HONG KONG — Apple said it had removed Meta’s WhatsApp messaging app and its Threads social media app from the App Store in China to comply with orders from Chinese authorities.

The apps were removed from the store Friday after Chinese officials cited unspecified national security concerns.

Their removal comes amid elevated tensions between the U.S. and China over trade, technology and national security.

The U.S. has threatened to ban TikTok over national security concerns. But while TikTok, owned by Chinese technology firm ByteDance, is used by millions in the U.S., apps like WhatsApp and Threads are not commonly used in China.

Instead, the messaging app WeChat, owned by Chinese company Tencent, reigns supreme.

Other Meta apps, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger remained available for download, although use of such foreign apps is blocked in China due to its “Great Firewall” network of filters that restrict use of foreign websites such as Google and Facebook.

“The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns,” Apple said in a statement.

“We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree,” Apple said.

A spokesperson for Meta referred to “Apple for comment.”

Apple, previously the world’s top smartphone maker, recently lost the top spot to Korean rival Samsung Electronics. The U.S. firm has run into headwinds in China, one of its top three markets, with sales slumping after Chinese government agencies and employees of state-owned companies were ordered not to bring Apple devices to work.

Apple has been diversifying its manufacturing bases outside China.

Its CEO Tim Cook has been visiting Southeast Asia this week, traveling to Hanoi and Jakarta before wrapping up his travels in Singapore. On Friday he met with Singapore’s deputy prime minister, Lawrence Wong, where they “discussed the partnership between Singapore and Apple, and Apple’s continued commitment to doing business in Singapore.”

Apple pledged to invest over $250 million to expand its campus in the city-state.

Earlier this week, Cook met with Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh in Hanoi, pledging to increase spending on Vietnamese suppliers.

He also met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Cook later told reporters that they talked about Widodo’s desire to promote manufacturing in Indonesia, and said that this was something that Apple would “look at.”
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Sydney — Australian researchers have built an electrical generator that consumes carbon dioxide, generates electricity and admits no exhausts.  They say the technology could create a new industrial-scale carbon capture method.  

Scientists say too much carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the atmosphere is main driver of warming temperatures.  

Researchers at the University of Queensland have created a generator that consumes carbon dioxide and produces electricity.

The carbon-negative “nano-generator” has been built by the university’s Dow Centre for Sustainable Engineering Innovation.

The prototype device uses what is known as a poly amine gel to absorb carbon dioxide to create an electrical current.  

The design team acknowledges the technology needs further development and refinement but believes it could help to significantly curb global CO2 emissions.

Zhuyuan Wang from the University of Queensland told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. the concept has great potential.  

“We actually just finished the proof of concept that proves this can work but the current power density and efficiency is not high enough to compete with other energy sources, like solar panel[s], like the wind turbine,” he said.

The Queensland researchers hope their prototype could have industrial applications to help, for example, power plants reduce their emissions, as well as smaller units for use at home.

Carbon capture and storage techniques are used by the oil and gas sector to try to offset its emissions of greenhouse gases. Current methods involve harnessing CO2 produced by power companies, for example, and then burying it deep underground where it becomes trapped in rock formations. There are several large-scale CO2 burial sites in the United States.

However, the Climate Council, an Australian advocacy organization, claims that carbon capture and storage technology “has not been trialled and tested – anywhere in the world – at the scale required to tackle the climate crisis.” 

Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation, states that “emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels make the largest contribution to climate change.” 

Australia is the world’s 14th highest emitter, contributing just over 1% of global emissions.  It has, however, some of the world’s highest per capita emissions.  Coal and gas generate much of Australia’s electricity, but solar and wind are leading an energy transformation. 

The Climate Council states that almost a third of Australia’s energy is renewable and will soon reach 50%.
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Tokyo — Two Japanese navy helicopters carrying eight crewmembers were believed to have crashed in the Pacific Ocean south of Tokyo during a night-time training exercise, and rescuers were searching for the missing, Japan’s defense minister said.

The two SH-60K choppers belonging to the Maritime Self Defense Force and carrying four crew each, lost contact late Saturday near Torishima island in the Pacific about 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of Tokyo, Defense Minister Minoru Kihara told reporters.

One of the eight crewmembers was recovered from the waters, but his or her condition was unknown. Officials were still searching for the other seven.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, Kihara said, adding that officials are prioritizing the rescue operation.

The MSDF deployed eight warships and five aircraft for the search and rescue of the missing crew. They recovered fragments believed to be from one of the SH-60Ks, Kihara said.

