “mental competency tests” she wants to force politicians older than 75 to take.
      Democrats are beginning to worry that Biden is too old to run for re-election.
      A bill to prevent police from using search warrants to access data from menstrual tracking apps failed in Virginia’s legislature, apparently due to interference from Republican governor Glenn Youngkin.
      A theory has emerged from the amateur radio community about what exactly a US jet shot down over Canada’s Yukon territory.The unidentified object, one of three downed by American planes in recent days, may have been a “pico” balloon equipped with a GPS module and a solar panel that was launched from Illinois last October, and in the middle of circumnavigating the earth for the seventh time, according to this report on hobbyist website RTL-SDR.As the article makes clear, the details of the K9YO-15 amateur radio balloon and US and Canadian authorities’ description of the object encountered on 11 February sure seem to line up:.css-cumn2r{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;}The launch blog post indicates that the K9YO-15 balloon was flying a silver mylar 32” sphere SAG balloon which appears to be this one from balloons.online. Unlike latex or rubber weather balloons which inflate and stretch as they rise into lower atmospheric pressures, these mylar balloons can’t stretch, so their fully inflated ground size will be the same as their size at high altitudes, meaning the pico balloon won’t get much bigger than 32”. The payload was a GPS module, Arduino, SI5351 used as a WSPR and APRS transmitter and a solar panel, all together weighing 16.4 grams. A pentagon memo notes that the object shot down over Canada was a “small metallic balloon with a tethered payload” which fits the description of the pico balloon exactly.
      The K9YO-15 balloon ceased all WSPR telemetry transmissions while flying just below Alaska since Feb 11 00:18 UTC (just before sunset in Alaska when the solar panels would stop working).
      By using NOAA wind models and the last known location by Alaska, K9YO-15 was projected to have been over Yukon when the US Air Force shot down the unknown balloon object at Feb 11 20:41 UTC (3:41 PM EST / 1:41 PM Yukon time according to Canadian Defense Minister Anand). Reports put the altitude of the shot down object at approximately 40,000ft (~12000 meters), which matches the projected ~11500 meters of K9YO-15. Based on the previous days transmission times, it is suspected that if it were operational, the balloon would have begun transmitting again sometime later in the Yukon afternoon when the sun was stronger, but no transmissions have been seen.A town in Ohio is demanding answers after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in their community, but the Guardian’s Lauren Aratani and Michael Sainato report that rail executives refused to provide any in a meeting last night:Nearly two weeks after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, community members packed a local high school auditorium on Wednesday night wanting answers to their health and safety concerns.Norfolk Southern Corporation, the Atlanta-based operator of the derailed train, ultimately skipped the meeting, which was the first community meeting in the town of 5,000 people since the incident.“We know that many are rightfully angry and frustrated right now. Unfortunately, after consulting with community leaders, we have become increasingly concerned about the growing physical threats to our employees and members of the community around this event stemming from increasing likelihood of the participation of outside parties,” the company said in a statement. “With that in mind, Norfolk Southern will not be in attendance this evening.”Ohio residents demand answers two weeks after toxic chemical train derailmentRead more01:23The New York Times has obtained an email from John Fetterman’s wife to the Democratic senator’s supporters:Email from @giselefetterman to supporters: “our family is in for some difficult days ahead, and we ask for your compassion on the path to recovery.””I’m sad, and worried, as any wife and mother would be.”— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) February 16, 2023
      John Fetterman, the newly elected Democratic senator whose victory in Pennsylvania gave Joe Biden’s allies an outright majority in the chamber after last November’s midterms, has checked himself into the hospital for clinical depression, his office announced.“Last night, Senator John Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to receive treatment for clinical depression. While John has experienced depression off and on throughout his life, it only became severe in recent weeks,” Fetterman’s chief of staff Adam Jentleson said in a statement.“On Monday, John was evaluated by Dr. Brian P. Monahan, the Attending Physician of the United States Congress. Yesterday, Dr. Monahan recommended inpatient care at Walter Reed. John agreed, and he is receiving treatment on a voluntary basis. After examining John, the doctors at Walter Reed told us that John is getting the care he needs, and will soon be back to himself.”The three recent shootdowns are among the more mysterious national security happenings in recent time, particularly because days have passed since they occurred, and Washington has yet to come out with an explanation of what American jets encountered in the skies.But Joe Biden seems to be preparing Americans for the possibility that the unidentified objects were simply innocuous vessels in the wrong place at the wrong time. While he didn’t say what was shot down in his White House speech today, he did note that he asked American intelligence agencies to look into reports of UFOs.“When I came into office, I instructed our intelligence community to take a broad look at the phenomenon of unidentified aerial objects,” Biden said. “We know that a range of entities including countries, companies and research organizations operate objects at altitudes for purposes that are not nefarious, including legitimate scientific research.”He also noted that “our military and the Canadian military are seeking to recover the debris so we can learn more about these three objects.” There’s no indication there that they’ve managed to get their hands on them yet, even though it’s been days since they were downed.The president announced he would look to speak with China’s leader Xi Jinping in the wake of the downing of a spy balloon belonging to Beijing off American’s eastern coast.“The other thing I want to point out is that we are going to keep our allies and the Congress contemporaneously informed of all we know and all we learn, and I expect to be speaking with President Xi, and I hope we have we are going to get to the bottom, as I make no apologies for taking down that balloon,” Biden said.He also noted that, “Our (experts) have lifted components of the Chinese balloon’s payload off the ocean floor, we’re analyzing them as I speak, and what we learn will strengthen our capabilities.”Biden says the government is coming up with practices to better detect and deal with unknown aerial objects in the wake of the recent shootdowns over North America.