Tag: InternationalNews

{Suicide bomber targets main judicial building in the capital’s centre, with a second blast reported in the Rabweh area.}

Two suicide bombings hit the Syrian capital of Damascus on Wednesday, killing dozens as the country’s war entered its seventh year.

A suicide bomber detonated his explosive vest in the capital’s main judicial building early in the afternoon, killing at least 31 people and wounding 102 others, Syria’s state news agency SANA reported.

A second attacker detonated himself at a restaurant in the Rabweh area of Damascus, according to SANA, wounding at least 28 people.

Al Jazeera’s Natasha Ghoneim, reporting from the Turkish city of Gaziantep along the Syrian border, said the suicide bomber in the first blast reportedly detonated himself after he was stopped by security at the gate of the court.

“The attack happened during a peak time to inflict the maximum number of casualties,” she said.

There was no immediate claim for the bombing, which came as the country’s civil war entered its seventh year.

The attack on capital’s Palace of Justice, located near the famous and crowded Hamidiyeh market in Damascus, was the latest in a spate of explosions and suicide attacks targeting government-controlled areas in Syria and its capital.

Attackers have also twice struck the government-held city of Homs in the past few weeks

Analysts who follow Syria have predicted that as rebels fighting to oust President Bashar al-Assad suffer military setbacks, they will increasingly turn to guerrilla attacks in territory controlled by the government.

Damascus police chief Mohammad Kheir Ismail told state TV that a man wearing a military uniform and carrying a shotgun and grenades arrived to entrance of the palace in the early afternoon.

The guards stopped the man, took away his arms and asked to search him. At that point, the man hurled himself inside the building and detonated his explosives, the chief said.

Ahmad al-Sayed, Syria’s attorney general, confirmed that account to state TV, saying when the security guards tried to arrest the man, he threw himself inside the palace and blew himself up.

“This is a dirty action as people who enter the palace are innocent,” he said, noting that the timing of the explosion was planned to kill the largest number of lawyers, judges and other people who were there at the time.

Ambulances rushed to the scene to transfer casualties to hospital.

The blast followed twin attacks on Saturday targeting Shia holy sites in the capital’s Old City that killed at least 40 people in Damascus, an attack claimed by a hardline coaltion known as Tahrir al-Sham, which includes groups with links to al-Qaeda.

But in a statement put out shortly after the bombings, Tahrir al-Sham denied involvement in Wednesday’s attacks, and emphasised that its “objectives are limited to security branches and military barracks of the criminal regime and its allies”.

Esewhere in Syria, air raids in the rebel-held city of Idlib killed at least 21 civilians, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The Syrian Civil Defence, a rescue group also known as the White Helmets that operates in opposition territory, put the death toll from the pre-dawn bombing at 22, and said that 15 children were among the dead.

Source:BBC

A total of 1800 stakeholders in governance, Peace Forum came together yesterday for the 1st Annual Commemoration of the DPCW in Seoul, South Korea organized by Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light (HWPL), an international peace organization under the UN Department of Public Information (DPI).

In commemoration of the DPCW proclaimed on the same date in 2016, the forum reaffirmed the importance of global peace movement currently on progress under the Legislate Peace Campaign to establish the principle of international law for peace through the introduction of a UN resolution based on the DPCW.

Chairman Man Hee Lee of HWPL emphasized that peacebuilding “is not an individual task”, but “is relevant to everyone” as a common purpose of the global community. He offered the role of religion as a bridgebuilder of peace rather than the core of conflict and violence by adding “our orientations must be one for peace. Whether religious secular world it is, there is no exception.”

In the progress report, Dong Min Im, the secretary general of HWPL, explained the significance of peace projects in HWPL by saying, “The work is to put an end to war in our globe and make a foundation of a world of everlasting peace, which is unprecedented in history.” He continued, “The solution to peace is all of us becoming messengers of peace.”

Bup Hye Kim, chairman of Buddhist Central Council for National Unification, offered a picture of concrete action plans of HWPL in achieving peace. “Youth and women are the main scapegoats in war, but even in this reality we must face the fact that youth and women are voluntarily standing at the forefront to build the foundation of peace with HWPL”, he said.

