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China-Russia Relations: 4 Takeaways From 2022 Beijing and Moscow are strengthening political, economic, and military ties, but the relationship is becoming ever more imbalanced in China’s favor.
By Joseph Webster
Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin exchanged a warm phone call on Friday, providing a fitting bookend to a year that saw China and Russia strengthen relations across the board. Still, Moscow is becoming weaker both absolutely and relatively, tilting the relationship ever more in Beijing’s favor and creating uncertainty about future interactions. The two sides will very likely continue to expand military and political ties in 2023, although a mutual trust gap could emerge in future years.
Russia, with an economy a tenth the size of China’s, is firmly the junior partner in the relationship. Events this year have underscored Russia’s dependency. In late January, Western diplomatic sources claimed to Bloomberg that Xi asked Putin to delay any escalation in Ukraine until after the conclusion of the 2022 Beijing Olympics. If true, this claim would have extraordinary implications for Putin’s perceptions of the role of China, the conduct of Russian foreign policy, and, potentially, the outcome of the war itself. As many analysts noted at the time, any escalatory delay would strengthen Kyiv’s hand by giving it more time to receive arms and aid shipments.
Caught in the act: supermassive black hole 8.5 billion light years away enjoys violent stellar snack
Credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images
Obliterated star produces some of the brightest relativistic jet flashes ever seen
When stars and other objects stray too close to a supermassive black hole they are destroyed by the black hole’s immense gravity.
These occurrences, known as tidal-disruption events (TDEs), result in a circling disk of material that is slowly pulled into the black hole and very occasionally, as in the case of supermassive black hole AT2022cmc, ejecting bright beams of material travelling close to the speed of light.
Luminous jets are produced in an estimated 1% of cases and are known as a type of astronomical occurrence known as a transient, because they are short-lived.
Bright flashes from the jets were spotted in data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in February this year using a special new technique which can comb through the equivalent of a million pages of information every night.
Due to the rapid results produced by the novel data analysis method, a research team in the US was able to swiftly follow up on the transient event with multiwavelength observations of the system from different observatory facilities.
World war already began
Star Economist Nouriel Roubini on the Global Crises
Interview Conducted By Tim Bartz und David Böcking
Global warming, war and inflation: The world seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis at the moment. In an interview, crash prophet Nouriel Roubini identifies 10 "megathreats" we are facing and how he is dealing with them.
About Nouriel Roubini
Nouriel Roubini, born in 1958, is one of the world's most well-known economists and a notorious pessimist: The professor emeritus at New York University's Stern School of Business predicted the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the crash of the global economy right at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. He grew up in Turkey, Iran, Israel and Italy, and is now a U.S. citizen.
DER SPIEGEL: Professor Roubini, you don't like your nickname "Dr. Doom." Instead you would like to be called "Dr. Realist." But in your new book, you describe "ten megathreats" that endanger our future. It doesn’t get much gloomier than that.
Roubini: The threats I write about are real – no one would deny that. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, I never worried about a war between great powers or a nuclear winter, as we had détente between the Soviet Union and the West. I never heard the words climate change or global pandemic. And no one worried about robots taking over most jobs. We had freer trade and globalization, we lived in stable democracies, even if they were not perfect. Debt was very low, the population wasn’t over-aged, there were no unfunded liabilities from the pension and health care systems. That's the world I grew up in. And now I have to worry about all these things – and so does everyone else.
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