Melbourne Cup: Magic Circle aims to break curse of British trainers

(CNN)It's one of racing's holy grails, but the Melbourne Cup remains a mystical prize for British trainers.

Plenty have tried, but it's as if there is a curse on the British in Australia's famous "race that stops a nation." Hoping to break that spell this year is Magic Circle, trained by Ian Williams.

Another strong European contingent will descend on Melbourne for Tuesday's showpiece, but instead of the power houses of Godolphin or John Gosden, it is the less-heralded Williams who will be spearheading the British attack.

"It's a national event and is very exciting to be involved in," Williams told CNN Sport.

"To have a runner in such a race is a great privilege and to have a horse good enough to compete in such a race is an even bigger privilege.

"This year's event is probably one of the most competitive races the Melbourne Cup will ever have seen.

"And, of course, to win a race like this would be a huge accolade."

Williams trains not out of the Flat racing heartlands of Newmarket or Berkshire's Lambourn Valley, but in Alvechurch in the West Midlands.

Not quite as racing-glamorous perhaps, but perfectly placed as he became the first trainer to win at every racecourse -- Flat or jump racing -- in the UK.

Now Williams is attempting to make more history with Magic Circle, a six-year-old gelding he bought last October for owner Dr. Marwan Koukash, a former refugee from the Middle East who has built up a multimillion dollar business in England's northwest.

Koukash has quite the celebration planned if his horse does win on Tuesday.

"I fit into my G-string now," Koukash told racing.com. "When we win nobody at Flemington is going to stop me providing the best or most colorful celebrations we've ever had or likely to have.

"I'm going to take off my clothes off, keep my tie and thong and shoes socks on. I know they're going to employ security, but I know how to evade them and I'm going to deliver."

Magic Circle was already a six-time winner when he joined Williams' 100-strong string at Dominion Stables, and he has rewarded them further with stellar victories in the Chester Cup and a Group Three race at Sandown this season.

A Group race win qualifies the horse for the Melbourne Cup, and from that moment on the famous race and its $2.8 million first prize became the focus for Williams.

Magic Circle, who will be ridden by last year's winning jockey Corey Brown, is second favorite behind esteemed Irish trainer Aidan O'Brien's Yucatan for the two-mile (3,200 meter) marathon.

Another Briton Charlie Appleby will pose a strong threat with Cross Counter for Godolphin.Carnival atmosphere'

Williams is excited to be heading back for a second time after saddling a horse called Munsef to 12th in the race in 2009.

"It was one of the most amazing experiences to see a city the size of Melbourne literally grind to a halt for a horse race," he says.

"The whole atmosphere and build up the week before the race was incredible. There's an electric atmosphere."

On the day before the Melbourne Cup, tens of thousands line Swanston Street for a parade featuring cars carrying the jockeys, owners, trainers and connections of each of the 24 horses.

"It has all the pomp and glory of a carnival and a carnival atmosphere," adds Williams. "It's one of the most exciting racing experiences you can be involved with."

For European horses it's a serious undertaking, with two weeks in quarantine in Newmarket, followed by a 30-hour flight followed by a further two weeks quarantine at Werribee, a racecourse facility south west of Melbourne.

Williams' traveling head lad Fabrice Smeulders is on hand to look after Magic Circle and keep his exercise ticking over.Special horse'

The journey in itself isn't the barrier to victory. After all, Joseph O'Brien, son of famed trainer Aidan, led an Irish one-two-three with Rekindling ahead of his father's Johannes Vermeer and Willie Mullins' Max Dynamite last year.

Countryman Dermot Weld was the trailblazer, becoming the first non-Australian trainer to win the Cup in 1993 with Vintage Crop.

He followed it up with Media Puzzle in 2002, while trainers from Germany, France and Japan have since clinched the Cup.

European horses are regularly in the first three, but a victory still eludes O'Brien Sr. -- and the British.

"It's probably all about the horses," says Williams. "It takes a special horse to travel halfway around the world and run at its best and the English trainers haven't been as lucky as they could have been. Let's hope the luck is stacked up for one of them this year."

For all his success traveling around the UK, Williams has to fight to get noticed among the bigger yards backed by major breeding operations such as Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's Godolphin or O'Brien's Coolmore Stud-backed Ballydoyle yard.