“I’ve directed my team to come back to me with sharper rules for how we will deal with these unidentified objects moving forward, distinguishing between those that are likely to pose safety and security risks that necessitate action and those that do not,” Biden said.“But make no mistake: if any object presents a threat to the safety, security of the American people, I will take it down. I’ll be sharing with Congress these classified policy parameters when they’re completed, and they’ll remain classified so we don’t give our roadmap to our enemies to try to evade our defenses.”He also addressed why the United States found itself suddenly responding to three unidentified objects in its airspace just days after shooting down a confirmed Chinese spy balloon.“We don’t have any evidence that there has been a sudden increase in the number of objects in the sky. We’re now just seeing more of them, partially because the steps we’ve taken to increase our radars, to narrow our radars, and we have to keep adapting our approach to dealing with these challenges.”Joe Biden says the intelligence services haven’t determined the purpose of the three objects American planes shot down in recent days, but there’s no sign they were used for surveillance or connected to China.“Our intelligence community is still assessing all three incidences. They’re reporting to me daily and will continue the urgent efforts to do so, and I will communicate that to the Congress,” Biden said in an address from the White House.“We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were, but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program, or they were surveillance vehicles from other any other country. The intelligence community’s current assessment is that these three objects were most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions, studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”01:19Joe Biden has started his address about the UFOs shot down over North America in recent weeks, as well as the Chinese spy balloon.Follow along here for the latest. More

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      in US Politics

      Competitor or adversary? The west struggles to define its relationship with Beijing

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      Competitor or adversary? The west struggles to define its relationship with BeijingChina, the US’s most vital trade partner and its main long-term competitor, presents the country with a sticky ‘pacing challenge’ If you want to solve a problem, it helps to be able to define it, but when it comes to a problem like China, western leaders have been struggling to find the right words.Liz Truss sought to designate China as a “threat” to Britain, but did not stay prime minister long enough for that to become established policy. Her successor, Rishi Sunak, has opted for the less combative “systemic challenge” but he is under pressure from backbench MPs to follow Truss’s path and call Beijing a “strategic threat”.Sunak has made clear he does not want the UK to be out of step with its allies on the issue, most importantly the US. In Washington, meanwhile, China designation is a delicate and evolving art.China ‘spy balloon’ wakes up world to new era of war at edge of spaceRead moreThe delicacy was apparent when a Chinese balloon sailed over the continental US earlier this month. The US declared the high-altitude airship and its payload to be designed for spying and shot it down once it was safely over the Atlantic. The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cancelled a long-planned trip to Beijing to address bilateral tensions, but at the same time stressed that channels of communication would be kept open and that the US remained keen on a meeting when conditions allowed. Blinken may meet his counterpart, Wang Yi, as soon as this week, at the Munich security conference.The theme of US-China policy towards the end of the Trump administration was an all-encompassing decoupling, in which China was presented in mostly adversarial terms. Joe Biden has preferred to talk about “stiff competition”. His administration’s national defence strategy paper deemed Russia to be an “acute threat” while China was portrayed as the US’s only long-term “competitor”. In recent weeks, the official catchphrase for Beijing has been the slightly nebulous “pacing challenge”, suggesting the US is the world’s constant frontrunner with China ever closer to its shoulder.The problem with categorising China is that there are multiple aspects to its global role as it expands its presence on the world stage. For that reason, Democratic senator Chris Murphy has warned against digging up old cold war rhetoric.“You can’t use the terminology that we used for our conflict with the Soviet Union for our conflict with China,” Murphy told Foreign Policy. “It is apples and oranges. We had virtually no trade relationship with the Soviet Union. Our most vital trade relationship is with China. So I do worry about a bunch of Cold Warriors and Cold War enthusiasts thinking that you can run a competition with China like you ran a competition with the Soviet Union. It’s not the same thing.”With this in mind, Blinken has adopted a Swiss army penknife multi-tooled approach that is “competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be.”Washington is acutely aware that it has been complacent in its competition with China for global clout, having assumed that better US technology and its democratic model would win the day, only to find that African countries and other parts of the global south were sitting on their hands when the US called for support in the UN general assembly. Last year an old Pacific ally, Solomon Islands, signed a security pact with Beijing, denying entry to a US Coast Guard cutter not long after.The Biden administration now plans to beef up its diplomatic presence in the Pacific, reopening some shuttered missions. It has set up a “China house” in the state department to coordinate analysis and help counter China’s message around the world. On Wednesday, the deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, summed up the new US approach as Washington takes on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the contest for hearts and minds in emerging economies.“It is not to say that the PRC can’t invest or that you should toss them out,” Sherman said at the Brookings Institution. Instead, she said the message will be: “Have your eyes wide open”.“Understand what you’re getting, understand what rules apply, what the norms are. Give us a chance, see what we have to offer. Let us compete and help you develop as a country in the ways that you choose,” Sherman said.As for collaboration with China, she said there was little choice other than to work with Beijing to address the climate emergency.