Headlines

With a wide range of activities and capabilities, France is making contributions to maritime security throughout the Indo-Pacific region.

Paris, Apr.3.– In July, France will take over the chairmanship of the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium for 2020-22. The first summit meeting, to be held in La Réunion, was postponed from late June to November. France’s chairmanship is an important symbol of the growing regional integration of French territories in the Indian and Pacific oceans, encouraged by Paris, and of the growing importance of maritime security issues in French strategy in the Indo-Pacific. The main reasons of the latter are threefold.

First, with nearly 2 million nationals living in the region and an EEZ of 9 million square kilometers, the protection of national maritime spaces and their resources constitutes a fundamental mission of the 7,000 French soldiers deployed permanently on five bases (La Réunion, Djibouti, Abu Dhabi, Nouméa, Papeete), notwithstanding naval forces sent on a regular base from metropolitan France.

March 27.– As coronavirus started seeping from its origins in a Wuhan wet market in China late last year, the information coming from the World Health Organization (WHO) was one of dismissal, in line with the Chinese Communist Party's muzzling of the disease's potency.

"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China,"  WHO tweeted in January.

Thus, after being left mostly unchecked in those first critical few weeks of inception, coronavirus – officially termed COVID-19 – has since infected upwards of 600,000 people globally and claimed the lives of some 27,000.

So what went wrong?

March 27.– Today, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES) — a $2 trillion stimulus package to provide financial relief to individuals, families and businesses — was signed into law. The 2020 coronavirus stimulus package will deliver relief through a range of measures, including an advanced tax rebate to taxpayers.

Stimulus Checks for Individuals and Joint Taxpayers

Stimulus checks — up to $1,200 for individuals, $2,400 for joint taxpayers and an additional $500 for each qualifying child — will be based on information from your most recent tax filings, either 2019 or 2018 if you have not yet filed this season.

Seoul, March 21.– South Korea’s Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae recently rejected the National Assembly’s request for the prosecution documents indicting 13 individuals, including former staff and other allies of President Moon Jae-in, on charges of unlawfully intervening in the 2018 Ulsan mayoral election.

This exposes alarming signs that South Korean democracy is in crisis under Moon. The 13 suspects include three former senior presidential secretaries as well as Ulsan Mayor Song Cheol-ho and Vice Mayor Song Byeong-gi.