"The big wins are always tough and it always boils down to the horses you're able to train," says Williams.

"We maybe don't have the quality in general compared with the Maktoum horses or large owners, breeders or trainers but we're lucky with what we've got.

"The challenge is to keep training winners to keep the business flowing and to keep interest in your abilities and what you achieve as a trainer to encourage people to send you the better horses to do the job with."

Whoever you are, the big prizes still mean a lot.

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This photographer is reimagining Norman Rockwell for the 21st century

n 1964, Norman Rockwell's Civil Rights-era painting "The Problem We All Live With" depicted Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old black girl, who entered an all-white school in 1960, walking between deputy 

U.S. marshals with volleyed tomatoes and a racial slur staining the wall behind her. In 2015, artist Maggie Meiners reimagined the famous composition to explore the plight of another youth: this time, a Dreamer -- a child of undocumented immigrants given temporary protection under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

In the photo, which she titled "Dream Act" (2015), Meiners directed actors and models to depict the scene of a young immigrant girl, standing alone and surrounded by a squadron of U.S. border-patrol agents. While Meiners created the image three years ago, it found new relevance under the current 

U.S. administration's "Zero Tolerance" policy, enacted this spring, which resulted in immigrant children being separated from their parents at the U.S. border.

From Nirvana to 'weightless worlds': How photos evolved underwater

"Dream Act" wasn't Meiners's first Rockwell-inspired work. The artist has long been fascinated by the painter's depictions of 20th-century American life, which charmed and shocked millions in the mid-1900s, and their power to adeptly illustrate an entire era.

Along with Rockwell's arresting scenes of daily life -- town gossips spreading the good word; a zookeeper on his lunch break while a lion eyes his peanut butter sandwich -- were works that depicted timely, charged issues, like Civil Rights-era desegregation. In the process, his works came to embody American culture of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and the social issues Rockwell and his peers were grappling with.

When Meiners visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 2010, she couldn't help but wonder what Rockwell's paintings would look like if they'd been made today -- a thought that laid the groundwork for "Revisiting Rockwell," her photo series that reimagines the legendary painter's canvases in a contemporary context.

Meiners was facing "Freedom from Want" (1941-1943), one of Rockwell's most famous works, when the idea struck her. The painting depicts an idealistic Thanksgiving dinner, in which several generations of a middle-class white family gather around a long table crammed with requisite side dishes (cranberry sauce and the like) as the matriarch serves a massive, glistening turkey.

When Rockwell made the piece for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, he set out to portray traditional family values -- the starry-eyed kind included in then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address, known as "Four Freedoms."As Meiners studied the painting, she pondered what an ideal American family looked like in 2010 -- and, more poignantly, "who gets to decide what an ideal family is," she told Artsy, from her home in Chicago's suburbs. "What if you're an orphan? What if you're adopted? What if you're gay?"

At the time, the state of California had recently overturned Proposition 8, the controversial same-sex marriage ban, and gay rights were on Meiners's mind. The court's decision gave the artist hope that narrow definitions of family were expanding, and she wanted to illuminate the shift.Meiners has a background in cultural anthropology, so before executing a Rockwell reboot, she wanted to take a deeper dive into the the social forces that informed Rockwell's work. She began researching his practice and the political climate of his time, and realized that many of the topics that Rockwell depicted (parenting, generational divides, freedom of speech, race relations) could be tweaked to reflect contemporary culture.

From there, Meiners chose a number of paintings and illustrations to adapt for "Revisiting Rockwell." Her selections were based on two factors. First, "it was about what I could actually execute," she recalled. Restaging Rockwell's compositions would be a complicated process, as many are filled with 10 or more subjects set against detailed backdrops. More importantly, though, a given piece needed to depict a subject that was "translatable to something that's going on today," she said. "I asked myself: 'What can I say now that's a little different than what was said in Rockwell's time?'"

