Senior government officials and scholars from more than 110 countries and 30 international organizations gathered in Beijing at the second High-Level Conference of the Forum on Global Action for Shared Development on Friday, where they highly praised China’s Global Development Initiative (GDI), saying that it’s bringing a new model of sustainable development cooperation that better aligns with the interests and demands of Global South countries. 

Under the GDI, China has brought tangible benefits to their countries’ economic and societal development on the basis of mutual respect, participants at the conference said, which are showcased not only in funding, creating job opportunities, and alleviating poverty, but also in upgrading their industries and addressing climate change.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi delivered a keynote speech at the opening ceremony on Friday, as he elaborated on the achievements made in the past three years since the initiative was proposed in 2021. By far, more than 80 countries have joined the “Group of Friends” of the GDI, with more than 40 countries and international institutions signing cooperation memoranda of understanding with China.

During last year’s high-level conference, China announced the establishment of a global project pool and raised a special development fund to support it. To date, the pool includes over 1,000 projects, with more than 500 projects completed or underway.

China will continue to expand the pool and increase its funding, prioritizing “small and beautiful” livelihood projects, said Wang, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee. 

In the context of a turbulent world with global economic recovery facing setbacks and the gap between the Global North and South continuing to widen, China, as a member of the Global South, firmly stands with developing countries, the top diplomat noted.

“We advocate for the advancement of dialogue and cooperation between the Global South and North, and we call on developed countries to fulfill their commitments and provide more effective and targeted support to developing countries,” Wang said. 

Prime Minister of the Republic of Vanuatu Charlot Salwai, who is visiting China from July 7-12, attended the conference, where he said the GDI “ushered in a beam of hope for global development.” Three years on, Vanuatu has become a true beneficiary of this great initiative, Salwai said. 

Thanks to the joint efforts by the two sides, the total value of trade between China and Vanuatu in 2023 reached $138 million, up by 27 percent year on year. “Although the world faces increasing uncertainties and instabilities, Vanuatu will always trust China as a reliable development partner,” the Salwai said.

During a panel on the sidelines of the conference on Friday, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, explained his “passion and sincerity” for voicing for the Global South. 

“The United States, my country, has many strange ideas. That's part of the reason for the division in the world … The whole idea that we're in some kind of confrontation is a profound misunderstanding,” Sachs noted. 

“The US has these two big oceans that separate it from the rest of the world, and from knowledge – they don't understand. So my first advice is that [US] congressman should get a passport and go see the world and visit these beautiful countries represented on stage here, then we would have a different kind of world,” he continued.

It is “ironic and notable” to see China hosting this “great forum” while in Washington, they are having the NATO Summit, which “is never going to solve anything: what is NATO going to solve except the waste of money and lives?” Sachs told the media at the panel.  

In response to Western hypes about China’s cooperation with the Global South countries is a way to “assert influence,” Hamad Al Hosani, researcher at TRENDS Research and Advisory, a think tank from the United Arab Emirates, told the Global Times, and said his country never sees it that way.

“China’s focus is on trade and investment, economy, technology, and we need China to help find solutions to many problems we’re having today. They don’t use guns and violence, and it’s not about politics,” Hosani said. 

China strongly condemns the extremely irresponsible and provocative remarks made by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg that were characterized by a Cold War mentality, blame shifting, and shirking responsibility on the Ukraine issue, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said on Friday.

On Thursday, Stoltenberg reiterated at the closing press conference of the NATO summit that NATO defines China as a "decisive enabler" of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and claimed that China has adopted more aggressive actions in its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and the South China Sea, Taiwan and neighboring countries, and is conducting a large-scale military build-up in a non-transparent fashion.

Lin noted that Stoltenberg's remarks were filled with ideological prejudice, reversing right and wrong, maliciously attacking China's political system, openly interfering in China's internal affairs, and maliciously distorting China's domestic and foreign policies.

Stoltenberg's remarks also shift blame and shirk responsibility on the Ukraine issue, misleading the international community's perception of China's normal military development and its relations with outside countries. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to this, said Lin.

Lin said that Stoltenberg has repeatedly ignored facts and China's repeated representations, using various occasions to smear and attack China, promoting the "China threat" narrative, and inciting anti-China sentiment. His intentions to cooperate with certain forces in suppressing and containing China has been fully exposed.

Such clumsy performances cannot help but arouse the world's vigilance and fully demonstrate that NATO, as a remnant of the Cold War and a product of bloc confrontation and group politics, only creates risks and challenges to world peace and stability, Lin said.

Lin said that certain Western politicians, who are nearing the end of their political careers, should not to attempt to leave a legacy through fanning the flames, provoking trouble, and shifting blame onto others.

China will firmly follow the path of peaceful development, injecting stability and positive energy into world peace and stability through its own development and international cooperation. At the same time, it will firmly safeguard its own sovereignty, development, and security interests. Viewing China as an "imaginary enemy" will ultimately lead NATO to reap what it has sown, Lin noted.

China on Thursday also voiced strong opposition and lodged stern representations on Thursday with NATO after it issued a direct warning to China for the first time regarding the so-called support to Russia in the Ukraine crisis.