The DPCW with its 10 articles and 38 clauses was drafted by HWPL and legal experts in international law. Based on the spirit of the Charter of the United Nations and Declaration of Human Rights, the DPCW advocates peace as a global order through respect on international law, ethnic/religious freedom, and spreading a culture of peace.

Efforts of promoting peaceful coexistence with initiatives of HWPL contribute to conflict resolution to raise mutual understanding that can restrain hostility. Seminars and culture events at both local and national levels have been hosted by HWPL with the local community to overcome religious or ethnic boundaries. Areas of conflict where threats of life are persistent including Syria, Israel and Palestine are included to raise awareness for peace building.

{As US network obtains part of president’s tax filings, White House says Trump paid $38m in taxes on $150m of income.}

US President Donald Trump paid $38m in taxes on more than $150m of income in 2005, the White House has said, acknowledging key details it previously refused to release.

The revelation came as a response to an MSNBC report on Tuesday that the US broadcaster had obtained two pages of his returns.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said she received the documents from investigative journalist David Cay Johnston, who said on her show that he received them in the mail.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Johnston said the $38m figure released by the White House included payroll taxes. When these are not taken into account, Trump’s total 2005 federal tax bill was $36.5m, the investigative journalist said.

According to the leaked pages of the tax return, Trump and his wife Melania paid $5.3m in regular federal income tax, and an additional $31m in the alternative minimum tax (AMT) – which the president wants to eliminate.

“If the alternative minimum tax had not been in effect in 2005, Trump would have paid only $5m of tax on $183m of income – that tax rate is less than the tax rate paid by the poorest half of Americans” Johnston said from New York.

“Trump, this very wealthy man … wants a tax system where he would pay the same rate of tax as people who make less than $33,000 a year in America.”

{{‘That makes me smart’}}

The returns showed Trump paid an effective federal tax rate of 25 percent in 2005 after writing off $100m in losses.

The White House said in a statement that Trump took into account “large scale depreciation for construction.”

It said the former reality TV star, as head of the Trump Organization, had a responsibility “to pay no more tax than legally required”.

Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns despite decades of precedent featured heavily in the 2016 presidential race. He said he could not release the filings as he was under audit.

Democrats hinted that by not releasing the documents, Trump may be trying to hide that he pays little to no tax, makes less money than he claims, or gives a negligible amount to charity.

In January, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said the White House would not release the documents.

Trump said his taxes are not of interest to the general public.

“You know, the only one that cares about my tax returns are the reporters,” he said during a news conference after his January 20 inauguration.

Ahead of the November election, The New York Times published what it said were leaked tax filings from 1995 that revealed a deficit big enough for Trump not to pay federal income taxes for up to 18 years.

In the first presidential debate, when Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton accused him of not having paid federal tax in years, he responded, “That makes me smart”.

{{Questions remain}}

Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi, reporting from Washington, DC, said that what many will be interested in is not Trump’s 12-year-old tax return, but his potential conflicts of interest – specifically allegations that he has been receiving contributions from foreign governments that could influence policy.

But “any money that he’s been making from foreign governments is unlikely to be in his personal income tax return, because he’s got so many different corporations, limited liability companies and so on,” Rattansi noted.

He added that Tuesday’s revelations could actually play out in Trump’s favour.

“The way MSNBC hyped it beforehand, and the skillful way the White House handled it, could bolster Trump’s base, who’ll say ‘look, it’s more fake news, there was nothing to see here’.

“Incidentally, at least for a while, it took the focus away from the controversy over the plan to replace the Obamacare system that will leave millions of people without healthcare coverage.”

The White House lashed out at MSNBC over the leaks.

“You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago,” it said in a statement.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Hijab targeted as court rules workplace bans on political and religious symbols are not discriminatory.}

Employers are entitled to ban staff from wearing visible religious symbols, the European Union’s top law court ruled on Tuesday, a decision Muslims said was a direct attack on women wearing hijabs at work.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) said it does not constitute “direct discrimination” if a firm has an internal rule banning the wearing of “any political, philosophical or religious sign”.

The court gave a judgment in the cases of two women, in France and Belgium, who were dismissed for refusing to remove hijabs, or the headscarf worn by many Muslim women who feel it is part of their religion.

