China has high-altitude balloon programme linked to army, White House says
The White House has determined that China has a “high-altitude balloon programme” for intelligence gathering.
It comes as tensions are mounting between the US and China after the US shot down a fourth unidentified object over North American airspace.
It was downed over Lake Huron in Michigan at 2.42pm local time on Sunday on President Joe Biden’s orders and came after objects were shot down in Alaska and Canada on Friday and Saturday.
John Kirby, the national security council coordinator for strategic communications, said on Monday that the US is still working to “better understand” foreign intelligence collection efforts.
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Moment ‘spy balloon’ is shot down off Carolina coast
“We were able to determine that China has a high-altitude balloon programme for intelligence that’s connected to the People’s Liberation Army,” he said at a news conference.
He says the balloons have provided “limited capabilities” but in the future as technology advances, it could become “more valuable to them”.
Mr Kirby says because the US cannot “definitively” identify what the risks of the balloons are, they reacted out of “an abundance of caution”.
Mr Kirby said the objects were not manned and there were no signs they had manoeuvring or propulsion capabilities.
He added: “We did assess that their altitudes were considerably lower than the Chinese high-altitude balloon and did pose a threat to civilian commercial air traffic.
“And while we have no specific reason to suspect that they were conducting surveillance of any kind, we couldn’t rule that out.”
He said the missions were “conducted successfully and safely”.
Efforts are under way to recover what remains of the objects to understand what they are, but the ones in Alaska and Canada are in remote terrain, making it more difficult to find them.
Outside of recovery operations, NORAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) is continuing to monitor the situation, Mr Kirby said.
‘No indication of aliens’
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, also addressing the media at the news conference, emphasised that the American people should hear “there is no indication of aliens” from the White House.
She joked with the journalists gathered for the briefing: “I loved ET the movie, but I am just going to leave it there.”
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‘There’s no indication of aliens’
Read more:
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Spy balloons and flying objects: A timeline of what and where fighter jets have shot down
Elsewhere, US defence secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters from Brussels that the “safety and security” of the American people is President Joe Biden’s “number one priority”.
He said: “I want to reassure Americans that these objects do not present a military threat to anyone on the ground. They do, however, present a risk to civil aviation, and potentially an intelligence collection threat. And we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
He added that the US has not been able to “definitively assess what these recent objects are”.
‘Very serious situation’
Earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the invasion of North American airspace is “a very serious situation” and is being taken seriously.
He said the issue will be part of discussions when he meets US President Biden.
Mr Trudeau said search and recovery efforts for the object shot down by a US fighter jet over Yukon territory on his orders on Saturday were under way, but the weather was posing some challenges in the search for debris.
“Obviously there is some sort of pattern in there, the fact we are seeing this in a significant degree over the past week is a cause for interest and close attention,” he said.
What we know so far about the flying objects:
- On 4 February, the first object, described by US officials as a suspected Chinese “spy” balloon, was shot down off the Carolina coast;
- On 10 February, a second object, described as being “about the size of a small car” was spotted by NORAD near Alaska and downed;
- Just a day later, on 11 February, a third object, again unidentified, was tracked entering US airspace over Alaska before drifting over Canada and was shot down;
- On Sunday, US officials confirmed another unidentified object had been shot down by fighter jets over Lake Huron on the US-Canada border near Michigan;
- A US F-16 jet fired a missile at about 20,000ft at the latest object amid concerns that its altitude and flightpath could endanger civilian planes;
- A senior US official, speaking anonymously, described the latest object as having “an octagonal structure with strings hanging off but no discernible payload”;
- Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said teams were searching for the object shot down over his country.
Britain’s ambassador to the United States will use a keynote speech today to underline the UK-US special relationship – while also attempting to ‘Reform-proof’ his own struggling government.
Lord Mandelson, the architect of New Labour, master of political spin and now Britain’s man in Washington, will use the 2025 annual lecture at Ditchley Park to offer a positive spin on a presidency which has proudly upended norms and frayed alliances.
