An American literary historian, a French paleoanthropologist, a Danish evolutionary geneticist and a German-Dutch radio astronomer have been named the winners of this year’s Balzan Prize

Elon Musk has been told Taiwan is “not for sale” by the island’s foreign minister after the tech mogul said Taiwan was an integral part of China. Speaking to the All-In Summit in Los Angeles uploaded to YouTube this week, Musk attracted criticism when he said: “Their [Beijing’s] policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because … the US Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force,” he said. Taiwan foreign minister Joseph Wu, posted on Twitter/X in response, saying that he hoped Musk could ask China to “open @X to its people“. China blocks X, along with other major western social media like Facebook. "Perhaps he thinks banning it is a good policy, like turning off @Starlink to thwart Ukraine’s counterstrike against Russia,” Wu added, referring to Musk’s refusing a Ukrainian request to activate his Starlink satellite network in Crimea’s port city of Sevastopol last year to aid an attack on Russia’s fleet there. “Listen up, Taiwan is not part of the PRC & certainly not for sale!” Wu said, using the acronym for the People’s Republic of China. This is not the first time Musk has annoyed Taiwan, which Xi Jinping wants to annex, claiming it is a province of China. Last October, he suggested that tensions between China and Taiwan could be resolved by handing over some control of Taiwan to Beijing. Meanwhile, this week has seen the largest scale Chinese military activity near Taiwan since major drills in April. On Thursday Taiwan’s defence ministry said it had detected 68 aircraft and 10 ships around Taiwan in the previous 24 hours, including 40 aerial crossings of the median line, prompting rumours of suspected military exercises, which have not been announced by China. Meanwhile, on Wednesday Chen Binhua, a spokesperson for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, accused the US and Taiwan of collusion to strengthen Taiwan’s defense capabilities. Maybe Musk should stay out of international relations and stick to Twitter/X. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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