Philippines to probe report of Chinese sewage-dumping at sea

The Philippines' defense minister on Tuesday ordered the military to investigate a report by a United States-based tech firm that hundreds of Chinese vessels were dumping sewage into contested areas of the South China Sea. China maintains a constant presence of coastguard and fishing boats in the South China Sea to assert its claim of sovereignty, including hundreds in the Spratly islands, where the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan, Vietnam and Malaysia also have claims. Simularity, an AI-based satellite image analysis firm, on Monday released public satellite images over a five-year period that it said showed damage caused by untreated human waste from Chinese vessels.

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