In the speech, parts of which have been released in advance, Mandelson will describe President Trump as a “risk taker” with an “iron-clad stomach”.
Lord Mandelson was chosen as ambassador by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer late last year. He is a political appointee rather than a career diplomat.
And with intriguing language he will offer his take on the parallels between Trump and Starmer’s challenges and mandates.
He will say: “I credit President Trump’s political instincts in identifying the anxieties gripping not only millions of Americans, but also far more pervasive Western trends: economic stagnation for many, a sense of irreversible decline, the lost promise of meaningful work…
“These American concerns find their mirror image in British society, where Keir Starmer won an electoral mandate for national renewal which is similar to Donald Trump’s.”
Yet Mandelson delivers the speech at the end of a week when Nigel Farage was in town.
Screaming for his own form of Trump-like national renewal, the disruptive leader of the UK’s top-polling political party – Reform – was in Washington to hobnob in the Oval Office and to tell Congress that Keir Starmer is turning Blighty into North Korea.
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Farage likens UK to North Korea in Congress
Mr Farage enjoys lapping up the limelight in Washington, where he is an old-world conservative celebrity in the new MAGA White House.
His calculation is that the MAGA wave will reach the UK shores soon.
Reform‘s policy platform is a mirror of the Trump agenda in many respects, tweaked accordingly. The administration is happy to support him. There is a MAGA-Reform mutual respect.
And so it is politically savvy or unavoidably necessary for Lord Mandelson, New Labour‘s architect laying the foundations of the current UK government, to proclaim: ‘We respect Trump too.’
The truth is the government, like so many around the world, sees Donald Trump as an infuriating and unpredictable disrupter with the ability to upend norms at the stroke of a Sharpie. But they can’t articulate that publicly.
Instead, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ will cast Mr Trump as the consequence not the cause of the disruption to international systems, even if many argue that he can be both.
As a master of spin, strategy and ruthlessness, Mandelson clearly has an admiration for Trump’s political style and sheer chutzpah.
Lord Mandelson’s speech comes a week before Mr Trump’s UK state visit. Pic: AP
He will tell the Ditchley Park lecture: “The president may not follow the traditional rulebook or conventional practice, but he is a risk taker in a world where a ‘business as usual’ approach no longer works.”
At a time when the Labour government is struggling and feeling the heat from Farage and his disrupters, are these words to be read as a not-so-subtle message to Prime Minister Starmer?
Mandelson is an old-fashioned liberal. He hasn’t the stomach for ‘wokey’ politics or own goals like the arrest of Graham Linehan. Is there a frustration that the political party he built is now messing it all up?
“Indeed, he seems to have an iron-clad stomach for political risk…” he will say of Trump, decrying the tendency of previous presidents to descend “into an analysis paralysis and gradual incrementalism”.
Lord Mandelson may be Britain’s man in Washington now but, more than anyone else to hold the post, he is deeply integrated into the Downing Street machine.
He is tight with Number 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and was inside Downing Street when Friday’s reshuffle took place. A total coincidence I am told.
A week before the president’s state visit to the UK, Lord Mandelson’s speech is designed to steady a special relationship put under pressure by the return of Trump.
“Do we always have identical views?” he will say. “Of course not, we never have. And we are not looking for special treatment. Our alliance exists because it serves both nations’ interests, because the core values of Britons and Americans remain aligned, as the world around us becomes more threatening.”
Lord Mandelson will say Brexit has freed the UK to pursue closer ties with the US. Pic Reuters
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And, in a shapeshifting manoeuvre that only the original spin doctor could manage, Lord Mandelson, a cheerleading remainer in the EU referendum campaign, now casts Brexit as a liberator.
“Brexit has freed us to pursue closer US ties,” he will say in his speech.
“Britain has the opportunity to use its regulatory freedom and independence from European law to deepen American investment opportunities. This is crucial as, post-Brexit, we need to leverage every advantage we can to spur UK growth and employment.”
