Italy's Meloni signs deal to 'relaunch' ties with China - DW
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is in Beijing to boost ties as concerns of a trade war with Europe grow. The two countries agreed to collaborate on green technology, including electric cars and renewable energy.
The feed still works (probably), there just hasn't been any new bulletins since April 20th: https://bulletins.hexbear.net/
Egypt to back South Africa genocide case against Israel at world court ^[SCMP]^
From what I've heard Egypt cracked down pretty hard on the protests and I'm under the impression no one expects the government to do the right thing unprompted so this was kind of surprising.
I somehow completely missed that Ukraine is now using civilian planes to bomb Russia. You'd think the international "rules based" order people would have something against this but they predictably do not.
A Ukrainian Sport Plane Drone Just Flew 800 Miles Into Russia To Blow Up An Oil Refinery ^[forbes]^
Debated whether I should post this here or in /c/the_dunk_tank.
From crisis to prosperity: Netanyahu's vision for Gaza 2035 revealed online
US first quarter annualized GDP growth comes in at 1.6%, lower than the expected 2.5%. At the same time inflation rises to 3.5%.
Responding to PostingInternational@lemmygrad.ml's comment in the last thread.
I can think of a a few reasons they would do this. Bhutan is an Indian vassal (although less so now than in the past) so this could put pressure on India to resolve their (China's and India's) border dispute. India has repeatedly refused very advantageous (for India) solutions like the Package Deal, proposed by China multiple times since 1960, where China gets Aksai Chin (with a civilian population of 0 and an area of 38,000 km^2^) and India gets Arunachal Pradesh (with a population of 1.4 million and an area of 83,743 km^2^).
Another reason could be to pressure Bhutan directly for a number of reasons. It could be to get Bhutan to recognize China as a country, which it hasn't done since the founding of the PRC (it doesn't recognize the RoC either). It could be to get Bhutan to stop dragging it's feet (in general it seems that feet-dragging is the default mode of operation of the Bhutanese government) with actually settling the border, which it has also never done. It could also be to get Bhutan to officially give up their claims on their former enclaves inside China, of which there are many, mostly in Tibet but iirc there are a few in other provinces (India also has at least one that it hasn't given up claims on).
I wrote most of this from memory and I'm not super well read on the topic so there are probably some inaccuracies.