To ease into the series, Meiner temporarily shelved her plan for an updated Thanksgiving scene and started with Rockwell's "The Tattoo Artist" (1944), a painting that portrays just two people (logistically, this would be easier to restage with sets and models than more complex, larger works). While Rockwell's piece shows a male sailor getting inked -- the names of six past lovers on his muscled arm crossed out in favor of the newest, "Betty" -- Meiner trades Rockwell's macho protagonist with a woman, toppling 1940s gender dynamics in the process. In her version, a woman can proudly brandish tattoos and boast many past lovers, too.Soon after, Meiners took on the rendition of "Freedom from Want" (1943), placing a gay couple at the head of the Thanksgiving table. Next was the lighthearted "It Went Viral" (2012-2017), in which Meiners restaged Rockwell's famous "The Gossips" (1948), replacing the landlines that townspeople use to play a game of real-world "telephone" with big, glowing smartphones.

However, most of Meiners's works in the series, like 2015's "Dream Act," strike a decidedly more serious tone. Her transformation of Rockwell's "Freedom from Fear" (1943) is particularly powerful. In his painting, parents tuck their children into bed while holding a newspaper emblazoned with all-caps World War II-era headlines, telling stories of widespread bombing overseas. Meiners replaces the white family with a black mother and her two young sons, who face violence that exists much closer to home. She grasps a copy of the Chicago Tribune, bearing the headline "Another Black Youth Shot," referring to police violence and structural racism in America.Like "Dream Act," Meiners's photographs are meant to provoke discussion. Her work often deconstructs and reconstructs American iconography and visual history. And though it took three years for "Dream Act," to make waves on the internet, the impact was profound. Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner even posted it on her Instagram account on June 29th. Under it, her caption read: "This photograph from @maggiemeinersprojects #revisitingrockwell collection tells you everything you need to know in a glance. Kids belong with parents."

The popularity of Meiners's "Dream Act," and the controversy it reflected, resembles the public response to Rockwell's most probing, incisive works. And that, of course, was Meiners's hope for "Revisiting Rockwell."

"That was my big takeaway from this project: things change," she said. "But there's always something else that needs to be worked on."

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Asia Bibi's lawyer flees Pakistan in fear for his life, associate says

Karachi, Pakistan (CNN)The lawyer representing a Pakistani Christian woman acquitted of blasphemy after almost eight years on death row, has fled the country in fear for his life, an associate told CNN on Sunday.

Asia Bibi's acquittal last week prompted violent protests by the Islamist movement Tehreek-e-Labbaik (TLP), and on Friday her lawyer Saiful Malook told CNN he was concerned for his life.

Two days later, an associate who asked not to be named for security reasons, told CNN that Malook had left the country "for Europe."

Supporters of Tehreek-e-Labbaik chant slogans Wednesday during a protest against the acquittal of Asia Bibi in Lahore.

His departure comes as Bibi's husband, Ashiq Masih, begged the United Kingdom, the United States or Canada to grant his family asylum, in a video message seen by the Guardian.

Masih also said he feared for his wife's safety in prison, and that the family had "no security and are hiding here and there, frequently changing our location," in an interview with Germany's public broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW).

He added that the Supreme Court acquittal had initially "created a ray of hope" and that Bibi's family "were excited that we would meet her soon."

"My daughters were dying to see her free," Masih told DW. But he said Bibi will now have to stay in prison until a review petition -- submitted by the Islamist movement TLP -- is decided.

Pakistani paramilitary soldiers stand guard outside the Supreme Court building in Islamabad on October 31.

In an effort to end protests, the government on Friday struck a deal with the TLP movement -- including agreeing not to oppose a review petition filed against the Supreme Court's judgment. The petition is not legally binding at this time.

The government also pledged not to oppose a TLP application to add Bibi to a list preventing her from leaving the country. And the government agreed to release everyone detained in connection with the protests.

Bibi's husband Masih told DW that the deal had "sent a shiver down my spine."

"My family is frightened, my relatives are frightened and my friends are also frightened," he said, adding that the judges had "delivered the verdict after taking into account all aspects of the case."

'Taking revenge'

Bibi, a mother of five from Punjab province, was convicted of blasphemy in 2010 and sentenced to hang after she was accused of defiling the name of the Prophet Mohammed during an argument a year earlier with Muslim colleagues.

The workers had refused to drink from a bucket of water Bibi had touched because she was not Muslim. At the time, Bibi said the case was a matter of women who didn't like her "taking revenge."

On Wednesday, she won her appeal against the conviction and death sentence.

