Biden to meet Xi for first time as president – White House

During the upcoming G20 it’s expected that Taiwan will loom large when the US president meets his Chinese counterpart

US President Joe Biden will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of next week’s G20 summit in Indonesia, the White House said on Thursday. While Biden and Xi will reportedly discuss “efforts to maintain lines of communication,” the relationship between Washington and Beijing has been strained as of late over Taiwan.

The pair are set to meet on Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, adding that they would “discuss a range of regional and global issues.”

“The leaders will discuss efforts to maintain and deepen lines of communication…responsibly manage competition, and work together where our interests align,” Jean-Pierre stated.

Biden and Xi last spoke by phone in late July, and have not met face-to-face since Biden assumed office last January.

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Relations between Washington and Beijing have taken a nosedive under Biden’s watch, with the US president threatening on four separate occasions to intervene militarily should China attempt to bring the island under its control by force. On each occasion, White House aides walked back Biden’s statements, assuring Beijing that the US still abides by the ‘One China’ policy – under which the US recognizes, but does not endorse, China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.

China also treated a visit to Taiwan by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in August as a tacit endorsement by Washington of Taiwanese separatism, as Pelosi is the top-ranking member of Biden’s political party. Beijing launched full-scale military exercises in the Taiwan Strait in response, and severed key lines of communication with the US.

Biden said on Wednesday that he will discuss Taiwan with Xi, and that the US’ stance on the island “has not changed at all from the beginning,” presumably referring to Washington’s adherence to the One China policy. Biden added that he is “looking for competition, not conflict” with China. 

Biden and Xi will also discuss the conflict in Ukraine and North Korea’s increased missile testing, a US official told reporters on Thursday. Biden intends to raise with Xi China’s alleged repression of the Uyghur Muslims, which Beijing denies, the official added.

Black hole theory questioned after new star defies rules

A newly observed neutron star merger has cast doubt on the accepted model of black hole formation

Astronomers in the UK have discovered a “hypermassive” neutron star which emitted radiation for far too long before collapsing into a black hole, bringing into question some of the assumptions about the scientific phenomenon. Their observations were published on Thursday.

A team at the University of Bath in Somerset observed a star binary merging and creating a “hypermassive” neutron star, which emitted gamma rays for over a day before it collapsed into a black hole. The result, dubbed GRB 180618A, is about 10.6 billion light-years away and was caught by NASA’s orbiting Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. A robotic observatory in the Canary Islands then zoomed in on the aftermath.

“Such a massive neutron star with a long life expectancy is not normally thought to be possible,” Dr. Nuria Jordana-Mitjans, head author of the study, told the Guardian. “It is a mystery why this one was so long-lived.”

Jordana-Mitjans and her colleagues interpret the “unusual spectral and temporal properties” of the object “as evidence of a highly magnetized, spinning neutron star,” they wrote in their  Astrophysical Journal study. The discovery, they said, “opens a new era for searches of gravitational wave counterparts with fast-cadence surveys.”

Neutron stars are believed to be the collapsed cores of supergiants, created by supernova explosions, with a radius of about 10 kilometers and a mass of about 1.4 of the earth’s sun. They are held together by a phenomenon called “neutron degeneracy pressure” and collapse if their mass exceeds a certain limit.

“They’re such weird exotic objects,” said Professor Carole Mundell, a co-author of the study. “This is the first direct glimpse that we may have of a hypermassive spinning neutron star in nature,” she added. “My hunch is we’ll be finding more of them.”

The gamma-ray bursts that accompany the collapse of neutron stars are the most energetic events in the universe since the Big Bang, according to The Guardian. They were believed to originate from the poles of the newly formed black hole, but the new observations show them emanating from the neutron star itself.

Granddaughter of European dictator back in office

A descendant of Italy’s Benito Mussolini is back in the European Parliament after ostensibly retiring from politics

Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Italian dictator and father of fascism Benito Mussolini, is once again a member of the European Parliament (MEP). She was one of the eight replacements for Italy’s MEPs who had to take their seats in the national parliament, the Chamber of Deputies.

Mussolini previously served as MEP for central Italy from 2014 to 2019, when she lost her re-election bid. Prior to that, she was a member of the Chamber of Deputies on two occasions, in 1992-2004 and 2008-2013. In 2020, she publicly criticized a policy of her party, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (FI), and announced a retirement from politics, calling it a “circle that has closed for me” in an interview with the Italian outlet Il Tempo.

Born in Rome in 1962, Alessandra is the daughter of Mussolini’s fourth son, Romano. Prior to entering politics, she had a career in modeling and acting, helped along by her maternal aunt, actress Sophia Loren.

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Mussolini also has three children. Her son Romano was signed by the youth squad of the football club Lazio last year, deflecting questions about his surname. His mother has also refused to change her name to make her life easier in show-business. 

During her time in politics, she has on many occasions defended her infamous grandfather, who formulated the ideology of fascism and ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 as ‘Il Duce’. After Italy’s surrender in 1943, he was evacuated by Nazi paratroopers and ran a German-allied rump state in the north until he was executed by communist partisans in 1945.

Both Mussolini and the current Italian PM Giorgia Meloni were members of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party widely regarded as the ideological successor to the fascists. Meloni became Italy’s new prime minister in October, after the coalition led by her Brothers of Italy (FdI) won the general election.