Joe Biden has pledged to defend the Philippines from any attack in the South China Sea, as he hosted the first joint summit with Manila and Tokyo amid growing tensions with Beijing.

“The United States’ defence commitments to Japan and to the Philippines are ironclad,” the US president said on Thursday as he met the Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida.

The summit at the White House comes after repeated confrontations between Chinese and Philippine vessels in the disputed waterway that have raised fears of a wider conflict.

Biden’s pledge follows a bilateral meeting between Biden and Kishida and the upgrading of their alliance, which also drew strong condemnation from the Chinese government.

“Any attack on Philippine aircraft, vessels or armed forces in the South China Sea would invoke our mutual defense treaty,” said Biden.

The US president made a similar commitment when he hosted the Philippine president at the White House last year.

China claims almost the entirety of the South China Sea, brushing aside competing claims from several south-east Asian nations including the Philippines.

The so-called “gray-zone” harassment by China has included shining military-grade lasers at the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), firing water cannon at vessels and ramming into Philippine ships running resupply missions near the Second Thomas Shoal, which both Manila and Beijing claim.

In 1999, Manila intentionally ran a second world war-era ship aground on the shoal, establishing a permanent military presence there.

Beijing accused the Philippines of violating Chinese sovereignty in the South China Sea on Thursday.

The foreign ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, said China was “committed to managing the situation at Ren’ai Jiao with the Philippines through dialogue and consultation” but that the Philippines had refused to tow away the vessel. She said Beijing would “allow” the resupply missions if it was given prior notice and the ability to inspect and monitor the process.

Mao also accused Manila of ignoring a “gentleman’s agreement” made with the previous president, Rodrigo Duterte, who on Friday told the Chinese state media outlet, the Global Times, that he believed the US was directing the new Philippines government.

“When I was president of the Philippines, there was no quarrel in the South China Sea, we were able to return to normal (relations),” he told the nationalistic tabloid.

“I’m pretty sure that it’s the US that is giving instructions to the Philippines, telling the current Philippine government not to be afraid (to go for a fight) because the US will support Manila.”

Chinese coast guard ships also regularly approach disputed Japanese-controlled East China Sea islands near Taiwan, and the increasing tensions have prompted Biden to boost alliances in the region.

As they met around a horseshoe-shaped wooden table in the grand East Room of the US presidential residence, the US, Japanese and Philippine leaders hailed the meeting as “historic.”

Without mentioning China by name, they painted their alliance as a bedrock of peace and democracy in the Asia-Pacific region in contrast to authoritarian Beijing.

Marcos, seen as closer to Washington than his more China-leaning predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, said they shared an “unwavering commitment to the rules-based international order.”

Kishida said that “multi-layered cooperation is essential” and that “today’s meeting will make history.”

Biden, 81, also held separate talks with Marcos, 66, the son and namesake of the country’s former dictator.

The joint summit came a day after Biden hosted a lavish state visit for Japan’s Kishida during which he unveiled a historic upgrade in defense ties aimed at countering a resurgent China.

Directly warning of risks from the rise of China, Kishida said that Japan – stripped of its right to a military after the second world war – was determined to do more to share responsibility with its ally the United States.

China responded, saying the United States and Japan had “smeared” its reputation during Kishida’s state visit.

Beijing foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Washington and Tokyo had “attacked China on Taiwan and maritime issues, grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, and seriously violated the basic norms governing international relations.”

Japan and the Philippines are the latest Asia-Pacific allies to be hosted by Biden, who was joined by Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol at Camp David in August.

But Biden has also moved to manage tensions with China, holding a two-hour phone call with President Xi Jinping last week after a face-to-face meeting in San Francisco in November.

On Wednesday Biden said the major upgrade in defense ties with Japan was “purely defensive” and “not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region.”