The TLP had previously vowed to take to the streets if Bibi were released, and large protests broke out in Islamabad and Lahore soon after the ruling was announced.

Under Pakistan's penal code, the offense of blasphemy is punishable by death or life imprisonment. Widely criticized by international human rights groups, the law has been used disproportionately against minority religious groups in the country and to go after journalists critical of the Pakistani religious establishment.

Bibi's case has attracted widespread outrage and support from Christians worldwide. Conservative Islamist groups in Pakistan have demanded the death penalty be carried out.

Sophia Saifi reported from Karachi, Sheena McKenzie wrote in London. Laura Smith-Spark and Jennifer Deaton contributed to this report.

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Death toll rises to 29 in Italy's historic storms, flooding

A flooded house where nine people in the same family died after a small river burst its banks in Casteldaccia near Palermo on the southern Italian island of Sicily.

(CNN)With the deaths of 12 people in Sicily, the death toll in Italy's historic flooding has grown to 29, the country's interior minister said.

"Twelve dead in Sicily, people that were having dinner and were swept up by the water," Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said in a statement to the press in the northern region of Veneto.

Nine of the people were members of two families dining together when the house was submerged by water from a nearby river that overflowed suddenly, the Fire Brigade said on Twitter.

The Fire Brigade said on Twitter that its divers had found the bodies. Among the victims were two children, 1 and 3 years old.

The Civil Protection Agency said it's still looking for a doctor who had been on his way to work at a hospital Saturday night and is now missing.

High winds and heavy rain have devastated parts of the country over the past week, causing the worst flooding in at least a decade in Venice, damages of more than 1 billion euros ($1.14 billion) in Veneto and landslides that have cut off villages, authorities said.

The situation in Sicily is "dramatic," Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said Sunday.

Conte will call a cabinet meeting to announce a state of emergency in affected regions, he said at a press conference in Palermo, Sicily.

Italy's Civil Protection Agency continues to monitor the situation, issuing weather warnings via Twitter, while volunteers from the Italian Red Cross work to rescue people.

Several of last week's deaths were caused by falling trees as winds as strong as 190 kilometers per hour (118 mph) toppled acres of woodland, including the famous "Violin Forest" that provided wood for violin maker Antonio Stradivarius' instruments.

Two young people died south of Rome when a tree hit their car. Another was hit by a falling tree while walking in Naples.

Around 300,000 trees were flattened after winds swept through the Val d'Assa in the Asiago plateau, Roberto Ciambetti, president of the Veneto Regional Council, told CNN.

"Tens of thousands of tall trees were felled like toothpicks," he said.Much of Venice was under water as strong winds on Monday drove the high tide to one of the highest levels ever recorded.

St. Mark's Square became a lake, and floodwater spilled across the ancient marble floors of St. Mark's Basilica.

"In a single day, the basilica aged 20 years, but perhaps this is an optimistic consideration," Carlo Alberto Tesserin, head of the board responsible for St. Mark's Basilica, said in a statement.

Floodwaters also covered several dozen square meters of the 1,000-year-old marble pavement in front of the alter of the Madonna Nicopeia, a 12th-century icon, and submerged the Baptistery and the Zen Chapel, Tesserin said.Flood barrier project incomplete

This week's flooding was caused by a seasonal high tide and a strong low-pressure system in southern Europe that brought strong winds from the south and pushed water up the Adriatic Sea into Venice. This is the peak time of the year for seasonal flooding known as acqua alta, or high water, in the city.Flooding at high tide has become much more common in Venice because of climate change -- a problem that will continue to worsen as seas rise because of increasing temperatures and melting ice sheets, according to CNN meteorologists.

Work to install innovative underwater flood barriers to protect Venice from serious flooding, known as the Moses Project, has been underway for years. However, it has not yet been completed, thanks in part to corruption and spiraling costs.

A spokesman for the Civil Protection Agency in Venice told CNN that the Moses system could have mitigated the impact of salt water on the city's historic sites.

"Of course if the Moses project was completed the damages we are seeing now would not have happened," he said, "but the project was not completed because of the high cost."Children play in a puddle by the ancient Colosseum in Rome on Tuesday, a day after strong winds and rain hit the city.

The spokesman for the mayor's office called for the project to be completed.

