Category World News

China has urged its citizens to avoid travelling to Japan, as a diplomatic dispute deepens over threats by new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on the possibility of deploying forces in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

The tension erupted after Takaichi told the Japanese parliament on November 7 that use of force against the self-ruled island claimed by China could warrant a military response from Tokyo.

Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its territory, denounced the remarks as a provocation. On Friday, Beijing said it had summoned Japan’s ambassador.

Tokyo in turn summoned China’s ambassador after an “inappropriate” and now-removed social media post by a Chinese consul general in Osaka appeared to threaten Takaichi.

Tokyo has since said its position on Taiwan, just 110km (70 miles) from the nearest Japanese island, is unchanged.

In an online post late on Friday, China’s embassy in Japan warned its citizens against travelling to the country.

“Recently, Japanese leaders have made blatantly provocative remarks regarding Taiwan, severely damaging the atmosphere for people-to-people exchanges,” the WeChat post said.

The situation presents “significant risks to the personal safety and lives of Chinese citizens in Japan”, it added.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese embassy and consulates in Japan solemnly remind Chinese citizens to avoid travelling to Japan in the near future,” the post said.

Reacting to the statement, Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara told reporters on Saturday that Beijing’s call was “inconsistent with the promotion of a strategic and mutually beneficial relationship”, Jiji Press reported.

The Japanese government has requested the Chinese side to take “appropriate measures”, Jiji said.

In a further development on Saturday, China’s largest airlines offered full refunds for flights on Japan routes before the end of the year.

Air China, China Southern and China Eastern all published separate statements on the policies, which will allow ticket holders to refund or change Japan itineraries free of charge for flights from Saturday through December 31.

Beijing insists Taiwan, which Japan occupied for decades until 1945, is part of its territory and has not ruled out the use of force to seize control.

China and Japan are key trading partners, but historical mistrust and friction over territorial rivalries and military spending often test those ties.

Japanese leaders have previously avoided publicly mentioning Taiwan when discussing such scenarios, maintaining a “strategic ambiguity” also favoured by Tokyo’s main security ally, the United States.

A spokesperson for Taiwan’s Presidential Office, Karen Kuo, said Chinese travel restrictions on Japan and live-fire drills in surrounding areas have drawn attention to regional developments. She said Beijing’s “politically motivated, multifaceted threats against Japan pose a grave danger to security and stability in the Indo-Pacific”.

United States President Donald Trump says he would likely sue the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) next week for as much as $5bn after the British broadcaster admitted it wrongly edited a video of a speech he gave, but insisted there was no legal basis for his claim.

“We will sue them for anywhere between a billion and five billion dollars, probably sometime next week. I think I have to do it. They have even admitted that they cheated,” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One late on Friday.

Trump’s lawyers had sent the BBC a letter on Monday, accusing it of defaming the US president with the video of the speech before the 2021 US Capitol riot and giving it until Friday to apologise and pay compensation for what they described as “overwhelming reputational and financial harm”.

The controversy centres on the BBC’s edit of Trump’s remarks from January 6, 2021, the day his supporters stormed the US Capitol. The dispute has pushed the network into its most severe crisis in decades, triggering the resignations of two senior leaders and prompting a wave of political scrutiny.

“The people of the UK are very angry about what happened, as you can imagine, because it shows the BBC is fake news,” Trump said.

He added that he planned to raise the BBC issue with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has backed the broadcaster’s independence while avoiding taking sides against Trump.

“I’m going to call him over the weekend. He actually put a call into me. He’s very embarrassed,” Trump said.

‘Beyond fake, this is corrupt’

The documentary, aired on the BBC’s flagship Panorama programme, stitched together three separate clips of Trump’s January 6 speech. His lawyers say the sequence created the false impression he was inciting the riot, calling the edit “false and defamatory”.

In an interview with GB News, Trump accused the BBC of misconduct. He said the edit was “impossible to believe” and likened it to election interference.

“I made a beautiful statement, and they made it into a not beautiful statement,” he said. “Fake news was a great term, except it’s not strong enough. This is beyond fake, this is corrupt.”

He dismissed the BBC’s apology as insufficient, arguing that the broadcaster had spliced together remarks that were nearly an hour apart. “It’s incredible to depict the idea that I had given this aggressive speech which led to riots,” he said.

BBC chair Samir Shah issued a personal apology to the White House and told British lawmakers that the edit was “an error of judgement”. Culture Minister Lisa Nandy said on Friday the apology was “right and necessary”.

The United Nations Security Council has voted to renew a UN Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA), the peacekeeping mission in the oil-rich disputed region between Sudan and South Sudan, for another year.

A 12-0 vote late on Friday, which saw Russia, China and Pakistan abstain, extended the mission until November 2026, but warned that progress on ending bloody fighting in the region would be crucial to any potential future extensions.

The United States submitted the draft resolution that renewed the mandate, which was due to expire on November 15, and said it “negotiated this draft in good faith, asking only for reasonable and common-sense benchmarks for this mission”.

Friday’s resolution stated that further renewal would be based on “demonstrable progress” by Sudan and South Sudan, including the creation of a joint police force for Abyei and the complete demilitarisation of the region, as agreed upon by the two sides in 2011 when South Sudan gained independence.

