World
At APEC 2024, Chinese leader Xi tells Biden he’s ‘ready to work’ with Trump

Chinese President Xi Jinping has held his final meeting with his outgoing counterpart in the United States, Democrat Joe Biden.
But Xi’s words on Saturday seemed directed not simply at Biden but at his Republican successor, returning President Donald Trump.
In his encounter with Biden on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Lima, Peru, Xi emphasised the importance of the US and China maintaining “mutual respect”.
While Xi did not mention Trump by name, he gave a nod to the incoming US president’s victory in the November 5 election.
“The United States has recently concluded its elections. China’s goal of a stable, healthy and sustainable China-US relationship remains unchanged,” Xi said.
But, he warned, “If we take each other as rival or adversary, pursue vicious competition and seek to hurt each other, we would roil the relationship or even set it back.”
Trump, who served as president previously from 2017 to 2021, oversaw a period of heightened tensions with China, including a trade war sparked by his imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods.
China responded with its own tariffs and trade restrictions, though experts warned that the escalation on both sides damaged the two countries’ economies.
On Saturday, Xi appeared to extend a hand of friendship to Trump, encouraging their countries to work together for mutual gain.
“China is ready to work with the new US administration to maintain communication, expand cooperation and manage differences so as to strive for a steady transition of the China-US relationship for the benefit of the two peoples,” he said.
A major campaign theme
Trump has reprised his “America First” philosophy as he prepares to enter the White House for a second time.
China was a repeated feature of the Republican’s campaign speeches, as he led a successful bid for re-election in the 2024 US presidential race.
As part of a pitch to American voters, Trump pledged to protect US manufacturing from Chinese competition.
“I charged China hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and tariffs. They paid us,” Trump boasted at his final campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 4.
“And you know what? We’re going to get along great with China. We’re going to get along good. I want to get along with them. President Xi was great until COVID came. Then, I wasn’t so thrilled with him.”
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump blamed the Chinese leader for letting the virus spread by “allowing flights to leave China and infect the world”. He also repeatedly called COVID-19 the “China virus”.
Despite their rocky history, Xi called to congratulate Trump on his second term the day after the election, on November 6.
Xi has led the Chinese government since 2013, and under his authority, the two-term limit was abolished for presidents.
Trump has expressed admiration for Xi’s authority over the Chinese government, which some critics compare with authoritarian rule.
“I got along very well with President Xi. He’s a great guy. He wrote me a beautiful note the other day when he heard about what happened,” Trump said after the assassination attempt on him in July. “It’s a good thing to get along, not a bad thing.”
Goodbye to Biden
Xi and Biden have had their own rocky history, with incidents like the 2023 downing of an alleged Chinese “spy” balloon fuelling spikes in tensions.
China maintained that the balloon was a civilian aircraft collecting weather data, and it denounced the US’s decision to shoot it down with a missile after it passed over sensitive US military installations.
Biden, who turns 82 on Wednesday, exchanged some banter with his Chinese counterpart as they spoke to reporters in their final meeting.
“Can you put on your earpiece? We have simultaneous interpreting,” Xi asked Biden at their afternoon news conference.
Biden responded with a joke. “I’ve learned to speak Chinese,” he said with a chuckle.
The US president continued by acknowledging that relations have not always been smooth between their two countries.
“We haven’t always agreed, but our conversations have always been candid and always been frank. We have never kidded one another. We’ve been level with one another. And I think that’s vital,” Biden said, pointing across the table as he read from prepared remarks.
“These conversations prevent miscalculations, and they ensure the competition between our two countries will not veer into conflict.”
He used his final encounter as president with Xi to push several US priorities. In a readout released by the White House, Biden reportedly pushed for greater law enforcement cooperation to stem the flow of synthetic drugs to the US.
He and Xi also spoke about the emerging challenges posed by artificial intelligence (AI), including with regards to its use with nuclear weapons.
“The two leaders affirmed the need to maintain human control over the decision to use nuclear weapons,” the readout explained.
“The two leaders also stressed the need to consider carefully the potential risks and develop AI technology in the military field in a prudent and responsible manner.”
Biden also confirmed that the US’s “one China policy” remained “unchanged”: The US acknowledges the government in Beijing as the sole government of China. It does not have formal diplomatic relations with the self-governing island of Taiwan, which China considers its territory.
China has called acknowledging Taiwan’s sovereignty a “red line” in its relationship with the US.
While Biden has previously pledged to protect Taiwan should it ever face attack, on Saturday, he struck a note of peace, calling for a continuation of the status quo.
“He reiterated that the United States opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side, that we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means, and that the world has an interest in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” the White House readout said.
But, it added, Biden also “called for an end to destabilizing PRC [People’s Republic of China] military activity around Taiwan”.