“There is no doubt that we cannot meet the climate challenge without engagement with the PRC,” Sherman said. “It’s just not possible because we are both such large emitters and historic emitters.”At the same time, there are plenty of fields in which the US and China are adversaries. The balloon affair has just added another layer to a constant, escalating intelligence struggle between the two powers, in which Beijing has scored some remarkable successes in recent years, stealing designs for the F-35 fighter jet for example. Chinese hackers also stole the personal details of 22 million federal workers – current, former and prospective.Fears of China’s technological capabilities led Biden to introduce draconian export restrictions on semiconductors in October of last year, in an effort to strangle China’s microchip sector. It came close to an economic declaration of war, but Republicans in Congress are still trying to depict him as “soft on China”, calling on him to ban the TikTok app as a threat to national security. Some red states are considering bans on Chinese nationals buying land.It is in the military arena of course where the stakes are the highest and the risks of a competitive relationship becoming adversarial are greatest. Last week, the Pentagon informed Congress that China now had more missile silos than the US. It was an eye-catching claim, though most of the silos are empty and the US retains a substantial superiority in submarine and airborne launchers. China is estimated by the Federation of American Scientists to have 350 nuclear warheads. Even if that number tripled, as the Pentagon predicts it will, it will still be less than a fifth of the US stockpile.China’s long-term threat will depend ultimately on whether it is developing its military clout simply to deter or to attack, across the Taiwan Strait in particular. At the end of January, the head of US Air Mobility Command, Gen Mike Minihan, told other officers that his “gut” told him the US and China would be at war by 2025. It was an estimate quickly disowned by the rest of the Pentagon leadership, who shied away from such expressions of inevitability.US officials say that Xi Jinping is watching Russia’s military debacle in Ukraine with concern and maybe recalibrating his options. Opinions differ within the administration on how seriously Xi takes his pledge to reunite China, another reason it has wavered over the right terminology.There is agreement for now however that repeatedly deeming China to be a threat risks making matters worse, shaping policy in such a way that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.TopicsChinaUS foreign policyBiden administrationUS politicsAsia PacificXi JinpingfeaturesReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Antoine van Agtmael: New Perspective on Europe, China and Demography

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      Kevin Rudd: Australia’s incoming ambassador to US says balloon saga threatens push to ease tensions with China

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      Kevin Rudd: Australia’s incoming ambassador to US says balloon saga threatens push to ease tensions with ChinaFormer Labor prime minister says incident has created ‘diplomatic clouds’ that may overshadow efforts to stabilise relationship The incoming Australian ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, has warned the Chinese balloon saga has created new “diplomatic clouds” that put at risk recent efforts to ease tensions between Beijing and Washington.In a speech in Brisbane on Wednesday, Rudd also warned against expecting any “softening in China’s ideological cleavage with the west”.Rudd, a former Labor prime minister who remains as president of the Asia Society until late next month, emphasised that he was offering “personal reflections” which “do not represent the views of the Australian government”.But given he is due to take up his diplomatic posting within weeks, Rudd’s views are likely to attract attention in Washington and Beijing.UK rehearsing economic fallout scenarios if China invades TaiwanRead moreDelivering the inaugural China Matters Oration at the University of Queensland, Rudd reiterated his view that “we are now indeed living in what I have called the decade of living dangerously”.He said the Chinese Communist party appeared to have abruptly changed course on Covid-19 policy because it “feared that not doing so would threaten its unofficial social contract with the Chinese people”.It also worried that a structural slowdown in growth could undermine China’s long-term strategic competition against the US, Rudd said. Those factors made it essential to “return to economic growth at all costs”.“While there has been much internal criticism for how the abrupt change to Chinese Covid policy was made, we should not conclude as a result that Xi Jinping is in real and immediate political danger,” Rudd said.“We should never forget that Xi’s control of the hard levers of power across the party’s security, intelligence and organisational apparatus continues to be near-complete.”Spurred by the “new urgency of its economic growth imperative”, China had attempted to make changes to its international relations in the wake of Xi’s meeting with the US president, Joe Biden, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in November.Rudd said those efforts included Xi’s renewed contact with heads of government around the world, particularly European leaders, to promote Chinese trade and investment opportunities.Xi had also reined in “the polarising practice of ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy seen over the last five years toward US partners and allies around the world, as Beijing embarks on a new approach in the short-to-medium term to accommodate its immediate economic growth agenda”.But Rudd predicted none of those shifts were likely to result in China changing its current military posture regarding the US, Japan and Taiwan.He said China retained its long-term strategic objective of increasing its power relative to the US “to make it possible to secure Taiwan by force at a time of Beijing’s choosing”.He said these structural tensions would “likely manifest in continued and increasing Chinese air force crossings of the median line in the Taiwan Strait; so too with Chinese intercepts of US and allied reconnaissance flights over the South China Sea”.“But nonetheless, prior to recent developments over the interception of the Chinese balloon over the United States, Beijing had begun to moderate its political relationship with Washington.”This was meant to pave the way for a visit to China by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, to continue talks on putting in place “protections” or “guardrails” to manage growing strategic competition.But Blinken postponed this month’s trip after the detection over US territory – and later shooting down – of a high-altitude balloon that American officials said was a Chinese surveillance device.What do we know about the four flying objects shot down by the US?Read more“While Beijing’s objectives may have been limited in scope, both sides appeared to have agreed not to allow their relationship to continue to freefall for the near term,” Rudd said.