Critics called the ban a thinly veiled measure targeting Muslims.

“A ban on religious and political symbols feels to me as a disguised ban on the hijab. I cannot think of another symbol that will affect hundreds of thousands of people in Europe ,” Warda el-Kaddouri told Al Jazeera from Brussels.

“By stating that veiled women can simply take off their hijab, you imply that the empowerment of women to be in control of their own body and to make individual decisions is reserved for white women only.”

Kim Lecoyer, president of Belgium-based Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera the ruling legitimised discrimination on the grounds of religion.

“The court could and should have seized the opportunity to put a halt to the multiple discriminations faced by Muslim women and protect their fundamental rights, but they chose not to,” said Lecoyer.

{{Anti-Muslim nationalism}}

The wearing of religious symbols, especially the hijab, has become a hot button issue with the rise of nationalist and sometimes overtly anti-Muslim parties across Europe.

Some countries such as Austria are mulling a complete ban on the full-face veil in public, while in France last year local authorities barred women wearing the burkini, the full-body swimsuit, fining those who did.

Manfred Weber, head of the centre-right European People’s Party, the biggest in the European Parliament, welcomed the ECJ’s ruling as a victory for European values.

“Important ruling by the European Court of Justice: employers have the right to ban the Islamic veil at work. European values must apply in public life,” Weber said in a tweet.

Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said Tuesday’s ruling is complex.

“The idea behind it is that companies have the freedom to choose whether or not they want to present a so-called neutral image and what they want to do to benefit their business.”

Butler said the court ruled businesses should have the freedom to choose how they operate, and that included choosing whether people would be allowed to wear items such as hijabs or crosses on chains.

“It’s going to be very complicated to rule on such cases within each country, because it will come under the jurisdiction of each separate nation in the EU, because there are so many shades of grey what constitutes discrimination against somebody’s religious freedom or not,” she said.

The ECJ ruled on a case dating to 2003 when Samira Achbita, a Muslim, was employed as a receptionist by G4S security services in Belgium .

At the time, the company had an “unwritten rule” that employees should not wear any political, religious or philosophical symbols at work, the ECJ said.

In 2006, Achbita told G4S she wanted to wear a hijab but was told this would not be allowed. The company subsequently introduced a formal ban. Achbita was dismissed and she went to court claiming discrimination.

The ECJ said European Union law does bar discrimination on religious grounds, but G4S’s actions were based on treating all employees the same, meaning no one person was singled out for application of the ban.

“Accordingly, such an internal rule does not introduce a difference of treatment that is directly based on religion or belief,” it said.

However, in a related case in France, the ECJ ruled a customer could not demand that a company employee not wear a hijab when conducting business with them on its behalf.

Design engineer Asma Bougnaoui was employed full-time by Micropole, a private company, in 2008, having been told that wearing the hijab might cause problems with clients.

After a customer complaint, Micropole asked Bougnaoui not to wear the hijab on the grounds that employees should be dressed neutrally.

She was subsequently dismissed and went to court claiming discrimination.

The ECJ said the case turned on whether there was an internal company rule in place applicable to all, as in the G4S instance, or whether the client’s demand meant Bougnaoui was treated differently.

The ECJ concluded that Bougnaoui had indeed been treated differently and so the client’s demand that she not wear a hijab “cannot be considered a genuine and determining occupational requirement”.

The ruling comes on the eve of a Dutch election in which Muslim immigration has been a key issue and a bellwether for attitudes towards migration and refugee policies across Europe.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Government soldiers try to retake strategic bridge in ISIL-held western Mosul, but snipers slow the advance.}

Iraqi forces said they killed the commander of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Mosul’s Old City as the battle for the group’s last stronghold in the country focused on a strategic bridge crossing the Tigris River.

Federal police said they killed Abu Abdul Rahman al-Ansary, military commander of the Old City, during operations to clear Bab al-Tob district.

With many ISIL leaders having already retreated from Mosul, Ansary’s death comes as a blow to the group as it defends shrinking control of Iraq’s second-largest city.

ISIL snipers, however, were slowing the advance of special forces units on the Iron Bridge linking western and eastern Mosul, officers said.

