hello and welcome to our viewers joining us here in the united states and all around the world. you re watching cnn newsroom, and i m rosemary church. just ahead, hollywood writers heading to the picket line. thousands set to go on strike, a move that will bring productions to a updated on anying halt and send shockwaves through the industry. a dire warning from america s treasury secretary, saying the country only has about a month to pay its bills or risk an economic catastrophe. plus, we ll take you to a small island that s part of taiwan, but just four miles from china s border and almost totally defenseless against china s navy. live from cnn center, this is cnn newsroom with rosemary church. good to have you with us. and we begin in hollywood, where television and film writers are going on strike, a move that will very likely shut down most tv and film productions in the u.s. for the foreseeable future. the strike was announced hours ago after the writers gu
meetings with two house speaker, nancy pelosi last year and kevin mccarthy in california last month. just off the coast of kinmen, we see chinese sand dredgers. china is reclaiming land to build a new airport. the mainland coast getting closer every day. we all hope war doesn t break out here says the chairman of the visitors association. we think it s basically impossible for our military to defend kinmen. but they did defend the islands more than 70 years ago. tens of thousands of nationalist troops from taiwan repelled the mainland s communist forces. things are very different today. only a few thousand taiwanese soldiers remain. china now has the world s largest navy. taiwan s outlying islands are no longer strategically valuable and almost defenseless if the pla decides to make a move. many here are calling for taiwan s military to pull out completely.
China’s Sand Dredgers Are Eating Into Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines: US Coast Guard Should Step Up
Commentary
China’s sand dredgers have destroyed thousands of square kilometers of ocean floor in order to build sand islands on which they put military runways and docking facilities for submarines and aircraft carriers. The construction of a single such Chinese island, Mischief Reef (5.6 square kilometers) on Philippine maritime territory, impacted 1,200 square kilometers with plumes of sediment that smothered life on the ocean floor. This implies that the approximately 12.9 square kilometers that China created in the exclusive economic zones (EEZ) of the Philippines and Vietnam since 2013 impacted approximately 2,785 square kilometers of ocean floor.