“At least that was the case until the extraordinary events of February. As of today, it remains unclear if and when the diplomatic clouds may clear to the extent they would enable the return of Secretary Blinken to Beijing – and the extent to which bilateral political resolve remains to find new mechanisms to stabilise the relationship as envisaged last November.”Rudd is due to take up his posting as ambassador to the US at a time when Australia is planning the most substantial overhaul of its defence capabilities in decades, even as it tries to “stabilise” its previously frosty relationship with China.On Tuesday the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, received the report of a defence strategic review, which is widely expected to see Australia acquire longer range missiles and attempt to project power further from its shores.Australia is also finalising the details of its plans to acquire at least eight nuclear-powered submarines with help from the US and the UK under the Aukus deal.The head of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine taskforce, V-Adm Jonathan Mead, revealed on Wednesday that he had handed his recommendations to the government “earlier this year”. A joint announcement by Albanese, Biden and the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is expected next month.Australia’s deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, told the ABC the government’s response to the wide-ranging defence review would be released “weeks” after the initial Aukus announcement.Marles also said he planned to introduce legislation to “remove any doubt” that former Australian defence personnel must maintain their country’s secrets. It follows a review into concerns about China’s attempted recruitment of former fighter pilots.TopicsKevin RuddChinaAsia PacificAustralian politicsUS politicsAustralian militaryTaiwannewsReuse this content More

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      Three objects shot down by US jets may be ‘benign’ balloons, White House says

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      Three objects shot down by US jets may be ‘benign’ balloons, White House saysFlying objects could be commercial- or research-linked but US military admits first shot at object over Lake Huron missed Three unidentified objects shot down by US fighter jets since Friday may turn out to be balloons connected to “benign” commercial or research efforts, a White House official said on Tuesday.The US has not found any evidence to connect the objects to China’s balloon surveillance program nor to any other country’s spy program, national security council spokesperson, John Kirby, told reporters.‘Significant’ debris from China spy balloon retrieved, says US militaryRead more“We haven’t seen any indication or anything that points specifically to the idea that these three objects were part of the [People’s Republic of China’s] spying program, or that they were definitively involved in external intelligence collection efforts,” he said.Instead, a “leading explanation” may be that the objects were operated privately for commercial or research purposes, Kirby said, though no one has stepped forward to claim ownership.The unidentified object shot down by a US fighter jet over northern Canada on Saturday was a “small, metallic balloon with a tethered payload below it”, according to a Pentagon memo to US lawmakers obtained by CNN.The details about the mysterious object – one of three shot down by the US in an eight-day period after a suspected Chinese spy balloon traversed the US mainland and was brought down over the Atlantic Ocean on 4 February – come amid growing frustration over a lack of information from Joe Biden’s presidential administration.The object shot down over Alaska on Friday was the “size of a small car”, the memo states. It also warns against drawing hasty conclusions: “It should not be assumed that the events of the past few days are connected.”The object shot down over Lake Huron on Sunday was previously described as an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it.“These objects did not closely resemble and were much smaller than the PRC balloon, and we will not definitively characterize them until we can recover the debris, which we are working on,” a national security council spokesperson told CNN.Also on Tuesday, Gen Mark Milley, the US’s highest ranking military official, acknowledged at a briefing in Brussels that the first attempt to shoot down the object over Lake Huron missed.The first missile “landed harmlessly” in the water while a second missile successfully downed the object, Milley said.“We’re very, very careful to make sure that those shots are in fact safe,” Milley said, according to the Associated Press. “And that’s the guidance from the president. Shoot it down, but make sure we minimize collateral damage and we preserve the safety of the American people.”US senators received a classified briefing about the objects on Tuesday. The briefers included an assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense and hemispheric affairs as well as Gen Glen VanHerck, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, according to Politico.The information vacuum has fueled speculation about the origins of the unidentified flying objects detected and shot down over Deadhorse, Alaska; Yukon, Canada; and Lake Huron, Michigan, since Friday.At a press briefing on Monday, administration officials defended Biden’s decision to shoot down the objects and also attempted to bat back at least one strand of the conspiracy theorizing inspired by the spate of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.“I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no – again, no – indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns,” the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said at a briefing on Monday. “I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that – all of you knew that – and it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.”Pressed on whether political pressure played into the decision to shoot down the objects, Kirby said: “There were very good reasons to do it … These were decisions based purely and simply on what was in the best interests of the American people.”The three objects shot down during the three-day period beginning Friday did not pose any threat to people on the ground, Kirby said, and were not sending communication signals.However, their altitude – significantly lower than the Chinese balloon from earlier – meant that they did pose a “very real potential risk to civilian air traffic”.TopicsUS newsUS politicsChinaUS national securityUS militarynewsReuse this content More

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      Tuesday briefing: Why is the US suddenly spying so many UFOs?

