Sinosphere Blog: In One Chinese City, Underperformers Also Share The Limelight

North Korea sent its highest-level delegation to Iran in about five years as the U. S. raised concerns that arms sales from Pyongyang and Tehran have helped fuel conflicts in the Middle East and Russia’s war in Ukraine. In a rare public report of the trip, the official Korean Central News Agency said in a one-sentence dispatch the North Korean delegation led by External Economic Relations Minister Yun Jong Ho left Pyongyang for Tehran on Tuesday.

The International Monetary Fund issued a most unusual rebuttal this month. Its spokeswoman Julie Kozack told reporters in Washington that executive director Krishnamurthy Subramanian’s growth forecast of 8% for India did not represent the views of the IMF, which still maintained a projection of 6.5% for the country. Subramanian’s views—expressed at an event in New Delhi a few days earlier—were in his role as India’s representative at the IMF, she said.

(MOSCOW) — Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich will remain jailed on espionage charges until at least late June, after a Moscow court on Tuesday rejected his appeal that sought to end his pretrial detention. The 32-year-old U. S. citizen was detained in late March 2023 while on a reporting trip and has spent over a year in jail, with authorities routinely extending his time behind bars and rejecting his appeals.

KUALA LUMPUR — Two Malaysian military helicopters collided and crashed during a training session on Tuesday, killing all 10 people on board, the navy said. The helicopters were rehearsing at a naval base in northern Perak state for the navy’s 90th anniversary celebration next month when the accident occurred, the navy said in a brief statement. “All victims were confirmed dead on site,” it said, adding that the remains have been sent to the hospital to be identified. A video circulating on social media purported to be of the incident showed several helicopters flying low in a formation.

Fresh off his feud with a Brazilian Supreme Court judge, Elon Musk is taking his next fight to the very top of the government down under. The owner of X and self-proclaimed champion of free speech has refused to comply with an Australian order to remove videos of violence from his platform, a move that has solicited the ire of the Prime Minister. Just days after a knifeman killed six at a mall earlier this month, Australia was rocked by another stabbing incident in the suburbs of Sydney when, on April 15, a bishop and a priest were stabbed during a live-streamed sermon.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — On a recent morning at a hospital in the heart of gang territory in Haiti’s capital, a woman began convulsing before her body went limp as a doctor and two nurses raced to save her. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] They stuck electrodes to her chest and flipped on an oxygen machine while keeping their eyes on a computer screen that reflected a dangerously low oxygen level of 84%. No one knew what was wrong with her. Even more worrisome, the Doctors Without Borders hospital in the Cite Soleil slum was running low on key medicine to treat convulsions. “The medication she really needs, we barely have,” said Dr.