An international team of rescuers on Tuesday pulled to safety a US explorer who spent nine days trapped deep in the narrow tunnels of a Turkish cave with internal bleeding.
"Mark Dickey was removed from the last exit of the cave," the Turkish Caving Federation said, adding that the "cave rescue part of the operation has ended successfully."
The 40-year-old explorer developed stomach problems while examining the depths of the Morca Cave, a remote complex of twisting underground passageways in southern Turkey's Taurus Mountains.
The cave, Turkey's third-deepest, reaches nearly 1.3 kilometers (0.8 miles) below ground at its lowest point.
Dickey fell ill at a depth of 1,120 metres (3,695 feet), sparking what organisers said was one of the largest and most complicated underground rescue operations ever mounted.
An international team of 200 rescuers, fellow explorers and medics began to cautiously pull Dickey to safety after first giving him infusions of blood.
They first strapped him to a stretcher, which sometimes needed to be lifted vertically by rope through particularly narrow passageways.
The teams pulling the ropes would occasionally take breaks, climbing back up to the surface before returning underground.
"We congratulate all those who contributed," the Turkish Caving Federation said.
- 'Saved my life' -
Officials said Dickey's health has been steadily improving for a few days.
"He is in good health in general. He continues to be fed with liquids," Cenk Yildiz, the head of the local branch of Turkey's emergency response service, told reporters late on Sunday.
"We have resolved his stomach bleeding issues with plasma and serum support."
In a video recorded on Wednesday, Dickey thanked the Turkish government for its help.
"The quick response of the Turkish government to get the medical supplies that I needed, in my opinion saved my life," Dickey said.
The European Cave Rescue Association (ECRA) called Dickey an experienced explorer with a medical background.
The New York state native is a "well-known figure in the international speleological community, a highly trained caver, and a cave rescuer himself," the ECRA said.
"In addition to his activities as a speleologist, he is also the secretary of the ECRA medical committee and an instructor for cave rescue organizations in the USA."
The crackdown was increasing, the screws of repression getting tighter, in the weeks leading up to the first death anniversary of Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina Amini.
The 22-year-old’s death in police custody on September 16, 2022, sparked protests across Iran for months until the authorities responded with brutal tactics, forcing protesters indoors or into exile. But with the anniversary of Amini’s death approaching, the regime was taking no chances.
Weeks ahead of the one-year milestone, the families of protesters killed by security forces were barred from holding commemorative gatherings at their graves, in what Amnesty International called the “cruellest restrictions”. Several women’s rights activists were also detained and accused of planning events to mark the death anniversary, according to Human Rights Watch.
A year ago, Amini was arrested by Iran’s Gasht-e-Ershad – or guidance patrols, better known as the “morality police” – for “improperly” wearing the mandatory hijab.
As enraged female protesters took to the streets, many defying the hijab rules – some burning their headscarves and cutting locks of hair – there were reports suggesting the Gasht-e-Ershad had been suspended.
But since mid-July, the morality police squads have been back on Iran’s streets, aided by other security forces. In early August, President Ebrahim Raisi took to the airwaves to tell the Iranian people they should not “worry” because, he promised, “the removal of the hijab will definitely come to an end”.
A new “Hijab and Chastity” bill is now working its way into law, with a package of repressive measures, including exorbitant fines for hijab offenders and increased police surveillance.
Iranians have a lot to worry about, including the rising cost of living, hyperinflation, corruption, economic collapse, and isolation under international sanctions while the regime plays hardball in nuclear negotiations.
The prospect of women revealing their hair in public does not top the list of concerns for most Iranians.
But for their unpopular president, it’s a major worry. The veil in Iran symboliezs much more than just a hair-covering garment. The death in custody of one young woman, hailing from the marginalized Kurdish-Sunni periphery of the official Shiite state, exposed the weakness of the Islamic Republic four decades after the 1979 revolution.
A year after Amini’s demise, that chapter in Iran’s post-revolutionary history is still being written and it could have dramatic consequences for the country – as well as the international community.
‘A very fragile moment for Iran’
Since the protests erupted last year, Iranian authorities have used a combination of old and new measures to suppress public anti-regime displays.
Security forces killed at least 537 protesters, the majority in the first months of the protests, according to an April 4 report by Oslo-based NGO, Iran Human Rights. At least seven men have been executed in connection to the protests following “hasty proceedings”, noted a UN-appointed Independent International Fact-Finding Mission.
The appointment of the fact-finding mission on November 24 was hailed as a “landmark” by rights groups and came after intense negotiations at the Geneva-based Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
In its first oral report presented in July, the fact-finding mission noted that Iranian authorities had not yet responded to repeated requests for a visit. “Even today, ten months after the events, no official data is publicly available regarding those arrested, detained, charged or convicted in connection with the protests,” the team noted.
In other words, it was business as usual for the Iranian regime after yet another crackdown on yet another round of protests that have been erupting with increased frequency over the past decade.
But this time, some unfamiliar suppression tactics were also applied, and they were disquieting.
As the number of defiantly unveiled women in public soared, the Islamic regime targeted prominent female influencers, including actresses, with dubious psychiatric diagnoses. As judges sentenced women to treatment for “anti-family personality disorder”, Iranian mental health organizations warned that the authorities were “exploiting psychiatry”.
A year after Amini’s death in custody, the figures may be disputed, but the facts are clear. “The government has very effectively crushed the protests that erupted last year. But anger at the regime is even worse,” said Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Washington DC-based Stimson Center. “The regime has been very effective in terms of repression, but it’s been a total failure at improving the lives of ordinary Iranians.”