Capturing the Iron Bridge would mean Iraqi forces will hold three of the five bridges in Mosul that span the Tigris, all of which have been damaged by ISIL (also known as ISIS) and US-led air strikes.

The southernmost two have already been retaken.

“We are still moving toward the Iron Bridge. We are taking out snipers hiding in the surrounding building,” Brigadier-General Mahdi Abbas Abdullah told Reuters news agency.

Near the Mosul Museum, Iraq forces used armoured vehicles and tanks to attack snipers pinning down troops clearing areas around the bridge.

{{Fleeing civilians
}}

As fighting intensified on Tuesday, civilians streamed out of western neighbourhoods recaptured by the government. Some pushed children and sick elderly relatives in handcarts and wheelbarrows.

Soldiers packed them into trucks on the Mosul-Baghdad highway to be taken to processing areas.

Ashraf Ali, a nurse who escaped with his wife and two children, said mortar rounds were falling as they fled. They took advantage of the army retaking their district to get out.

“Daesh wanted us to move to their areas but we escaped when the army arrived,” he said, referring to the Arabic name of ISIL.

As many as 600,000 civilians are caught inside Mosul, which Iraqi forces have effectively sealed off from the remaining territory that ISIL controls in Iraq and Syria.

More than 200,000 Mosul residents have been displaced since the start of the campaign in October.

Iraq’s Ministry of Immigration and Displacement said on Tuesday almost 13,000 displaced people from western Mosul had been received seeking assistance and temporary accommodation each day.

Losing Mosul would be a major strike against ISIL.

It is by far the largest city ISIL have held since their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, proclaimed himself leader of a caliphate spanning Iraq and Syria in the summer of 2014.

Source:Al Jazeera

{State prosecutor says more remains of drug cartel victims to be likely found from clandestine burial pits in Veracruz.}

The top prosecutor in Mexican state of Veracruz has confirmed that more than 250 skulls have been dug up in what appears to be a drug cartel mass burial ground on the outskirts of the city of Veracruz.

Jorge Winckler, the state prosecutor, said on Tuesday that the clandestine burial pits appear to contain the victims of drug cartels killed years ago.

“For many years, the drug cartels disappeared people and the authorities were complacent,” Winckler said, in apparent reference to the administration of fugitive former Governor Javier Duarte and his predecessors.

In an interview with the Televisa network, Winckler did not specify when the skulls were found or by whom.

On Monday, when the discovery was first reported in this southeastern state, Winckler said investigators were likely to find more remains.

But they appear to have been found over the course of months.

Victims’ advocacy groups like Colectivo Solecito have excavated and pressed authorities to excavate such sites to find missing loved ones.

The skulls and other bones were found in a wooded area known as Colinas de Santa Fe, where activists have been exploring since at least mid-2016, sinking rods into the ground and withdrawing them to detect the telltale odor of decomposition.

When they find what they believe are burial pits, they alert authorities, who carry out the final excavations.

Winckler said excavations have covered only a third of the lot where the skulls were found, and more people may be buried there.

“I cannot imagine how many more people are illegally buried there,” Winckler said, noting that the state has reports of about 2,400 people who are still missing.

“Veracruz is an enormous mass grave,” he said.

{{Government ‘inaction’}}

The victims’ advocacy groups have criticised authorities for doing little to try to find or identify the state’s missing people, many of whom were kidnapped and never heard from again.

Al Jazeera’s John Holman, reporting from Mexico City, said that one mother of a missing person told him that her family received “very little help” from state authorities in finding her son.

“Veracruz is a real epicentre in the violence that is being felt through various areas of Mexico,” he said.

Our correspondent also reported that the country’s top prosecutor has yet to take action on the latest discovery, adding that federal authorities are “keen to sort of dampen down talk about the violence being suffered in the country”.

Veracruz had long been dominated by the ferocious Zetas cartel. But the Jalisco New Generation cartel began moving in around 2011, sparking bloody turf battles.

Drug cartels in other parts of Mexico have deposited victims’ bodies in mass graves before.

In the northern state of Durango, authorities found more than 300 bodies in a clandestine mass grave in the state capital in excavations starting in April 2011.

