Washington Post reports that the United Nations has commended China's "continued strong leadership" for backing a landmark international agreement to curb climate change. Led this year by China, the Group of 20 rich and developing nations issued a statement earlier this week following a meeting in Guangzhou to back the Paris climate accord and pledge domestic measures to bring it to force as soon as possible. Spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Friday that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was "encouraged by the strong political momentum" behind the Paris Agreement, which will be signed at a ceremony at U.N. headquarters on April 22. Full cooperation from the G20 members, in particular the United States and China — the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter — are viewed as crucial for the agreement to be effective.

Bloomberg reports that the U.S. is keen to raise the issue of China's territorial ambitions in the South China Sea at a Group of Seven foreign ministers meeting in Hiroshima, in a move that would likely draw an angry response from the government in Beijing. State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters in Washington on Friday that the U.S. should discuss security issues any time it meets with key partners in Asia. "What we want to see happen in South China Sea is important. It's important to the region, it's important to the stability of the region, so I would suggest that those topics should be on the table." Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Saturday said the G-7 meeting shouldn't "hype" the South China Sea issue. He made the comments in a meeting with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond in Beijing, according to a statement on the ministry's website Saturday.

New York Times reports that Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou called for peace in Asia's contested waters on Saturday as he visited a small island in the East China Sea, one of his last symbolic foreign policy moves before leaving office next month. Ma's visit to Pengjia, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) north of Taiwan proper, was his administration's second propaganda trip to an island in three weeks. It came four years after Ma last visited Pengjia to propose a plan to address territorial disputes among China, Taiwan and Japan over the nearby chain known as Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyutai in Chinese. During his eight years as president, Ma has sought to carve out Taiwan's position as a mediator in the region's numerous territorial disputes while asserting its own claims, even though it has been locked in a decades-long standoff with Beijing, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province.