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press

William Wordsworth’s best‑known poem may be addressed to daffodils, but his favourite flower in the year’s bright early succession was the lesser celandine. It’s a preference I share. On the whole, gardeners and botanists do not. Those I’ve canvassed for their opinion regard its cold-months, late-February-to-early-May profusion along verges and across lawns with something approaching disdain. I view it as our native miniature tournesol, or sunflower, following the brief sallies of sunlight, clamming up and drooping under the grey skies of a Welsh spring.

Here along the sodden vernal lanes of Radnorshire, its mounded growths of heart-shaped leaves and its vivid golden flowers on frail stems are ubiquitous, bringing a stellar texture to roadside banks and meadows. They impart and enrich the winter-grey grasses with sun‑tones before primroses and daffodils are fully in flower, then age before our eyes to a blanched drabness that still retains the charm of heart-shaped petals to complement its fleshy leaves.

There is something about the lesser celandine that resonates with our own blossoming and fading. From its gold-spangled profusion across every field, along the banks of each sunken lane at the earliest hint of spring, here’s a flower that is responsive to every climatic vagary the season can offer. Small wonder that Wordsworth thrilled to its responsiveness. He took it as correlative to his own sensitivity to nature and, in espousing its cause, defended it against an apparent disregard in English verse that paralleled the one he had suffered in that sphere.

It’s an odd flower – so delicate to be flowering in the harshest of seasons, so slight, and yet so vivid. Wordsworth actually wrote three poems to it, all of them fine and complex verses. He doesn’t mention the wealth of names bestowed on it (my favourite is “spring’s messenger”), nor does he refer to its exposed pale tubers, cabbage-scented, from which another name tells us of folk‑medicine usage: “pilewort”.

Such a wealth of cultural texture attached to this glowing early visitant! Enjoy it this year while you can, for its heliophilic brilliance is already fading, and you will have to wait till late February of 2025 to rejoice in it again.

A vast network of undocumented “ghost roads” is pushing into the world’s untouched rainforests and driving their destruction in the Asia-Pacific region, a new study has found.

By using Google Earth to map tropical forests on Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea islands, researchers from James Cook University in Australia documented 1.37 m kilometres (850,000 miles) of roads across 1.4m sq kilometres of rainforest on the islands – between three and seven times what is officially recorded on road databases.

These ghost roads, which include bulldozed tracks through natural rainforest and informal roads on palm-oil plantations, were “almost always” an indicator of future destruction of nearby rainforests, according to the study published in the journal Nature. They are “among the gravest of all direct threats to tropical forests”, the researchers concluded.

“They’re being constructed by a range of people, including legal or illegal agriculturalists, miners, loggers, land grabbers, land speculators and drug traffickers,” said Prof Bill Laurance, a co-author of the study. “By sharply increasing access to formerly remote natural areas, unregulated road development is triggering dramatic increases in environmental disruption due to activities such as logging, mining and land-clearing.”

A team of more than 200 trained volunteers and study authors performed the analysis over a combined 7,000 hours. They estimate 640,000 hours would be required to map all of the roads on Earth.

“There are some 25m kilometres of new paved roads expected by mid-century and 90% of all road construction is happening in developing nations, including many tropical and subtropical regions with exceptional biodiversity,” Laurance said.

“Worryingly, our new findings show that the extent and length of roads in the tropical Asia-Pacific is severely underestimated, with many roads being out of government control. In these findings, nature is the big loser.”

The researchers said their findings tally with earlier studies in Cameroon, Solomon Islands and Brazil, with road building almost always preceding local forest loss.

“Informally or illicitly constructed ghost roads can be bulldozed tracks in logged forests, roads in palm-oil plantations and other roads missing from existing road datasets for various reasons,” said Laurance.

Last year, the destruction of the world’s most pristine rainforests continued at a relentless rate despite efforts to slow the loss. While there were falls in Colombia and Brazil, the world lost an area nearly the size of Switzerland from previously undisturbed forests.

The survival of rainforests is essential to meeting the goals of the Paris agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C and the Kunming-Montreal framework on biodiversity.

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