“We believe the helicopters have crashed,” he said.

The helicopters, twin-engine, multi-mission aircraft designed by Sikorsky and known as Seahawk, were on night-time anti-submarine training in the waters, Kihara said. One lost contact at 10:38 p.m. (1338 GMT) after sending an emergency signal. The other aircraft lost contact about 25 minutes later. One belonged to an air base in Nagasaki, and the other at a base in Tokushima prefecture.

The SH-60K aircraft is usually deployed on destroyers for anti-submarine missions.

Saturday’s training only involved the Japanese navy and was not part of a multinational exercise, defense officials said. They said no foreign aircraft or warships were spotted in the area.

Japan, under its 2022 security strategy, has been accelerating its military buildup and fortifying deterrence in the southwestern Japanese islands in the Pacific and East China Sea to counter threats from China’s increasingly assertive military activities. Japan in recent years has extensively conducted its own naval exercises as well as joint drills with its ally the United States and other partners.

Saturday’s apparent crash comes a year after a Ground Self-Defense Force UH-60 Blackhawk crashed off the southwestern Japanese island of Miyako, leaving all 10 crewmembers dead. In January 2022, an Air Self-Defense F-15 fighter jet crashed off the northcentral coast of Japan, killing two crew.

Japan’s NHK public television said no weather advisories were issued in the area at the time of Saturday’s crash.
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BANGKOK — About 1,300 people have fled from eastern Myanmar into Thailand, officials said Saturday, as fresh fighting erupted at a border town that has recently been captured by ethnic guerillas.

Fighters from the Karen ethnic minority last week captured the last of the Myanmar army’s outposts in and around Myawaddy, which is connected to Thailand by two bridges across the Moei River.

The latest clashes were triggered in the morning when the Karen guerillas launched an attack against Myanmar troops who were hiding near the 2nd Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge, a major crossing point for trade with Thailand, said police chief Pittayakorn Phetcharat in Thailand’s Mae Sot district. He estimated about 1,300 people fled into Thailand.

Thai officials reported people had started crossing since Friday following clashes in several areas of Myawaddy.

The fall of Myawaddy is a major setback for the military that seized power from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021. Myanmar’s once-mighty armed forces have suffered a series of unprecedented defeats since last October, losing swathes of territory including border posts to both ethnic fighters, who have been fighting for greater autonomy for decades, and pro-democracy guerrilla units that took up arms after the military takeover.

The clashes, involving drone attacks from the Karen forces and airstrikes by the Myanmar military, had subsided by noon Saturday compared to the morning, but Mae Sot police chief Pittayakorn Phetcharat said he could still hear sporadic gunshots. He said Thai authorities would move people fleeing into a safer area.

Footage from the Thai border showed Thai soldiers maintaining guard near the bridge with sounds of explosions and gunshots in the background. People with children waded across the river with their belongings and were received by Thai officials on the riverbank. Several are seen taking shelter in buildings along the riverbank on the Myanmar side.

Thailand’s Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin wrote on the social media platform X on Saturday that he was closely monitoring the situation at the border.

“I do not desire to see any such clashes have any impact on the territorial integrity of Thailand and we are ready to protect our borders and the safety of our people. At the same time, we are also ready to provide humanitarian assistance, if necessary,” he wrote.

In March, Thailand delivered its first batch of humanitarian assistance to Myanmar for about 20,000 displaced people.

Nikorndej Balangura, a spokesman of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, told reporters on Friday that Thailand is currently working to expand its aid initiative.
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BANGKOK — As rebel forces across Myanmar continue making major gains against the country’s military regime on the battlefield, resistance groups are working behind the scenes to plan for the government they want to take the junta’s place.

It is not clear that the effort will succeed, and if it does not, some analysts fear a political vacuum if the junta-led government should fall.

At a so-called People’s Assembly in January 2022, nearly a year after the military seized power, upwards of two dozen resistance groups endorsed a two-part charter laying out their vision for a new order that would loosely bind Myanmar’s states together as a democratic and federal — or “union” — government.  

Since then, though, they have been struggling to agree on just what a federal union should look like and how to build it, analysts following the talks tell VOA. 

“What has propelled them thus far is this least common denominator that everyone buys into: a federal democratic system,” Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington told VOA in recent days. 

“But once you actually get down to brass tacks and try to define what that is, everyone all of a sudden gets cold feet and doesn’t want to attach their names. I think everyone is still kind of waiting this out, seeing what else they can get,” he said.