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      Tuesday briefing: Why is the US suddenly spying so many UFOs?In today’s newsletter: The use of surveillance balloons has gone largely under the radar until several floating orbs were shot down in North America. But China’s not the only country full of hot air – a look at this mysterious twist in international espionage

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      Good morning. UFOs are being shot down over North America, and one of them is octagonal. OK, that’s a slightly breathless account of events since a Chinese balloon was sighted over Montana 10 days ago, and aliens probably aren’t involved – but the full story is almost as interesting.After that first balloon was brought down and US secretary of state Anthony Blinken postponed a trip to Beijing in response, three other mysterious objects have been taken out in US and Canadian airspace in the last few days – the last of them an “octagonal structure” with strings attached to it. The US views them as potential surveillance tools.China says the first one was a weather balloon, and in any case claims the US does the same thing itself. The US hotly denies it. UK defence secretary Ben Wallace says the UK will conduct a security review of its own airspace in response. Now, as debris from the first balloon is recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, a diplomatic spat that started with literal hot air is floating into the stratosphere.What on earth is going on here? Are balloons seriously part of the cutting edge of international espionage? And what exactly was that octagon? For today’s newsletter, Dr David Jordan, co-director of the Freeman Air and Space Institute at King’s College London and a director of the RAF Centre for Air and Space Power Studies, helps us towards some answers. The truth is out there, and after the headlines.Five big stories
      Policing | Police missed clear chances to identify Wayne Couzens as a danger to women before he murdered Sarah Everard, it emerged as he pleaded guilty to three offences of indecent exposure on Monday. Witnesses recorded either full or partial registration details of vehicles Couzens used, but the cases were not linked to the then-Metropolitan police officer.
      Turkey-Syria earthquake | Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a Syrian rebel leader with a $10m US government bounty on his head, has made an urgent appeal for international aid to Idlib, a province in the north-west under opposition control. Meanwhile, Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad has agreed to open two border crossing points with Turkey to allow more emergency aid to the regoin.
      UK news | The family of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old from Warrington who was stabbed to death on Saturday, said her death “has left a massive hole in our family”. They described Brianna, who was transgender, as “strong, fearless and one-of-a-kind”, and thanked the public for their support.
      Israel | Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Jerusalem to protest against legislation introduced by the country’s hard-right government aimed at overhauling the judicial system. The changes, which give politicians greater control over the supreme court, could help prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoid conviction in his corruption trial, in which he denies all charges.
      Fan safety | Uefa bears “primary responsibility” for the catastrophic failures that turned last season’s Champions League final into a horrific experience for thousands of supporters, the organisation’s own review has concluded. The report found no evidence for claims that Liverpool fans were at fault.
