TAIPEI — China is deploying its largest navy fleet in regional waters in nearly three decades, posing a threat to Taiwan that is more pronounced than previous Chinese war games, the Taiwanese defense ministry said on Tuesday.

Speaking in Taipei, defense ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang said the scale of the current Chinese naval deployment in an area running from the southern Japanese islands down into the South China Sea was the largest since China held war games around Taiwan ahead of 1996 Taiwanese presidential elections.

China’s military has yet to comment and has not confirmed it is carrying out any exercises.

China, which views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory over the island’s rejection, had been expected to launch drills to express its anger at President Lai Ching-te’s tour of the Pacific that ended on Friday, which included stopovers in Hawaii and the US territory of Guam.

Taiwan’s military raised its alert on Monday after saying China had reserved airspace and deployed naval and coast guard vessels.

“The current scale is the largest compared to the previous four,” Sun said. “Regardless of whether they have announced drills, they are posing a great threat to us.”

Senior ministry intelligence officer Hsieh Jih-sheng told the same press conference there have so far been no live fire drills in China’s seven “reserved” air space zones, two of which are in the Taiwan Strait, but there had been a significant increase in Chinese activity to the north of Taiwan over the last day.

The number of China navy and coast guard ships in the region, which a Taiwan security source told Reuters remained at around 90, was “very alarming,” and China was taking aim at other countries in the region and not only Taiwan, he added.

China’s deployment in the First Island Chain — which runs from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and on to Borneo, enclosing China’s coastal seas — is aimed at area denial to prevent foreign forces from interfering, Mr. Hsieh said.

INTERNAL SEA
The ministry said China’s navy is building two “walls” in the Pacific, one at the eastern end of Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone and the other further out in the Pacific.

“They are sending a very simple message with these two walls: trying to make the Taiwan Strait an internal sea” of China, said Mr. Hsieh.

Earlier on Tuesday, the defense ministry said it detected 47 military aircraft operating around the island over the past 24 hours, as well as 12 navy vessels and nine “official” ships, which refers to vessels from ostensibly civilian agencies such as the coast guard.

Of the aircraft, 26 flew in an area to the north of Taiwan off the coast of China’s Zhejiang province, six in the Taiwan Strait and a further 15 to the island’s southwest, according to a map the ministry provided in its daily morning statement on Chinese activities.

A senior Taiwan security source told Reuters that the Chinese aircraft simulated attacks on foreign naval ships and practiced driving away military and civilian aircraft as part of a “blockade exercise.”

Mr. Lai and his government reject Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying only Taiwan’s people can decide their future.

China says the Taiwan issue is the “core of its core interests” and a red line the United States should not cross.

China has held two rounds of major war games around Taiwan so far this year. — Reuters

WASHINGTON — Fresh corroboration of the perplexing observation that the universe is expanding more rapidly than expected has scientists pondering the cause — perhaps some unknown factor involving the mysterious cosmic components dark energy and dark matter.

Two years of data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have now validated the Hubble Space Telescope’s earlier finding that the rate of the universe’s expansion is faster — by about 8% — than would be expected based on what astrophysicists know of the initial conditions in the cosmos and its evolution over billions of years. The discrepancy is called the Hubble Tension.

The observations by Webb, the most capable space telescope ever deployed, appear to rule out the notion that the data from its forerunner Hubble was somehow flawed due to instrument error.

“This is the largest sample of Webb Telescope data — its first two years in space — and it confirms the puzzling finding from the Hubble Space Telescope that we have been wrestling with for a decade — the universe is now expanding faster than our best theories can explain,” said astrophysicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, lead author of the study published on Monday in the Astrophysical Journal.

“Yes, it appears there is something missing in our understanding of the universe,” added Mr. Riess, a 2011 Nobel laureate in physics for the co-discovery of the universe’s accelerating expansion. “Our understanding of the universe contains a lot of ignorance about two elements — dark matter and dark energy — and these make up 96% of the universe, so this is no small matter.”

“The Webb results can be interpreted to suggest there may be a need to revise our model of the universe, although it is very difficult to pinpoint what this is at the moment,” said Siyang Li, a Johns Hopkins doctoral student in astronomy and astrophysics and a study co-author.

Dark matter, thought to comprise about 27% of the universe, is a hypothesized form of matter that is invisible but is inferred to exist based on its gravitational effects on ordinary matter — stars, planets, moons, all the stuff on Earth — which accounts for roughly 5% of the universe.

Dark energy, believed to comprise approximately 69% of the universe, is a hypothesized form of energy permeating vast swathes of space that counteracts gravity and drives the universe’s accelerating expansion.

What might explain the anomalous expansion rate?

“There are many hypotheses that involve dark matter, dark energy, dark radiation — for example, neutrinos (a type of ghostly subatomic particle) — or gravity itself having some exotic properties as possible explanations,” Mr. Riess said.