"The Moses project is important to the Venetians," he said. "This infrastructure must be completed to avoid extraordinary waters, like what happened on Monday."

A spokeswoman for the New Venice Consortium, which is responsible for the Moses system, told CNN: "The work on the Moses began in 2003. At the moment it is 92-93% concluded."

Venice also has a system in place to monitor tides and warn of high water levels.

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Lion Air crash: Signal from black box lost, searchers say

Jakarta (CNN)Divers searching for the wreckage of Indonesian Lion Air Flight 610 can no longer hear a signal from the aircraft's missing cockpit voice recorder, the head of Indonesia's Search and Rescue Agency said Sunday.

Diving teams have been working to locate the device, commonly known as a black box, which could help investigators piece together the final moments of the brand-new Boeing 737 before it crashed, killing all 189 people on board.

Muhammad Syaugi, head of Indonesia's Search and Rescue Agency, Basarnas, told reporters in Jakarta Sunday that a "ping" from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was heard Saturday but "we don't hear the ping signal today.""We checked that spot, located around 50 meters from the location of finding the first black box. But we can't find the CVR yet," Syaugi said.

Meanwhile, the plane's first black box, the flight data recorder, was located Thursday, and investigators said it showed Flight 610 had performed 19 flights -- including its final flight.

Six black box experts from four different countries were now analyzing the flight data recorder to piece together the last moments of the new Boeing 737 before it crashed.

Syaugi said that the search operation had been extended and would continue through Wednesday.

The focus of continuing efforts will be to recover additional victim remains and to locate the CVR, he said.

Analysts say finding the cockpit voice recorder is imperative if investigators are to determine whether the crash has implications for other airlines collectively operating thousands of Boeing 737 flights around the world each day.Search for victims continues

Flight 610 was supposed to take its passengers on a one-hour journey from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang on the island of Bangka. Instead it crashed 13 minutes after takeoff. The pilots had asked to turn around but didn't transmit an emergency call.

At least 65 body bags have been gathered since the start of the search-and-rescue operation, though each bag could contain remains of more than one person.Investigators will have to rely on DNA samples to identify victims because of the condition and size of the remains found. Police have 181 DNA samples from victims' families and are working to match them to 272 human tissue samples.

Lisda Cancer, head of Disaster Victim Identification, told reporters Friday that just one person has been identified so far, a female, through a fingerprint.

On Wednesday, authorities started bringing relatives to the port to identify victims' personal belongings, which lay piled up next to cushions and other debris that appeared to be from the aircraft.

Epi Syamsul Qomar, whose 24-year-old son was on the flight, broke down in tears when he recognized his son's shoe.

"I saw my son's black sneaker," he told CNN. "I also saw his bank checkbook."One diver has died

The fast-moving currents and muddy waters of the crash site in the Java Sea have hindered recovery efforts since the plane came down Monday shortly after taking off from Jakarta.

On Saturday, Syaugi confirmed that one of the more than 100 divers involved in the search had died.

Syahrul Anto, 48, was found unconscious Friday after his diving partner noticed he had disappeared, said Syaugi. He was immediately brought back to shore and was attended by doctors but Syaugi said that "God had a different plan."

Anto was a qualified, senior diver "who devoted his life for our country," Syaugi said.

Syaugi, who is responsible for the diving team, said those involved "are very qualified divers, outstanding divers, with long experience. They are come from Navy special task forces, from the police, from the Basarnas team, and some are volunteers from diving clubs."Pilot reported plane issues

The jetliner had experienced technical issues the day before on another route, passengers aboard that flight revealed to CNN.

On Sunday the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft -- a new plane, which had only around 800 flying hours on the clock -- had flown Lion Air's Bali-Jakarta route and had experienced a significant drop in altitude, passenger Robbi Gaharu said."After 10 minutes in the air the plane dropped as if it was losing power. People panicked. It dropped about 400 feet," said Gaharu, adding that he had confirmed the height of the drop on a flight-tracking website. He said the drop felt like falling into "a really, really deep hole."

Lion Air confirmed to CNN that the aircraft that crashed on Monday had been used to fly the JT43 Bali-Jakarta route the day before, and Indonesian authorities confirmed that the pilot on Sunday's flight reported a problem with one of the plane's instruments.