      In depth: What’s behind the stratospheric attempts to protect US and Canadian airspace?Shortly after he left work on 1 February, Chase Doak spotted a mysterious white orb floating far above him. He decided to film it. “I am sitting in my driveway here in Billings, Montana … and this thing is up in the sky,” he said, in a video that went viral. “And I have no idea what it is.”Three days later, after identifying the orb as a Chinese surveillance balloon, the US shot it down. A week after that, last Friday, the US shot down another flying object off the coast of Alaska. On Saturday, a US jet acting on US and Canadian orders shot down another over Canada’s Yukon territory. On Sunday, that aforementioned octagonal thing was shot down over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border. (Leyland Cecco reports on local residents’ utter bafflement.) And overnight, the US military said it had recovered “significant debris” (pictured above) from the first incident.Dr David Jordan, an expert in air power and defence, has not previously been asked to give an interview about balloons. “The military use of balloons hasn’t gained much attention recently,” he said. “But it’s fair to say, no pun intended, that it probably goes on under the radar.”Why is the US suddenly spotting so many UFOs and balloons?While it’s quite exciting to imagine a sudden abundance of mysterious objects prowling North American skies, part of the explanation is comically prosaic: it looks like the US has just turned up the radar a bit.Melissa Dalton, the US assistant secretary of defence, said on Sunday: “We have been more closely scrutinising our airspace at these altitudes, including enhancing our radar, which may at least partly explain the increase in objects.”That doesn’t really clear up whether this is a new problem or something ongoing that nobody’s been monitoring, though. “It might be a bit of both,” Jordan said. “It’s entirely understandable they haven’t been looking for them because you pick up so much other stuff like hobby drones, weather balloons – you get to a stage where it’s a bit, ‘Is it a bird, is it a plane?’ (Here’s a fascinating piece by Jonathan Yerushalmy explaining the problem of ‘sky trash’.)“But if you start to think – hang on, are we in a situation where a potential adversary is using these craft to conduct surveillance based on knowing it’s written off as clutter, they will want to go back and check. If it turns out it’s been going for a while, they will leave the filters turned off.”Why might they be useful?Balloons are useful tools for gathering intelligence, in part because they can stay in one place more easily than a satellite. “They help you maintain a fairly persistent surveillance capability,” Jordan said. “And you can launch them relatively covertly. A satellite launch is going to be detected – there’s not much to stop you letting a balloon off.”While satellites will remain the dominant means of collecting intelligence on what’s going on on foreign soil, they have downsides. “The Chinese have used dazzling lasers to block them,” Jordan said. “And the Americans know when satellites are passing over sensitive locations – so you get a window when you’ll be out of sight.”On the other hand, as James Lewis of the US thinktank the Center for Strategic and International Studies pointed out in this global overview of the use of the “poor man’s satellite”, balloons have issues of their own. “They go where the winds take them,” he said. “I’m surprised the Chinese would resort to it … Why not just send a guy in a campervan to drive around?”That might suggest a motive beyond pure intelligence. “It may be they’re sending a message – saying look, your vaunted air differences can’t stop us flying things over your territory,” Jordan said. “If it’s that sort of cunning wheeze, it has a limited lifespan, but it might still have been good while it lasted.”Is China the only country doing this?It’s worth noting that only the first object has been definitively attributed to China. On Monday, Beijing accused the US of flying its own balloons over Chinese airspace more than 10 times since the beginning of last year. While the US flatly denies that claim – and it seems surprising that it would only come up now – it is certainly true that China is not alone in seeing potential in their use.The US has significantly increased its investment in balloon projects: it went from spending $3.8m over the last two years to more than $27m in 2023, Politico reported – a marginal sum against the vast defence budget, but still a big change.The UK is also developing its own programme. The Ministry of Defence’s 2021 tender for a £100m contract, Project Aether, said the UK was seeking to strengthen its capacity for “Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance using Stratospheric Uncrewed Air Systems.”Even so, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Chinese claim of US operations in its airspace are true. “My gut feeling is that it’s unlikely,” said Jordan. “You can pick up an awful lot of information from international airspace.”What was that octagon, then?There have been conflicting views from US officials over whether the objects sighted over Yukon and Alaska can be categorised as balloons, with little detail beyond the admirably specific line that they are about the size of “a Volkswagen Beetle”. None of that explains the “octagonal structure” shot down over Lake Huron in Michigan on Saturday.Part of the giddy fascination prompted by that incident was the result of a response from General Glen VanHerck, head of North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), to a question about aliens: “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.”Yikes! Other defence officials hastened to add that, er, there was no evidence of aliens. So WHAT WAS THE OCTAGON?Part of the mystery is the result of the fact that the only sightings were from fighter jets travelling past at hundreds of miles an hour, the White House noted yesterday. Jordan doesn’t know for sure, but he has a fun speculation, drawing on the example of the Coléoptère, an ill-fated French experiment in wingless flight from the 1950s: while no propulsion system was detected, it’s not impossible this was a high-end drone.