The researchers employed three different methods to measure a specific telltale metric — distances from Earth to galaxies where a type of pulsating star called Cepheids have been documented. The Webb and Hubble measurements were in harmony.

The universe’s expansion rate, a figure called the Hubble constant, is measured in kilometers per second per megaparsec, a distance equal to 3.26 million light-years. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Under the standard model of cosmology — basically, the conventional wisdom concerning the universe — the value of the Hubble constant should be about 67-68. The Hubble and Webb data give a value averaging about 73, with a range of about 70-76.

The Big Bang event 13-14 billion years ago initiated the universe, and it has been expanding ever since. Scientists in 1998 disclosed that this expansion was actually accelerating, with dark energy as the hypothesized reason.

The new study looked at Webb data covering about a third of Hubble’s full slate of relevant galaxies. The researchers in 2023 announced that earlier interim Webb data validated the Hubble findings.

So how might this Hubble Tension mystery be solved?

“We need more data to better characterize this clue. Exactly what size is it (the discrepancy)? Is the mismatch at the lower end — 4-5% — or the higher end — 10-12% — of what the current data allows? Over what range of cosmic time is it present? These will further inform ideas,” Mr. Riess said. — Reuters

DAMASCUS/NEW YORK — The lightning overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad left Syrians, countries in the region and world powers nervous on Tuesday about what comes next as the rebel alliance took its first steps in a government transition.

The United Nations (UN) Security Council met behind closed doors late on Monday, and diplomats said they were still in shock at how quickly Assad’s overthrow unfolded over 12 days, after a 13-year civil war that was locked in stalemate for years.

“Everyone was taken by surprise, everyone, including the members of the council. So we have to wait and see and watch … and evaluate how the situation will develop,” Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia told reporters after the body met.

Russia played a major role in supporting Mr. Assad’s government and helping it fight the rebels. The Syrian leader fled Damascus for Moscow on Sunday, ending more than 50 years of brutal rule by his family.

With the mood in Damascus still celebratory, Mr. Assad’s prime minister, Mohammed Jalali, on Monday agreed to hand power to the rebel-led Salvation Government, an administration based in rebel-held territory in northwest Syria.

The main rebel commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammed al-Golani, met with Jalali and Vice-President Faisal Mekdad to discuss the transitional government, a source familiar with the discussions told Reuters. Jalali said the handover could take days to carry out.

Al Jazeera television reported the transitional authority would be headed by Mohamed al-Bashir, who has headed the Salvation Government.

The steamroller advance of the militia alliance headed by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, was a generational turning point for the Middle East.

The civil war that began in 2011 killed hundreds of thousands, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble, countryside depopulated and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions.

But the rebel alliance has not communicated plans for Syria’s future, and there is no template for such a transition in the fractious region.

Oil prices rose more than 1% on Monday, partly on concerns that instability in Syria, which is not a major oil producer, could raise regional tensions, analysts said.

“This is an incredible moment for the Syrian people,” Deputy US Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood said in New York. “Now we’re really focused right now on trying to see where the situation goes. Can there be a governing authority in Syria that respects the rights and dignities of the Syrian population?”

The US was seeking ways to engage with Syrian rebel groups and is reaching out to partners in the region such as Turkey to start informal diplomacy, Washington said.

Qatari diplomats spoke with HTS on Monday, an official briefed on the developments told Reuters, as regional states race to open contact with the group.

‘FREEDOM, EQUALITY, RULE OF LAW’
Some insurgent fighters who milled about the capital on Monday, clustering in the central Umayyad Square, expressed hope a civilian administration would soon be running the country.

“We want the state and security forces to be in charge,” said Firdous Omar, a fighter who intends to resume farming in provincial Idlib.

Golani has vowed to rebuild Syria, and HTS has spent years trying to soften its image to reassure foreign nations and minority groups within Syria.

But fears of reprisals remained. HTS said it will not hesitate to hold security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people accountable, describing them as criminals and murderers.

“We will release a list that includes the names of the most senior officials involved in the torturing of the Syrian people,” Golani said in a statement. “Rewards will be offered to those who will provide information about senior army and security officers involved in war crimes.”

HTS is designated as a terrorist organization by many states and the UN, and its governing credentials are uncertain.

“Syrians are looking forward to establishing a state of freedom, equality, rule of law, democracy, and we will join efforts to rebuild our country, to rebuild what was destroyed, and to rebuild the future, better future of Syria,” Syria’s UN Ambassador Koussay Aldahhak told reporters.

There were tentative signs of a return to order. Syria’s banks will reopen on Tuesday, and the oil ministry called on all employees in the sector to head to work on Tuesday, adding that protection would be provided to ensure their safety.

In one of many challenges facing Syria, Israel seized a buffer zone in the country’s south, a move condemned by Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia said the move would “ruin Syria’s chances of restoring security.”

Israel said its airstrikes would carry on for days but told the UN Security Council that it was not intervening in Syria’s conflict. It said it had taken “limited and temporary measures” solely to protect its security. — Reuters