World
Zelenskiy, NATO boss and European leaders discuss Ukraine security guarantees

World
Hamas' Gaza death toll questioned as new report says its led to 'widespread inaccuracies and distortion'

A new report cites a laundry list of alleged errors in the casualty tallies that the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health has issued during the conflict in Gaza, and found that worldwide media widely report the inflated numbers with little or no scrutiny.
The Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a U.K. based think tank, found “widespread inaccuracies and distortion in the data collection process” for the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) which has resulted in a “misleading picture of the conflict.” The study also analyzed how journalists worldwide have spread misleading MoH data without noting its shortcomings or offering alternative information from Israeli sources.
The report’s author, Andrew Fox, a fellow at HJS said his team’s research is based on lists of casualty figures that the MoH has released through Telegram as well as lists released by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Fox said he and his team have been able to examine segments of the reporting, despite changeable MoH data being “really hard to interrogate.”
On Tuesday, Gaza health authorities updated its number of dead to what it said was more than 45,000.
ISRAEL TO CLOSE EMBASSY IN IRELAND OVER ‘ANTI-ISRAEL POLICIES’
A man walks past shelter tents erected near collapsed buildings in the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on Oct. 1, 2024. (Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images)
The report said the ministry’s reporting long indicated that women and children made up more than half of the war dead, leading to accusations that Israel intentionally kills civilians in Gaza.
“If Israel was killing indiscriminately, you would expect deaths to roughly match the demographic proportions pre-war,” Fox said. At the time, adult men made up around 26% of the Gazan population. “The number of adult males that have died is vastly in excess of 26%,” he said.
Within accessible reporting, Fox and his team also found instances of casualty entries being recorded improperly, “artificially increas[ing] the numbers of women and children who are reported as killed.” This has included people with male names being listed as females, and grown adults being recorded as young children.

A terrorist from Hamas takes part in a military parade. (Reuters/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/File Photo)
Analyzing data by category has further highlighted biases within reporting. There are three kinds of entries within MoH’s casualty figures: entries collected by hospitals prior to the breakdown of networks in November 2023, entries submitted by family members of the deceased, and entries collected through “media sources,” whose veracity researchers like Dr. David Adesnik, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, has previously questioned.
Analysis of gender breakdowns among these groupings shows that hospital records “are distorted,” with a higher percentage of women and children among hospital-reported casualties than in those reported by family members.
UN ACCUSED OF DOWNPLAYING HAMAS TERRORISTS’ USE OF GAZA HOSPITALS AS NEW REPORT IGNORES IMPORTANT DETAILS

