China on Tuesday again voiced opposition to a gathering in Vancouver of foreign ministers from 20 countries on security and stability on the Korean Peninsula.
Canada and the United States will co-host the meeting OG Anunoby Raptors Jersey , scheduled for Tuesday, will discuss measures to exert maximum diplomatic as well as economic pressures on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) to force it to end its nuclear and missile programs.
"Since this meeting does not have legitimacy or representativeness, China has opposed the meeting from the very beginning," Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a routine press briefing. "While countries are committed to finding a proper solution for the peaceful settlement of the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue, some parties hold such a meeting in the name of the so-called United Nations command during the Cold War era. We do not know what the purpose of convening such a meeting is."
He said that without participation of some of the most important direct parties to the nuclear issue, the Vancouver meeting had no legitimacy and was not representative.
The meeting, in which China's foreign minister will not participate Norman Powell Raptors Jersey , comes as the DPRK and the ROK have resumed talks after Pyongyang decided to join the PyeongChang Winter Olympics next month.
URUMQI, Jan. 20 (Xinhua) -- A China-Europe freight train carrying 36 containers of auto parts, engineering equipment, and daily necessities left Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Friday.
The train will travel through Xinjiang's Alataw Pass and stop at a port in Kazakhstan where the containers will be transferred to ships which are bound for Baku, capital of Azerbaijan.
This new rail-ship route was jointly launched by railway authorities of Xinjiang and Kazakhstan Nick Foles Raptors Jersey , and opens quicker access to connect China with Central Asia, West Asia and Europe.
According to the Xinjiang railway bureau, the 4,186-kilometer journey will take eight days, less than one-third of travel time via rail alone.
"The rail-ship route can save logistics time and increase the added value of our export products," said Liu Chang, general manager of a Shanghai-based global trade company.
"Urumqi plans to send 1 Lucas Nogueira Raptors Jersey ,400 China-Europe trains in 2018, further improving connectivity with Central Asian and European cities," said Nan Jun, vice general manager of Xinjiang Xintie International Logistics Company.
The number of China-Europe freight train trips reached a new high of more than 3,000 last year, and is expected to reach 4,000 this year LeGarrette Blount Raptors Jersey , according to China Railway Corporation.
by Matthew Rusling
WASHINGTON, March 16 (Xinhua) -- While the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has over several months pushed a narrative that the Islamic State (IS) terror group is on the run, it is now changing its tune, expressing alarm that its influence is spreading worldwide.
Marking a major shift in the administration's take on the situation, CIA Director John Brennan expressed deep concern over the group that has overtaken vast swaths of Syria and northern Iraq. The sentiments, expressed in a speech Friday in New York, marked an even sharper departure from Obama's dismissal last year of the murderous thugs Kyle Lowry Raptors Jersey , billing them as amateurs.
Brennan said the threat had "snowballed" as an estimated 20,000 fighters from nearly 100 nations worldwide have gone to fight with the IS, many from the West, including the United States.
Left unchecked, the group would pose a threat not only to Iraq and Syria but to a wider region, as well as to the United States and its allies, the U.S. spy chief said.
The administration's sudden about-face comes amid a rising threat of Islamist terror worldwide KJ McDaniels Raptors Jersey , with radical groups across the globe viewing the IS as the rock star of the jihadi world, as the IS has been able to hold large amounts of territory in the face of ongoing U.S. bombings that have thus far failed to defeat the militants.
"There clearly is a trend on the part of the most extreme Islamic militant groups to associate themselves with the self-styled Islamic State. Some of these militant nodes, sometimes rather small, appear to have been searching for an identity of sorts and found Daesh (IS) a relatively successful and inspiring new model," Wayne White, former deputy director of the State Department's Middle East Intelligence Office, told Xinhua.
Indeed Jonas Valanciunas Raptors Jersey , Nigerian terror group Boko Haram earlier this month pledged allegiance to the IS in an audio recording. The group has displaced around 3 million people in Africa over the last five years, kidnapped women and girls to use as sex slaves and slaughtered whole villages at a time.
U.S. experts have expressed worry over some IS affiliates' willingness to copy the radicals' brutal methods.
"A particularly worrisome aspect of these successive affiliations ... the extent to which such groups go about emulating Daesh's barbaric behavior as in the beach execution of Egyptian Christians in Libya," White said, referring to the IS propaganda video last month that depicted the beheadings on a Libyan beach of a dozen members of Egypt's Coptic Christian minority.
The IS' trademark brutality has grabbed headlines worldwide, as the group has employed ancient and medieval methods of torture or execution, such as crucifixion, used by the ancient Romans Jay Ajayi Raptors Jersey , whereby victims' lungs eventually collapse in an agonizing death that sometimes takes several days.