BEIJING: The ruling Communist Party here has had a major rethink overnight and now says it’s happy for Australia to buy as many nuclear submarines as it likes.

In fact, China’s Defence Minister Wei Fenghe in a lengthy communique has offered Australia “all the financial capital it needs at very competitive rates” to buy any number of US Virginia-class nuclear submarines and to build countless conventionally armed, nuclear SSN-Aukus submarines to hit the water by the early 1940s.

“We were wrong to initially declare that Australia’s decision to have nuclear-powered submarines was a provocative act that could threaten peace between our two countries,” the minister states in the communique fully endorsed by President Xi Jinping, currently in Moscow urging Russian president Vladimir Putin to achieve peace in Ukraine by convincing that country to surrender unconditionally and immediately.

“But now we are happy for you to put so many subs into the waters of the Pacific Ocean and even the South China Sea so that if they all surfaced at the same time, it would look like the fish kill in the Darling-Baaka River at Menindee. We wouldn’t mind that at all.”

China’s change of heart is understood to be based on computer war games conducted by the nation’s military and security agencies over recent days, based on the strengths of the world’s major powers now and their expected positions of power in the decades ahead after the civil war in the United States, and projections about how China’s underwater attack drone and sonar technology, that can already blow those big fat nuclear boats out of the water like shooting tin ducks at a sideshow, will have dramatically improved even more by the 2040s.

Back in Australia, eminent war-studies experts and top-shelf military strategists Greg Sheridan, Peter Hartcher and Andrew Knox in a joint statement said China’s cunning plan to send Australia broke so that the People’s Republic of China was the only country capable of throwing billions of dollars of aid money at water-logged Pacific nations was all the more reason “for us to hit China hard and fast and put them right back in their box right now!”

“Let those slant-eyed, yellow Commie bastards feel the full lethal effect of a length of cold Aussie steel,” Sheridan added in a separate video, doing a reasonable present-arms and then an en-guard! in-out with twist to let the air in, using a pretty authentic-looking, full-scale assault rifle with bayonet bought at Toys ‘R’ Us.

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LONDON: Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has denied that a spirited defence of his behavior during COVID-19 lockdown rules is a strong signal that he wants to lead the country again.

Mr Johnson made the strong denials about any desires of a return to 10 Downing Street after riding a state-of-the-art drone from the top of 72-story The Shard in London Bridge Street to an interview chair in Victoria Tower Gardens close to the houses of Parliament at Westminster, where he told assembled media that current PM Rishi Sunak had his “full and total support at this point in time”.

Grilled earlier by a parliamentary committee investigating whether he knowingly misled the House of Commons over parties held by his office during those COVID lockdowns, Johnson said any lies he had ever uttered in public life would have been done completely unknowingly and without deliberate malice.