Leaders of NATO's 32 members held a three-day summit in Washington, DC from Tuesday to Thursday. And for the third year in a row, the leaders of New Zealand, Japan and South Korea attended the summit as observers.

According to reports, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida held talks with South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on Wednesday, and both sides expressed hope that Japan and South Korea can maintain close cooperation with NATO.

Lin said at the Friday press conference that NATO, led by the US, as a remnant of the Cold War and the world's largest military alliance, claims to be a regional and defensive organization while continuously creating regional tensions and promoting bloc confrontation. It seeks excuses to strengthen its ties with countries in the Asia-Pacific region, which has aroused high vigilance among regional countries.

The Northeast Asia region, having suffered from the ravages of war, military standoff, and bloc confrontation, deeply understands the value of peaceful coexistence, solidarity, cooperation, and mutual benefit. The current state of peace, cooperation, stability, and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region, including Northeast Asia, is the result of the joint efforts of regional countries, said Lin.

The Asia-Pacific does not need military alliances, nor does it need "small circles" that provoke great power confrontation and instigate a new Cold War, said the spokesperson.

We hope that regional countries will adhere to the path of Asia-Pacific cooperation, play a constructive role in maintaining and promoting peace, stability, and development in the region and the world, and refrain from acting as the vanguard for NATO's expansion to Asia-Pacific, Lin said.

For the first time, astronomers have spotted a middleweight black hole in the nearby universe. The discovery could help solve the riddle of how even heftier black holes form and grow up with their host galaxies.

The black hole, which sits about 16,000 light-years from Earth in the center of star cluster Omega Centauri, is at least 8,200 times as massive as the sun, putting it squarely in a rare category of intermediate-mass black holes, researchers report July 10 in Nature.
Most of the black holes astronomers have detected fall into one of two categories. They’re either stellar-mass black holes, with masses up to about 100 times that of the sun, or supermassive black holes, which reside in the centers of galaxies and clock in at hundreds of thousands to billions of times the mass of the sun.

Black holes with masses in the middle could help span the gap between the two categories and explain how the supermassive ones got so big. But these black holes are a little like Bigfoot: There have been many claimed sightings, but most turn out not to be real (SN: 2/8/17).

“There’s this rather wide mass range, between 100 and 100,000 solar masses, where there are only very few detections,” says astronomer Maximilian Häberle of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. “It’s interesting to find out whether they are there, and we just don’t see them because they are hard to detect. Or maybe there’s also a reason why they don’t exist at all.”

One reason to think midsized black holes should exist is because the supermassive black holes astronomers have spotted in the early universe didn’t have time to grow so big if they were just eating gas and stars like black holes do today (SN: 1/18/21). If those black holes grew from mergers of intermediate-mass seeds, that could solve the puzzle (SN: 6/2/23).

“It’s like a missing link that is needed to explain the existence of the supermassive black holes,” says Texas-based astronomer and data scientist Eva Noyola, who was not involved in the new work. “If it’s proven that [intermediate-mass black holes] happen in dense stellar clusters, you have a solution there that’s pretty elegant and simple.”

So astronomers have been hunting for midsize black holes for decades, and searching Omega Centauri specifically since at least 2008. As the most massive cluster of stars in the Milky Way, it’s a relatively easy spot to search, and it may be the remnant core of another galaxy that merged with the Milky Way about 10 billion years ago (SN: 11/1/18).

“It’s basically a galactic nucleus frozen in time,” says study coauthor Nadine Neumayer, also of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Its black hole could be representative of all small galaxies’ black holes 10 billion years ago. “It tells us immediately something about the seed mass for black holes.”

But previous studies left it unclear whether Omega Centauri hosted a single medium-size black hole, or a bunch of smaller black holes close together.

Using 20 years of Hubble Space Telescope observations, Hӓberle and colleagues tracked the motions of 1.4 million individual stars in the cluster and searched for stars moving faster than expected.

The team found seven stars zipping around the innermost regions of the cluster at speeds between 66 and 113 kilometers per second — speeds that should have rocketed the stars out of the cluster altogether. The only way those stars could remain in the cluster is if a single massive object is holding them close, the team concludes.

The observations of superfast stars, combined with other observations through the years, should resolve the debate about the black hole in Omega Centauri, says Noyola, who was on the team that first claimed to see the black hole in 2008 and faced skepticism when they reported the result.

It wasn’t until over a decade later that astronomers nabbed undeniable evidence of an intermediate mass black hole. The first solid detection came from the LIGO gravitational wave observatory, which recorded ripples in spacetime shaken off after two smaller black holes merged to form a single black hole with about 142 solar masses (SN: 9/2/20). But that collision occurred about 17 billion light-years from Earth, making it challenging to study.

Omega Centauri’s black hole has two advantages over that one, from an astronomer’s perspective: It’s in our galactic neighborhood, and astronomers can continue to observe it. Hӓberle and his colleagues are planning to use the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, to get more information on the orbiting stars’ speeds, which will let them put better limits on the black hole’s mass.

Another group, led by astrophysicist Oleg Kargaltsev at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., is using JWST to look for light emitted by super-hot gas flowing into the black hole.

“It will be a completely independent, very different method of proving that there is an intermediate-mass black hole,” Kargaltsev says.