“It would be very unconventional,” he said. “ but even without wings an octagon could have an aerodynamically viable system with an engine piloted remotely – that would be sophisticated, but not revolutionary.” Again: probably not aliens, though.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIs North American airspace really what’s important here?Probably not. While the subject has come to the fore because of what started in Montana, balloons may be a more pressing issue in Taiwan, as part of preparation for a possible future Chinese invasion.On Sunday, the FT reported (£) that dozens of Chinese military balloons had been observed over Taiwan in recent years, with the most recent just a few weeks ago.Such operations are far more militarily relevant, Jordan said. “They want to fatigue Taiwan’s response – but they don’t want to add fatigue to their own. If the Taiwanese feel they have to intercept it, you probe their defences, you inflict attrition, you work out their response times and their tactics and procedures. So that is a more significant development.”What else we’ve been reading
      Ruth Michaelson and Lorenzo Tondo have a devastating report from north-west Syria, where the earthquake “has compounded layers upon layers of humanitarian crisis in Idlib”. They speak to Mohammed Hadi (above), whose wife died along with two of their five children after she ran back inside their home to try to save them. Archie
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      Stuart Heritage compiles 27 great tricks from professional chefs to make your own dinners seem a little more restauranty. Why has nobody told me to put a teabag in my curry until now?? Archie
      Interweaved with the story of her courtship with her husband, Andee Tagle’s piece in the Atlantic (£) explores the enduring magic of mixtapes. “The gift of music curation is powerful, a love language to be wielded with care,” writes Tagle. Nimo
      After scenes of violent disorder outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Knowsley on Saturday, Diane Taylor writes about the problem of inflammatory rhetoric coming from the government itself: “The government needs to extinguish its anti-asylum-seeker rhetoric before the situation becomes too out of control to be reined in.” Archie
      SportFootball | Czech Republic international Jakub Jankto came out as gay in a social media video, becoming the most prominent current male footballer to come out publicly. Jankto (above) said he wanted to “live my life in freedom without fears, without prejudice, without violence, but with love,” adding: “I am homosexual, and I no longer want to hide myself.”Cricket | England trounced Ireland at the T20 Women’s World Cup, bowling their opponents out for 105 before reaching their target for the loss of six wickets. Meanwhile, seven players picked up contracts in the inaugural Women’s Premier League in India, including a £320,000 deal for Nat Sciver-Brunt, likely making her the best-paid female team athlete in the UK this year.Football | Liverpool triumphed in the Merseyside derby, beating Everton 2-0 thanks to goals from Mohamed Salah and Cody Gakpo. For Liverpool, writes Jonathan Liew, “the hopeful reading is that this comfortable win against their favourite opponents can restore a little of the old swagger”.The front pagesThe Guardian leads with “Police missed chances to arrest Couzens as sex offender suspect”. The Metro carries tributes to stabbing victim Brianna Ghey: “Strong, fearless, one of a kind”. The i has “Hunt urged to boost defence spending – or risk failing to deter Putin”, while the Daily Mail says “Rishi: RAF are ready to shoot down spy balloons”. More surveillance worries in the Daily Telegraph: “Police use of Chinese drones ‘risks UK security’”.The Times has “Exposed, the secret plot to sink tougher sewage rules” while the Daily Express warns “Millions face maximum council tax hikes”. “Cost of living it up” – the Sun is angry on our behalf that an energy company sent 100 “reps” on a Maldives jaunt. The lead story in the Daily Mirror is “M25 road rage killer claims: I’m not a threat to victim’s lover”. Top story in the Financial Times today is “Overseas bets on Vodafone mount as Liberty Global takes £1.2bn stake”.Today in FocusWhy anger is growing in Turkey a week after catastrophic earthquakesIt’s been an agonising time for survivors in Syria and Turkey – especially those whose relatives and friends are still trapped under rubbleCartoon of the day | Martin RowsonThe UpsideA bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all badSuzy Morrison had been working since she was 15, but money always disappeared quickly: “I couldn’t keep hold of it,” she says. “I never learned how to save money.” Morrison developed addictions to alcohol and other substances, holding down a job and raising two children while also funding her dependency by selling drugs. In her late 30s, though, Morrison joined a 12-step recovery programme. But while her life transformed in many ways, her dysfunctional relationship with money did not change. So in 2012, after a lifetime in debt, she joined Debtors Anonymous when she was 61. Ten years later, she is debt-free and works as a counsellor, giving Addiction 101 workshops and webinars. Her life could not look more different. Morrison says she is more self-assured than ever. “I’m at ease in my own skin,” she says. “There’s none of that fraud or impostor thing. Becoming easy in my skin feels like a radical act.”Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every SundayBored at work?And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords are here to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Also try out the Guardian’s new daily word game, Wordiply. Until tomorrow.