Some of Myanmar’s states are home to large ethnic minority populations, which together account for roughly a third of the country’s 54 million people. Rebel armies among the minorities, dubbed ethnic armed organizations, or EAOs, have been fighting Myanmar’s ethnic Burman-dominated military for control of parts of those states for decades. They have been demanding a federal union that gives their states more autonomy for just as long.

The new charter is a bid to answer their call, but it remains vague on how the federal and state governments would share power in a new Myanmar.

The charter calls the states “the original owners of sovereignty” and says the union “shall consist of member states which have full rights to democracy, equality and self-determination.” It adds that the specific powers of the union and of the states “shall be determined,” without elaborating. 

Where the power lies

Among the EAOs, debate over the charter has mostly focused on how much power each state may want to grant the union or keep for itself, said Ying Lao of the Salween Institute for Public Policy, a Myanmar think tank.

Another key player in the talks is the so-called National Unity Government, an alliance of civilian resistance groups including some of the mostly Burman lawmakers ousted by the 2021 coup. Disputes over the charter between the EAOs and NUG are deeper and “ideological,” Ying Lao said, about where political power in Myanmar actually lies.

As the EAOs see it, she said, that power rests with the states, and the union “has only the powers that they are willing to share with the union. That’s the kind of federalism they are looking for. But for the Bamar [Burman] political elite, they claim that sovereignty rests with the country, which is the union of Burma, and that the states have the powers that the union is willing to share with them.”

That dispute is echoed in the concerns some groups have with the charter’s second half, or Part 2, which lays out a rough roadmap for shifting to the full-fledged federal union envisioned in Part 1. It says the lawmakers ousted by the coup would serve as an interim legislature and sets no time limit. 

Analysts tell VOA that minority groups say that hews too closely to the centralized, Burman-dominated government they have been struggling for decades to replace. When it came time to endorse that part of the charter at the 2022 People’s Congress, they said, some of the groups that endorsed Part 1 abstained.

In the final days of a second People’s Congress held earlier this month for resistance groups to keep planning for a future government, the NUG and ousted lawmakers pulled out. They claimed the event had gotten out of hand and that the issues some of the groups were raising were out of bounds.

The NUG includes ethnic minority officers and takes pains to stress its inclusive credentials. Ying Lao said its actions, however, are reinforcing the impression among some that Burman elites still dominate.

Many minority groups feel a faction of the NUG “still has this Burma-centric, or what they call a chauvinistic mindset,” Kim Jolliffe, an independent Myanmar analyst and researcher, told VOA.

“They support the [charter], but they don’t fully have trust in the process, that it’s really going to be implemented,” he said.

Less talk, more action

Many of Myanmar’s EAOs, including a few of the most powerful, are not even taking part in the charter talks, or are doing so only at arm’s length.

Some are not waiting for the details to be worked out either, and they have started building whole new governments on their own in their home states.

Armed and civilian ethnic Karenni groups in Kayah state were the first to declare an interim government replacing the military regime across their state in June. The Arakan Army EAO has been building its own government as well across the parts of Rakhine state it has battled to reclaim from the junta. Resistance groups elsewhere are following suit.

“A lot of the [EAOs], they’re saying now, we’re not going to get bound up in any more debates about the [charter], we’re just going to build our states, and we’re going to come together and then we’ll decide what needs to be shared as a union of equals,” Jolliffe said.

Working out the details “is going to be very messy,” Abuza said. He noted he also worries that both the EAOs and NUG, which has its own network of militias fighting the Myanmar military across the country, will want to concede less politically as they gain ground against the junta on the battlefield.

The junta may still be far from defeat. It continues to hold Naypyitaw, the capital, and main cities, and has the edge in funds and firepower. But the military is widely loathed and overstretched and has now lost control of most of Myanmar’s borders.

Should the junta lose or collapse before the EAOs and NUG work out their political differences, analysts like Abuza and Jolliffe say they worry about a federal power vacuum and the problems that could cause.

Ying Lao is more sanguine. She says Myanmar has “never really existed” as a functioning union with a central government that meets the needs of its states, and it could continue to muddle along without one.

“Not getting that functioning federal union anytime soon, for the people on the ground, the situation will only get worse and worse. But whether this country will remain intact, I’m sure it will,” she said. “But no one will have any real power in the country. … It’s going to be chaotic, for sure.”