The ambassador is expected to concede that pre-referendum warnings of the demise of Britain’s trans-Atlantic clout have not transpired, while maintaining that Brexit has hit the UK financially with a net-loss to its economy.
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They say the British ambassador is the custodian of the US-UK special relationship. This ambassador has seen what the relationship looks like under Trump.
With trademark political gymnastics, he seems now to be both admiring of the Trumpian movement but also anxious that if Britain under Labour doesn’t get its house in order, then it too will get its own Trumpian disrupter.
Former US president Joe Biden has had surgery for skin cancer, his spokesperson has said.
It’s unclear when he had the procedure, but video from late August showed him leaving church in Delaware with a large, fresh scar on his head.
The spokesperson told Sky’s US partner, NBC News, that he was recovering well.
Mr Biden had Mohs surgery, which involves removing a layer of tissue, examining it under a microscope to see if any cancer cells remain, and repeating if necessary.
The 82-year had a basal cell carcinoma, one of the two most common skin cancer types, removed from his chest in 2023.
His doctor said at the time that all the cancerous cells had been removed.
The same year, Mr Biden’s wife, Jill, had two basal cell carcinomas removed from near her eye and on her chest.
The former president also revealed this May that he had stage-four prostate cancer – with the disease having spread to his bones and having a Gleason score of nine.
Such a score means the disease is “likely to grow quickly”, according to Cancer Research UK.
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His office said the prostate cancer was discovered when Mr Biden visited a doctor for urinary symptoms and that he was considering “multiple treatment options”.
“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” said a statement.
Officers detained 475 people during an immigration raid on a Hyundai factory for electric vehicles in Georgia.
The majority of those detained at the 3,000-acre site west of Savannah are from South Korea, according to Steven Schrank, special agent in charge at Homeland Security Investigations.
Mr Schrank said the raid was the “largest single-site enforcement operation” in the history of the agency and followed an investigation of several months, which involved leads from community members and former workers.
The spokesman for the South Korean foreign ministry, Lee Jaewoong, said there was a “large” number of South Koreans among those detained in the raid, but did not provide an exact number.
A ‘large’ number of those detained were from South Korea
He said the detained workers were part of a “network of subcontractors” and that the employees worked for several different companies on the Georgia site.
Mr Lee said South Korea’s foreign ministry is dispatching diplomats from its embassy in Washington and consulate in Atlanta to the site, and plans to form an on-site response team centred on the local mission.
“The business activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed in the process of US law enforcement,” Mr Lee added.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that agents executed a search warrant “as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into allegations of unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes”.
The manufacturing site, which employs about 1,200 people, has been hailed as the largest economic development project in the state’s history by Governor Brian Kemp and other officials.
The Hyundai Motor Group plant in Georgia. File pic: AP Photo/Mike Stewart
Hyundai Motor Group, the biggest automaker in South Korea, started manufacturing electric vehicles at the $7.6bn (£7.4bn) site a year ago and partnered with LG Energy Solution to build an adjacent battery plant, which is set to open in 2026.
ICE spokesman Lindsay Williams confirmed the raid and said agents were focused on the construction site for the battery plant.
LG said in a statement that it was “closely monitoring the situation and gathered all relevant details”. The firm said it couldn’t immediately confirm how many of its employees or Hyundai workers had been detained.
“Our top priority is always ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees and partners. We will fully cooperate with the relevant authorities,” LG said.
Hyundai and LG’s battery joint venture, HL-GA Battery Company, said in a statement that it’s “cooperating fully with the appropriate authorities” and paused construction of the battery site to assist the investigation.
Operations at Hyundai’s electric vehicle manufacturing plant weren’t interrupted, plant spokesperson Biance Johnson said.
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The raid is the latest in a series of sweeping ICE operations as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, which saw immigration officers raid farms, construction sites, restaurants and auto repair shops.
The US labour force lost more than 1.2 million immigrants from January through July, which includes legal and illegal immigrants, according to the Pew Research Centre, citing preliminary census data.
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