News in Short

• US President Joe Biden says he would use force to defend Taiwan if it was attacked by China, appearing to signal a shift away from Washington’s decades-long policy of so-called strategic ambiguity towards the East Asian democracy.
• Biden made the remarks while visiting Japan, where he is on the second leg of his first trip to East Asia since taking office last year.
• Beijing still claims Taiwan, whose formal name is the Republic of China, as a province and has not ruled out unifying the two sides by force.

• Cave explorers in China stumbled upon a prehistoric forest at the bottom of a giant sinkhole in South China. Sinkholes are also known in Chinese as Tiankeng, or “Heavenly pit”.
• The ancient forest has been discovered in a massive sinkhole in south China’s Guangxi region that extends up to 630 feet deep and spans more than 176 million cubic feet.
• Chinese scientists are speculating that the forest could be home to unique species that have never been reported by science in the past.

• United States President Joe Biden announced 12 countries have joined a new trade pact that will help the United States work more closely with Asian economies on issues including supply chains, digital trade, clean energy and anticorruption efforts.
• The signatories joining the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework are Australia, Brunei, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
• The pact will help them collectively “prepare their economies for the future” following disruptions from the coronavirus pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• Australia’s new prime minister Anthony Albanese was sworn in, ahead of a Tokyo summit with President Joe Biden.
• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor Party ousted predecessor Scott Morrison’s conservative coalition at Saturday’s election.
• Mr. Albanese will be the first ever candidate for the office of the Prime Minister with a “non-Anglo Celtic name.

• A Ukrainian court sentenced a 21-year-old Russian soldier to life in prison for killing a Ukrainian civilian, in the first war crimes trial held since Russia’s invasion.
• Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin was accused of shooting a Ukrainian civilian in the head in a village in the north-eastern Sumy region in the early days of the war.
• He pleaded guilty and testified that he shot the man after being ordered to do so. He told the court that an officer insisted that the Ukrainian mancould pinpoint their location to the Ukrainian forces.