More than 250 bodies were discovered in April 2011 in burial pits in the town of San Fernando, in Tamaulipas state, close to the US border.

Drug gangs in some places in Mexico have taken to burning or dissolving their victims’ bodies in corrosive substances in order to avoid discovery.

But the victims in Veracruz appear to have been buried relatively whole.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Scathing broadside against German chancellor came hours after EU urged Turkish leader to halt inflammatory rhetoric.}

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continued his rhetorical attacks on European leaders on Monday by accusing German Chancellor Angela Merkel of “supporting terrorists”.

Merkel called the accusations “clearly absurd” after Erdogan made the comments in an interview with Turkey’s A Haber TV.

“The chancellor has no intention of taking part in a game of provocation,” Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said in a brief written statement.

Erdogan – whose government is embroiled in a spiraling row with some European governments over the cancellation of political rallies on their soil ahead of an April referendum – had earlier accused Berlin of not responding to 4,500 dossiers sent by Turkey on suspects.

“Mrs Merkel, why are you hiding terrorists in your country? Why are you not doing anything?” Erdogan said. “Mrs Merkel, you are supporting terrorists.”

Erdogan did not cite specifics, but made references to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group deemed a “terrorist organisation” by the Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

The scathing broadside against Merkel came hours after the EU urged him to avoid inflammatory rhetoric in a growing standoff with Germany and the Netherlands over the blocking of Turkish ministers seeking to address rallies promoting a “Yes” vote in the April 16 referendum.

Erdogan has been seeking to harness the Turkish diaspora vote – which numbers as many as 1.4 million in Germany alone – ahead of the referendum on creating an executive presidency and scrapping the post of prime minister.

The president twice over the weekend accused NATO ally Netherlands of acting like the Nazis, comments that sparked outrage in a country bombed and occupied by German forces in World War II.

The row erupted on March 2 when local authorities in the western German town of Gaggenau cancelled a rally which Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag was set to attend, ostensibly for logistical reasons. Other local authorities followed suit, sparking fury in Ankara.

Turkey said on Monday it would suspend high-level diplomatic relations with the Netherlands after Dutch authorities also prevented Turkish ministers from speaking at rallies on Saturday.

Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus, the government’s chief spokesman, also said Ankara might re-evaluate its deal with the EU to halt the flow of migrants from Turkish shores to Europe.

“We are doing exactly what they did to us. We are not allowing planes carrying Dutch diplomats or envoys from landing in Turkey or using our airspace,” Kurtulmus told a news conference.

Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist and visiting fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley College, told Al Jazeera that both sides were playing into nationalist emotions ahead of key votes in their respective countries. “Within Turkey this [dispute] has certainly stoked nationalist ambitions and nationalist feelings,” said Akyol. “And even openly President Erdogan’s supporters are saying that this is going to help them in the upcoming referendum in April.”

However, Akyol said that the dispute could ultimately be damaging for both countries.

“This is creating a big rift between Turkey and the West, and that is combined with anti-Turkish or anti-Islamic elements in European politics right now; the far-right and Geert Wilders in Holland. So we are going to a rift and I think that is bad for both sides.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{Rodrigo Duterte orders military to assert ownership of Benham Rise area to Beijing – but in a nice way.}

President Rodrigo Duterte says instructed the military to assert Philippine ownership of a large ocean region off the country’s northeastern coast where China’s survey ships were spotted last year.

However, Duterte said on Monday he ordered the military to claim the Benham Rise area in a friendly way, repeating his country has no option but to be diplomatic because it “cannot match the might of China”.

“My order to my military, you go there and tell them straight that this is ours, but I say it in friendship,” Duterte said in a news conference when asked about the issue in the Pacific Ocean.

The Philippine military spotted the Chinese survey ships suspiciously crisscrossing the Benham Rise waters from July to December last year, defence chief Delfin Lorenzana said last week.

Lorenzana said the government is considering an increase in patrols and the building of territorial markers in the offshore region, which is believed to be rich in mineral resources and a vast coral reef ecosystem.

The Chinese ships’ presence in the area was to be discussed late on Monday at a meeting between National Security Council executive members and Duterte.

The Department of Foreign Affairs said it asked China through its embassy on Friday to clarify what the survey ships were doing in Benham Rise.

