This is the best summary I could come up with:
HMAS Toowoomba had been operating in international waters off Japan in support of a United Nations mission to enforce sanctions when the incident occurred on Tuesday.
Naval divers were working to clear fishing nets from the Australian frigate’s propellers, when the Chinese warship began operating its hull-mounted sonar.
According to Defence Minister Richard Marles, the Australian frigate provided multiple warnings to vessels in the area that diving operations were underway.
The incident comes less than a fortnight after Anthony Albanese made the first official visit to Beijing by an Australian prime minister in seven years, meeting President Xi Jinping.
The discussion was described by the prime minister as one of ‘goodwill’, and President Xi credited Mr Albanese for working to stabilise the relationship between the two countries after years of rising tensions.
In May last year, tensions between Australia and China were heightened by the presence of a Chinese surveillance ship operating off the West Australian coast, close to a secretive naval communications base at Exmouth.
The original article contains 306 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 46%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Was it deliberate or incompetence? 🤔
i think a lot of authoritarian dictator moves bring up this same question. is it for plausable deniability? easiest to cover up?
If anyone else is interested in details on the effect of active sonar on divers, I found this https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/93222
Sonar is fucking terrifying. It’s lethal to marine life as well as humans, and the fact that we’re happy to spam it out into the ocean is an ecological tragedy.
It’s either international waters or it isn’t.
If it’s international waters, then this isn’t a story. If it’s not, then China violated the sovereignty of a foreign state’s territorial waters.
That’s not exactly how it works. There are “territorial waters” which are entirely under the control of the state. And there is the “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ) outside of that, where the state has rights to resources. But the surface is “international waters”. This incident happened in the EEZ.
EEZ does not restrict the operations of other boats, as has been repeatedly established by the US in the Taiwan Strait, the Paracel Islands, the Spratly Islands, and elsewhere in the South China Sea.