Ingyin Naing in Washington contributed to this report.
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Osaka, Japan — Wider access to abortion in Japan has largely remained elusive a year after the historic approval of medical abortion pills.

In April last year, lawmakers approved the use of the two-step abortion pill — MeFeego Pack — for pregnancies up to nine weeks. Before that, women in the East Asian nation could only receive a surgical abortion in private clinics by designated surgeons that often charge as much as $370.

Financial strain aside, women were often required to provide proof of spousal consent to receive an abortion, making it nearly impossible for them to make the decision on their own. Reports showed that even for single women, doctors still asked for permission of a male partner before agreeing to perform such surgeries.

Despite the approval of the abortion pill, only 3% of all clinics with abortion services in Japan provide them a year after the pill’s approval, according to Kumi Tsukahara, independent researcher of reproductive health and rights, “and none of them have a Maternal Body Protection Law (MBPL) designated doctor,” Tsukahara told VOA News.

Under the MBPL, the controversial requirement for spousal consent before a doctor can prescribe oral abortion medication still exists — it’s the same condition for gaining permission for a surgical abortion.

“Unfortunately, there are no signs of change with regard to either,” the expert said.

In contrast to countries with better abortion access, Japan’s approved abortion pills cannot be administered more than once — sometimes, multiple tries are necessary — and the pregnant women will still need to resort to surgical abortion that involves a serious risk to their health.

Since such surgeries are only allowed in private clinics and are considered profitable by designated doctors, they often charge the same price or higher for abortion pills as for a surgical abortion. Neither measure is covered by Japan’s national health system.

“The high prices and low affordability depending on individual doctors, the inaccurate information given by doctors who cannot use drugs to guide people to conventional surgical procedures, the unjust situation and the state’s failure to respond, and the women are disempowered to have a sense of entitlement on their part,” Tsukahara explained.

Abortion rights activist Kazuko Fukuda, who spearheads a grassroots movement to push for women’s rights to end pregnancies in Japan, echoed the sentiment.

“The abortion rights [in Japan] didn’t improve,” Fukuda told VOA News. “Of course, this [approval of oral abortion] was better than nothing, but conservative politicians went against such pills before the approval. … It’s mandated that women have to stay in hospitals that provide beds until the end of the abortion, but designated private clinics don’t usually have beds.”

Women in Japan are banned from taking abortion pills at home. They must be in hospitals and take the pills in front of the doctors as authorities fear that they might resell them. If violated, these women can be subject to imprisonment for up to a year.

Male-dominated political scene

Abortion is still a big taboo in politics, and real rights improvement will go a long way, Fukuda added.

“News of women being arrested for giving birth alone and abandoning them is still very common — we hear that just a few days ago. … The government should repeal the criminalization of abortion. [Things don’t work] as doctors are still afraid of being sued so they require signatures from boyfriends to prescribe abortion pills.”

Last year, Japan started a study, selling morning-after pills over the counter without prescription. However, the study suffers limited availability in many cities. Girls under 15 are not allowed to purchase them, and those ages 16 to 18 must be accompanied by a parent to buy the pills.

Both experts VOA spoke with say that the information and availability of these contraceptive pills doesn’t appear high in online searches — the usual method for the targeted group to look for contraception.

Japan ranked among the lowest of developed countries in a March report this year by the World Bank in terms of women’s rights.

Currently, women account for less than 10% in Japan’s lower house of parliament and 27% in the upper house. In local politics, only 15% of women are on the front line. The gender pay gap in Japan reached 40%, according to a report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Women’s issues like abortion access or contraceptive measures are often not viewed as priorities for female politicians.

“In the male-dominated politics, a lot of women have to become more conservative and look strong to be accepted so it’s really hard for women to liberal or supportive in this kind of thing [abortion and contraception in the parliament],” Fukuda said.

Women blamed for low fertility rate

Social stigma connected to abortion remains strong as Japan blames women for its low fertility rate. The country hit a record low number of births last year.

“The Japanese government has attributed the ‘decreasing number [fertility rate] to ‘women who don’t give birth,’ women are made to feel socially guilty for trying to choose not to give birth. Of course, such an issue construction is itself highly biased and misogynistic,” said researcher Tsukahara.

Fukuda said that the government’s support of favorable reproductive policies stops with women who don’t want babies.

“Anything against that [wanting babies] is not supported at all. Many people think that ‘contraception’ is a taboo and even taking [morning after] pills can expose to judgment as a promiscuous woman. It’s not easy for women to talk about it.”
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