The 4,000 police and soldiers of UNISFA are tasked with protecting civilians in the region plagued by frequent armed clashes.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is now tasked with presenting a report by August 2026 on whether Sudan and South Sudan have made any tangible progress, which would also enable the Security Council to assess the consequences of reducing the peacekeeping force.

“These benchmarks will help describe the mission’s impact and provide a critical tool to hold host governments accountable for measurable progress,” said US representative Dorothy Shea.

UNISFA is a small but politically sensitive mission, operating in a region where clashes have displaced thousands and humanitarian access has often been constrained by a lack of security and dangerous road conditions.

Unrest in the disputed area with South Sudan also continues at a time when Sudan is devastated by a civil war that erupted in April 2023, when two generals started fighting over control of the country.

Mali’s media regulator has suspended French broadcasters LCI and TF1 over allegedly broadcasting false information on a fuel blockade imposed by an al-Qaeda linked armed group.

TF1 is a French commercial television station that broadcasts in several countries, and LCI, La Chaine Info, is a French free-to-air news channel that is also part of the TF1 group.

Mali’s High Authority for Communication (HAC) said in a letter to image distributors in Mali, dated November 13 and made public on Friday, that it had suspended TF1 and LCI, claiming the two private TV channels had made “unverified claims and falsehoods” in a broadcast on November 9.

“LCI and TF1 television services have been removed from your packages until further notice,” the document read.

The letter said the authority disputed three passages in broadcasts by the two channels, specifically that “the junta has banned the sale of fuel,” “[the regions of] Kayes and Nioro are completely under blockade,” and “the terrorists are now close to bringing down the capital [Bamako].”

The channels have not been accessible in Mali since Thursday evening, a journalist for the AFP news agency reported.

Since September, the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) group, linked to al-Qaeda and primarily operating in Mali, has imposed a blockade on fuel entering the landlocked country, by sealing off major highways used by tankers to transport fuel from neighbouring Senegal and the Ivory Coast.

In recent weeks, fuel shortages caused by the blockade have created long lines at gas stations and further deteriorated the security situation in the country.

Several Western embassies, notably those of the United States and France, have asked their citizens to leave Mali.

Mali, alongside its neighbours Niger and Burkina Faso, is governed by military leaders who took power by force in recent years, pledging to provide more security to citizens.

But the security situation in the Sahel has worsened since the militaries took power, analysts say, with a record number of attacks and civilians killed both by armed groups and government forces.

All three countries have withdrawn from regional and international organisations in recent months, while forming their own bloc known as the Alliance of Sahel States.

The three West African countries have also wound back defence cooperation with Western powers, most notably their former colonial ruler, France, in favour of closer ties with Russia, including Niger nationalising a uranium mine previously operated by French nuclear firm Orano.

Within the three countries, the military governments are fighting armed groups that control swaths of territory and have staged attacks on army posts.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced a $4.3bn deal to buy Swedish warplanes at a time when his country is locked in tension with the United States.

Speaking on Friday, Petro confirmed an agreement was reached with Sweden’s Saab aircraft manufacturer to buy 17 Gripen fighter jets, giving the first confirmation of the size and cost of the military acquisition that was initially announced in April.

“This is a deterrent weapon to achieve peace,” Petro said in a post on social media.

The purchase of warplanes comes as Colombia and much of remaining Latin America are on edge due to a US military build-up in the region, and as US forces carry out a campaign of deadly attacks on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

Washington claims – but has provided no evidence – that it has targeted drug smuggling vessels in its 20 confirmed attacks that have killed about 80 people so far in international waters.

Latin American leaders, legal scholars and rights groups have accused the US of carrying out extrajudicial killings of people who should face the courts if suspected of breaking laws related to drug smuggling.

US President Donald Trump has also accused both Petro and his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolas Maduro, of being involved in the regional drug trade, a claim that both leaders have strenuously denied.

Petro said the new warplanes will be used to dissuade “aggression against Colombia, wherever it may come from”.

“In a world that is geopolitically messy,” he said, such aggression “can come from anywhere”.

The Colombian leader has for weeks traded insults with Donald Trump and said the ultimate goal of the US deployment in the region is to seize Venezuela’s oil wealth and destabilise Latin America.

Trump has long accused Venezuela’s Maduro of trafficking drugs and more recently branded Petro “an illegal drug leader” because of Colombia’s high level of cocaine production. Trump has also withdrawn US financial aid from Colombia and taken it off its list of countries seen as allies in fighting drug trafficking internationally.

Amid the war of words rumbling on between Washington and Bogota, Petro said last week that Colombia would suspend intelligence sharing with the US on combating drug trafficking, but officials in his government quickly rolled back that threat.

The AFP news agency reports that US and French firms had also tried to sell warplanes to Colombia, but, in the end, Bogota went with Sweden’s Saab.

Swedish Defence Minister Pal Jonson said Colombia was joining Sweden, Brazil and Thailand in choosing the Gripen fighter jet, and defence relations between Bogota and Stockholm would “deepen significantly” as a result.

🇸🇪🇨🇴I’m proud that Colombia today joins the Gripen E family, alongside Sweden, Brazil and Thailand. With the Colombian purchase of 17 Gripen E/F, our defence relations will deepen significantly & Colombia will receive one of the world’s greatest fighter jets. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/g0rESq69nD