Kamal Adwan hospital’s health team evacuate Palestinian patients after Israeli airstrikes damaged the hospital in Gaza Strip on May 21, 2024. (Karam Hassan/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Though around 5,000 natural deaths typically occur in Gaza each year, the study found that MoH casualty figures do not account for natural deaths. It claims that it also fails to exclude deaths unassociated with Israeli military action from its count. This includes individuals believed to have been killed by Hamas, like 13-year-old Ahmed Shaddad Halmy Brikeh, who appears on a casualty list from August despite reports indicating he had “been shot dead by Hamas” while trying to get food from an aid shipment in December 2023. The list also excludes individuals killed by Hamas’ rockets, about 1,750 of which “fell short within the Gaza strip” between October 2023 and July 2024.
Fox and his team also found individuals who died before the conflict began had been added to MoH casualty counts. In addition, at least three cancer patients whose names were included in lists to leave the Gaza Strip for treatment in April had been listed as dead during the month of March.
RETURN OF TRUMP GIVES FAMILIES OF GAZA HOSTAGES NEW HOPE

Ambulances carrying victims of Israeli strikes crowd the entrance to the emergency ward of the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 15, 2023. (Dawood Nemer/AFP via Getty Images)
The ministry does not separate combatants and civilians in its casualty figures. Though the study states that Israeli forces have killed around 17,000 Hamas terrorists, Fox said that his research indicated the death toll may include as many as 22,000 members of Hamas. He said his research supports the fact that around 15,000 of the dead in Gaza are women and children, and 7,500 are non-combatant adult males.
“Collecting these sorts of lists in a war zone is a hugely challenging thing,” Fox admitted, but he stated that the MoH’s mistakes, whether innocent or deliberate, show that the institution is “really unreliable.”
Despite this unreliability, the Henry Jackson Society’s survey of reporting of the conflict found that 98% of media organizations it looked at utilized fatality data from MoH versus 5% who cited Israeli figures. Fox found that “fewer than one in every 50 articles [about the conflict] mentioned that the figures provided by the MoH were unverifiable or controversial,” though “Israeli statistics had their credibility questioned in half of the few articles that incorporated them.”

Smoke rises near the al-Wafa hospital from Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Oct. 24, 2023. (Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)
As an illustration of the phenomenon witnessed in the survey, Fox pointed out what he called an “incredibly biased” article from a British broadcaster that recently emerged citing MoH data claiming that there have been more than 45,000 deaths in Gaza. Though its report mentions MoH data, it does not break down the numbers of combatants and civilians, and does not mention the questionable veracity of MoH reporting. Instead, it parrots MoH claims, reporting that women and children make up for over half of the fatalities.
“It’s just a great example of everything we’ve written in the report,” Fox said.
World
Arson at karaoke bar in Vietnam’s Hanoi kills 11, police say

Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security says suspected perpetrator confessed to starting blaze after dispute with staff.
A suspected arson attack at a cafe and karaoke bar in Vietnam’s Hanoi has killed 11 people and injured two others, police have said.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security said on Thursday that it had arrested a man who confessed to starting the blaze on the ground floor of the building following a dispute with staff.
Rescue workers who rushed to the scene brought seven people out of the building alive, two of whom were rushed to hospital, police said.
Footage that circulated on social media showed a multistorey building engulfed in flames as firefighters worked at the scene while surrounded by a crowd of onlookers.
“At that time, we saw many people screaming for help but could not approach because the fire spread very quickly, and even with a ladder, we could not climb up,” the Lao Dong newspaper quoted a witness as saying.
The Tien Phong newspaper quoted a witness as saying there was a strong smell of petrol at the scene.
“Everyone shouted for those inside to run outside, but no one called for help,” the witness said.
CCTV footage published by the VnExpress news site appeared to show a man carrying a bucket towards the cafe seconds before the blaze began shortly after 11pm (16:00 GMT) on Wednesday.
Fires are a common hazard in Vietnam’s tightly packed urban centres.
Between 2017 and 2022, 433 people were killed in some 17,000 house fires in the country, most of them in urban areas, according to the Ministry of Public Security.
In September last year, 56 people, including four children, were killed and dozens injured in a fire at an apartment block in Hanoi.
This October, a court in southern Binh Duong province jailed six people, including four police officers, over safety lapses related to a fire at a karaoke complex that killed 32 people in 2022.
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