The Associated Press reports: "An international tribunal ruling next week on a challenge to China's expansive claims in the South China Sea could determine whether the region is ruled by law or 'raw calculations of power,' U.S. officials said Thursday....Abraham Denmark, deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, urged both parties to comply with the ruling. Denmark said it would be chance to determine 'whether the Asia-Pacific's future will be defined by adherence to international laws and norms that have enabled it to prosper, or whether the region's future will be determined by raw calculations of power.' Rep. Randy Forbes, the Virginia Republican who chairs the House subcommittee on sea power, said the world is watching whether China behaves like a responsible stakeholder in the international system, and, if not, to see how America responds."
Reuters reports: "South Korea and the United States said on Friday they would deploy an advanced missile defense system in South Korea to counter a threat from North Korea, drawing a sharp and swift protest from neighboring China.The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, anti-missile system will be used only as protection against North Korea's growing nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, the South's Defence Ministry and the U.S. Defence Department said in a joint statement....China said the system would destabilize the security balance in the region without achieving anything to end the North's nuclear program....'China strongly urges the United States and South Korea to stop the deployment process of the THAAD anti-missile system, not take any steps to complicate the regional situation and do nothing to harm China's strategic security interests,' the foreign ministry said in a statement."
The Financial Times reports: "Devastating flooding has paralysed central China's largest city, where urban development has taken over lakes that once absorbed the high waters of the Yangtze river in summer....Heavy rains and a huge tornado have killed dozens of people in central China over the past few weeks, while the coast braces for the start of the typhoon season. 'Wuhan has invested a lot into its infrastructure but in the early stage of new urban district building they reclaimed too much land from the lakes,' said Cheng Xiaotao, flood defence expert at the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research in Beijing. Waist-high water has inundated a city subway line, completed four years ago, that was the first to go under the Yangtze. 'Subways should not flood,' Mr Cheng said. 'They might not have thought it would be this severe … Risk assessment is key.'"