In 2012, the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf declared Benham Rise to be part of the Philippine continental shelf, where the country has exclusive rights to fish and exploit resources, including undersea deposits of oil and gas.

{{‘Innocent passage’
}}

The Chinese foreign ministry has said its ships have a right to “innocent passage” through the area under international law.

Beijing and Manila have a separate long-running territorial feud in the South China Sea west of the Philippines, but tensions have eased considerably since Duterte took office in June and began reaching out to China.

He has placed the dispute on the backburner while seeking Chinese trade and economic aid, downplaying the issue during his visit to Beijing last year.

Duterte has also shelved plans made under his predecessor for joint Philippine patrols with the US Navy in disputed waters to avoid offending China.

A US Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, has been sailing on a mission to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, claimed virtually in its entirety by China.

“America wants to pick a fight there,” said Duterte, who has openly criticised US security policies. “Why would I get into a trouble in that area?”

Source:Al Jazeera

{Nonpartisan report projects that 52 million people will be uninsured by 2026 if Republican bill becomes law.}

Fourteen million Americans would lose coverage next year under a Republican plan to dismantle Obamacare, according to a government agency tasked with performing cost-benefit analyses of proposals.

The report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), released on Monday, dealt a potential setback to President Donald Trump’s first major legislative initiative.

The CBO projected that 52 million people would be uninsured by 2026 if the bill became law, compared with 28 million who would not have coverage that year if the law remained unchanged.

Two House of Representatives committees have approved the legislation unveiled by Republican leaders last week that would dismantle Obamacare.

But it faces opposition from not only Democrats but also medical providers including doctors and hospitals and many conservatives.

The CBO said in its report that the Republican plan would save $337bn in government spending between 2017 and 2026.

The savings would come primarily in reduced spending for Medicaid, an assistance programme for low-income families, and an end to subsidised health insurance, two of the hallmarks of Obama’s policy.

Those changes mean that, by 2018, 14 million more people would be without insurance than if existing legislation was allowed to remain in place. That figure grows to 21 million by 2020 and 24 million by 2026, the CBO reported.

The Trump administration was quick to defend the proposal.

“We disagree strenuously with the report,” Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said at a briefing.

He said the plan being considered offers greater choice and puts patients and doctors in charge of healthcare, and not the federal government.

Price said numbers would remain up because people would not voluntarily leave Medicaid. However, he also noted that there would be some increase in the number of those not covered because the new law would not require health care insurance, as Obamacare does.

He also noted that the report overlooks the fact that people will have a greater choice under the Republican plan.

“They are going to be able to buy a coverage policy that they want for themselves and their family,” he said.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Izumo carrier will cruise the South China Sea with stops in Southeast Asia before heading to India for US war games.}

Japan plans to dispatch its largest warship on a three-month tour through the South China Sea in May, three sources said, in its biggest show of naval force in the region since World War II.

The Izumo helicopter carrier, commissioned only two years ago, will make stops in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka before joining the Malabar joint naval exercise with Indian and US naval vessels in the Indian Ocean in July, the sources told Reuters news agency.

The carrier will then return to Japan in August.

“The aim is to test the capability of the Izumo by sending it out on an extended mission,” said one of the sources with knowledge of the plan.

READ MORE: Japan’s new Defence White Paper – Turbulence ahead

“It will train with the US Navy in the South China Sea,” he added, asking not to be identified because he is not authorised to talk to the media.

The 249-metre-long Izumo is as large as Japan’s World War II-era carriers and can operate up to nine helicopters.

It resembles the amphibious assault carriers used by US Marines, but lacks their well deck for launching landing craft and other vessels.

A spokesman for Japan’s Maritime Self Defence Force declined to comment.

China claims almost all the disputed waters in the South China Sea and its growing military presence has fuelled concern in Japan and the West, with the US holding regular air and naval patrols to ensure freedom of navigation.

Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei also claim parts of the sea, which has rich fishing grounds, oil and gas deposits, and through which about $5 trillion in global sea trade passes each year.

Japan does not have any claim to the waters, but has a separate maritime dispute with China in the East China Sea.

Source:Al Jazeera