����ֱ��

BEIJING: China’s Education Ministry issued a safety warning for Chinese students in the Philippines after what it said were a series of criminal incidents targeting them.

The brief warning Friday did not identify any specific incidents but told students to increase their safety awareness should they choose to study in the Philippines. The number of Chinese students in the country was not given but enrolments have fallen to just a few hundred in recent years, according to the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post.

Relations between the governments of China and the Philippines are particularly tense due to disputes over maritime claims in the South China Sea, which China claims almost in its entirety. China has used water cannons and other non-lethal shipboard deterrents to drive off Philippine fishing boats.

Undersecretary Claire Castro of the Presidential Communications Office said on Friday that China has the right to issue such an advisory but underscored that the crime rate in the Philippines has been falling and “safety and security in the Philippines, we can say, have been improving as far as we are concerned.”

Police response to public concerns over crime has been fast. Crimes sparked by Chinese online gambling have declined or have been eradicated and many Chinese suspects have been deported by the Philippines, Castro told a daily news briefing.

In February a 14-year-old Chinese student was kidnapped in Manila by a Chinese-led gang, which killed his driver and cut off the student’s finger in a bid to force his parents to pay a huge ransom. The Philippine interior secretary said the student’s family and the Chinese leader of the kidnappers were allegedly former operators of lucrative online gambling outfits.

Politically, China has dismissed a UN-backed court decision in The Hague that ruled out most of China’s claims in the South China Sea and has expressed resentment over close ties between the US and Manila.

China often disrupts cultural and economic ties to register their discontent over actions by foreign governments.

In April, China issued a similar warning about the risk to Chinese students in the United States.

BERLIN: Germany deported dozens of Afghan nationals to their homeland on Friday, the second time it has done so since the Taliban returned to power and the first since a new government pledging a tougher line on migration took office in Berlin.
The Interior Ministry said a flight took off Friday morning carrying 81 Afghans, all of them men who had previously come to judicial authorities’ attention. It said in a statement that the deportation was carried out with the help of Qatar, and said the government aims to deport more people to Afghanistan in the future.
More than 10 months ago, Germany’s previous government deported Afghan nationals to their homeland for the first time since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed to step up deportations of asylum-seekers.
New Chancellor Friedrich Merz made tougher migration policy a central plank of his campaign for Germany’s election in February.
Just after he took office in early May, the government stationed more police at the border and said some asylum-seekers trying to enter Europe’s biggest economy would be turned away. It also has suspended family reunions for many migrants.
The flight took off hours before German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt plans to meet his counterparts from five neighboring countries — France, Poland, Austria, Denmark and the Czech Republic — as well as the European Union’s commissioner responsible for migration, Magnus Brunner. Dobrindt is hosting the meeting to discuss migration on the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak, on the Austrian border.