Capt. Daniel Putut Kuncoro Adi, managing director of Lion Group, said that all information had been handed over to Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Commission and he could not answer any questions about the fault because of a nondisclosure agreement signed to accommodate the investigation.

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US Navy has had 18 unsafe or unprofessional encounters with China since 2016

(CNN)The US Navy has had 18 unsafe or unprofessional encounters with Chinese military forces in the Pacific since 2016, according to US military statistics obtained by CNN.

"We have found records of 19 unsafe and/or unprofessional interactions with China and Russia since 2016 (18 with China and one with Russia)," Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a spokesman for the US Pacific Fleet, told CNN.

A US official familiar with the statistics told CNN that 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, saw the most unsafe and or unprofessional encounters with Chinese forces during the period.

At least three of those incidents took place in February, May and July of that year and involved Chinese fighter jets making what the US considered to be "unsafe" intercepts of Navy surveillance planes.

While the 18 recorded incidents only involved US naval forces, the Air Force has also had at least one such encounter during this period.

"Our continued presence in the region highlights our commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific and demonstrates that the US Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows," Christensen added.

The US Navy told CNN that, in comparison, there were 50 unsafe or unprofessional encounters with Iranian military forces since 2016, with 36 that year, 14 last year and none in 2018. US and Iranian naval forces tend to operate in relatively narrow stretches of water, such as the Strait of Hormuz, increasing their frequency of close contact.

The Navy averages hundreds of air and sea operations annually in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan, and officials say they take such unsafe interactions seriously.

"Make no mistake, the safety of our forces is paramount, and any time there is an unsafe and/or unprofessional incident, we are concerned," a US Navy official told CNN. "To address these incidents, the US responds through appropriate diplomatic and military channels."

The relative frequency of such interactions raises the possibility of a collision or clash that could spark a crisis or even a conflict between the two major powers.

In 2001, a collision between a US surveillance plane and a Chinese jet fighter led to a major diplomatic crisis between Washington and Beijing.

The most recent encounter with China took place last month while the Navy destroyer USS Decatur was sailing within 12 miles of two of the Spratly Islands as part of what the US calls a "freedom of navigation operation."

During that operation, a Chinese destroyer came within 45 yards of the US warship, forcing it to maneuver to avoid a collision. The US labeled the Chinese warship's actions unsafe and unprofessional, while Beijing said the US was threatening the safety and sovereignty of China.

Tensions over militarization of islands

Secretary of Defense James Mattis is expected to meet Friday with his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Wei Fenghe, in Washington. Mattis has sought to cooperate with Beijing were possible while also pushing back on what the US sees as China's militarization of the South China Sea.

"We will cooperate where we can," Mattis said Monday at an event at the US Institute for Peace, while adding the US "will confront them where we must, for example, freedom of navigation in international waters and that sort of thing."

The US has ramped up its criticism of China's militarization of islands in the South China Sea, emphasizing that the US military will continue to operate in that area to contest what the US views as Beijing's excessive claims.

"What we don't want to do is reward aggressive behavior like you saw with the Decatur incident by modifying our behavior," Joe Felter, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for South and Southeast Asia, told reporters last month while Mattis was traveling in the region.

"That's just not going happen," he added. "We're going to continue to exercise our rights under international law and encourage all our partners to do the same."

Mattis said at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations meeting in Singapore last month following a meeting with Wei: "China's militarization of the South China Sea and aggressive action in international waters destabilizes the region and threatens shared efforts to promote security."

The US regularly sails vessels and flies aircraft in the South China Sea, but Beijing is particularly sensitive about the operations when they come near areas where the Chinese government has built islands and established military facilities on disputed maritime features.

Chinese warships will often shadow US vessels operating in the area, as they did last month while two US Navy ships were transiting the Taiwan Strait.

The Chinese military also kept a close eye on a recent joint US-Japan military exercise involving over 50,000 US and Japanese personnel,

US-China tensions have risen in recent weeks, with President Donald Trump accusing China of interfering in November's midterm elections and the countries embroiled in a high-profile trade dispute.

But on Friday Trump told reporters he had spoken with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the two leaders wanted to work towards a trade deal and also discussed North Korea.

The Trump administration also recently sanctioned Beijing over its purchase of Russian weapons systems.

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