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      TopicsUS newsFirst EditionSurveillanceChinaAsia PacificUS militaryUS politicsCanadanewslettersReuse this content More

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      Schumer says Chinese ‘humiliated’ after three flying objects shot down

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      Schumer says Chinese ‘humiliated’ after three flying objects shot down‘Chinese were caught lying’,’ says Senate majority leader as US and Canadian military scramble to recover pieces US and Canadian military are continuing to search by sea and land amid hostile weather conditions in a scramble to recover portions of three flying objects shot down over North American airspace in the past week.The Democratic majority leader of the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that he had been briefed by the White House and that officials were now convinced that all three of the flying objects brought down by air-to-air missiles this week were balloons. He put the finger of blame firmly on China.“The Chinese were humiliated – I think the Chinese were caught lying,” he said. “It’s a real setback for them.”Hours later a spokesperson for the White House national security council tried to tamp down some of Schumer’s rhetoric, saying it was too early to characterise the two latest flying objects shot down over Alaska and Canada. Definitive answers would have to wait for the debris to be recovered, the official said.Schumer said that US military and intelligence agencies were “focused like a laser” on gathering information on the flying objects and then analysing what steps needed to be taken to protect American interests in future. He called it “wild” that the US government had no idea about the balloon spying program until just “a few months ago”.US and Canadian personnel are now scrambling to retrieve elements of the balloons from all three crash sites. In the most recent case, an unidentified flying object was taken down within Canadian airspace on Saturday by F-22 fighter planes with the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad.Canadian military on Sunday were attempting to reach pieces of the vessel in a remote, rugged area of Yukon. The object, described as cylindrical, had been flying at 40,000ft in Canadian territory and was considered a risk to civilian air traffic.Searches by US military are also continuing in difficult circumstances off the coasts of South Carolina and Alaska in the wake of the two previous interceptions. Some debris from the first balloon to be destroyed, the largest of the three objects, was shot down on 4 February about six miles off the South Carolina coast.Underwater survey and recovery teams have already retrieved pieces from the ocean floor 50ft down. The fragments are now being taken to military laboratories for analysis.US officials have told reporters that stormy seas are slowing the mission. The Chinese government has admitted that this balloon was its own, insisting though that it was used only for weather research.The Pentagon has disputed the characterization, saying that early indications suggest that the balloon was carrying powerful equipment that could intercept communications. The balloon, flying at 60,000ft, was tracked by US military for several days as it traversed the national airspace, having initially been spotted off the coast of Alaska on 28 January.The air force decided to wait until it was over the Atlantic before shooting it down out of concern for civilians on the ground, the Pentagon said.Schumer defended that decision on Sunday against mounting criticism from Republicans who have castigated the Joe Biden White House for failing to act immediately. By following the balloon across the country, the US had gained “enormous intelligence” on what the Chinese were doing, he said.Schumer predicted that the entire object would be pieced back together in coming days. “That’s a huge coup for the United States,” he told ABC’s This Week.A third search is being carried out in treacherous conditions off the coast of Alaska near Prudhoe Bay, a major oil drilling community. A flying object described by US officials as being roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle car was shot down by F-22 fighter jets using a Sidewinder air-to-air missle on Friday afternoon.Bits of the vessel have landed in frozen sea in an area of snow and ice which is very hard to navigate amid sub-zero temperatures. Retrieval teams are using helicopters and HC-130 search-and-rescue planes because naval boats are unable to reach the location.The confluence of three downed flying objects in a week has raised tension and jangled nerves on both sides of the US and Canadian border. As a sign of the jitters, late on Saturday night, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) closed parts of Montana’s airspace to air traffic after a “radar anomaly” was reported.Norad fighter jets were sent to scour the skies but reportedly found nothing. However, on Sunday, a Montana congressional representative, Matt Rosendale, tweeted slightly different information, saying military officials had advised him that they were confident an object was there and that it was not an anomaly.Additionally, on Sunday, the FAA similarly restricted civilian air traffic over Lake Michigan as there were local reports of military jets in the area but lifted them after a brief time. The FAA didn’t immediately say why it put the restrictions in place.The trio of flying objects has also generated political stresses internationally and domestically. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, postponed the first visit to Beijing by a senior American diplomat since 2018 in response to the high-altitude intrusion of the Chinese balloon.US officials have told news outlets that they have tracked the balloon program to a number of locations inside China.On the Chinese end of the billowing dispute, local news outlets cited by Bloomberg News reported on Sunday that China’s government was preparing to bring down an unidentified flying object said to have been spotted over the port of Qingdao. Fishermen in the surrounding area had been told to be alert, according to the reports.At home, the US congress has also seen rising tension between the new Republican leadership of the House and the Biden administration over the handling of the spy objects. Republicans were critical of the Pentagon’s decision to allow the Chinese balloon to fly across the heartlands of America before bringing it down, though they have been less forthright about explaining how it was that at least three suspected Chinese spying vessels entered US airspace under Donald Trump’s previous presidential administration apparently undetected.The Republican chair of the House intelligence committee, Mike Turner, on Sunday called on the Biden administration to be aggressive in its stance on the flying objects. “I would prefer them to be trigger happy than to be permissive,” he told CNN’s State of the Union.“This administration now needs to declare that it will defend its airspace.”Turner said that the three aerial objects in short succession exposed the gaps in US defenses. “What’s become clear in the public discussion is that we don’t really have adequate radar systems, we certainly don’t have an integrated missile defense system,” he said.TopicsUS militaryJoe BidenChinaUS politicsCanadaAlaskaEspionagenewsReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      Vietnam and India Are Now Acting to Contain Aggressive China

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