The explosive mix of public rage and regime suppression makes it hard to say who really won the day, much less the year. “It’s a mixed picture: on the one hand, society is miserable, angry, restive. On the other hand, Iranians have shown that the regime no longer calls the shots,” said Slavin. “It’s a very fragile moment for Iran.”
‘Women, Life, Freedom’
The fragility was exposed last year by women, the officially fragile 51 percent of Iran’s 87 million population. Adopting the rallying cry, “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” – Women, Life, Freedom – Iran’s women led the latest charge against the regime with a mix of courage, creativity and doggedness that electrified the world.
Since the 1979 revolution, women have been used as a political symbol by the Islamic Republic, with the veil promoted as the most manifest proclamation of its values. More than 40 years later, that political symbolism provided the seed for its own unraveling.
“Heavily discriminating against women in all aspects of life, the Islamic Republic’s policies on compulsory veil emerges throughout the years as the symbol of its control over women’s bodies and life. Regardless, Iranian women have remained courageously outspoken for their rights, while having paid and continuing to pay a high price for their dissent,” said Azadeh Pourzand, senior fellow at the Center for Middle East and Global Order.
While the government is pushing for the adoption of the “Hijab and Chastity” law, Slavin doubts it will end the regime’s worries. “Overall, the government has lost the battle for the obligatory hijab – they can’t arrest all the women going around without hijab,” she explained. “They’ve lost the battle, they simply refuse to admit it.”
Despite the tightened restrictions, many Iranian women are putting up a fight, with some displaying exceptional bravery. Weeks before Amini’s death anniversary, firebrand Iranian labour activist Sepideh Qoliyan got a warning by a criminal court judge that she could face additional charges if she continued to appear in court without a veil.It came a month after an earlier court hearing was cancelled because Qoliyan refused to wear the mandatory hijab. The 28-year-old activist remains in prison while she fights two separate charges, including insulting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Meanwhile Nazila Maroufian, the Iranian-Kurdish journalist who interviewed Amini’s father last year, walked out of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison on August 13 and posted a photograph on social media of herself without a headscarf and the slogan, "Don't accept slavery, you deserve the best."
She was promptly detained again, released on bail and then re-arrested. On September 4, an Iranian judge sentenced Maroufian to a year in prison, ensuring the now-prominent journalist would be locked behind bars on Amini’s first death anniversary.
New generation rejects ‘patience’
Iranian women and girls taking to the streets were immediately joined by male protesters who grasped the symbolism of the veil in their demand for total change. The unofficial anthem of the Women, Life, Freedom movement was written by a young man and recorded in his bedroom in the Iranian coastal city of Babolsar.
Shervin Hajipour wove tweets of protest-supporters into the lyrics of his song, Baraye, or “For” in English. He was arrested and released on bail when he won a special Grammy award in February for his powerful, haunting single.
The song title comes from #Baraye, a hashtag Iranians used to explain why they were protesting. One of the tweets in the song simply states, “For yearning for an ordinary life” – a central demand of the primarily young protesters.
The Gen Z component of the protests was particularly noteworthy, distinguishing it from previous Iranian protest movements, explained Iran-born and UK-based Pourzand.
At 38, Pourzand belongs to the “Green movement” generation of protesters who took to the streets to challenge the results of the 2009 presidential elections, which denied a victory to the reformist candidate.
“My generation thought patience is a value, that incremental change is a value worth holding on to,” she explained. “We thought we had to pick between the bad and worse. ‘Better to work for the bad – what if, what comes next is the worse,’ describes the reform movement.”
Iran’s Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2010 – or 1375-1389 in the Iranian calendar and dubbed DaheHashtadi (“the Eighties”) in Persian – displayed the impertinence and impatience of youth. This included a total rejection of the post-1979 edifice, complete with ripping and burning posters of Supreme Leader Khamenei.
The leaderless, social media-driven nature of the movement raised immediate doubts over whether the young protesters had the mobilization capacity to topple the regime.
But in their failure to bring immediate change, Generation Dahe Hashtadi did not fare any worse than their parents, analysts concede a year later. What’s more, in a country with a long protest culture, they fundamentally altered the discourse by calling for a dismantling of the republic itself.
“They got together, they figured a message quickly and effectively, and the whole world heard it,” said Pourzand. “'Women, Life, Freedom' divided Iran’s history into a ‘before’ and ‘after’. I don’t think the regime can take it back to before this movement.”
Referring to the Iranian saying, “the fire under the ashes”, Slavin says the smoldering anger cannot be extinguished by a deeply discredited regime using the old repression techniques. “Iranians understand this is a long struggle, they are very determined,” she explained.
A year after Amini’s death, the state of the republic appears to be as frail as that of the 84-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. “People have been calling 'Death to the dictator' for the past four to five years. They hate him,” said Slavin.
Khamenei’s most likely successor list includes President Raisi and the octogenarian supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei. Both men lack popular support, according to analysts. “Khamenei has been trying to arrange for his son to succeed him. The hypocrisy of the regime is beyond all calculations,” said Slavin. “Someday it will fall and people will celebrate – just when and how it happens, people can’t predict.”
A veteran zookeeper from Germany was killed on Tuesday by a rhinoceros at the Salzburg Zoo in Austria as she was completing routine tasks, according to the zoo director. "She was always very careful and very thoughtful and had extremely good instincts with animals," managing director Sabine Grebner said at a press conference on Tuesday. The experienced keeper, a 33-year-old German woman from the state of Bavaria, was killed early Tuesday morning while trying to apply insect repellent to a 1.8-ton female rhino, Grebner said. The incident also injured a 34-year-old keeper who rushed to help his ...
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that the Soviet Union's decision to send tanks into Hungary and Czechoslovakia to crush mass protests during the Cold War was a mistake. "It was a mistake," Putin said when asked about perceptions of Russia as a colonial power due to Moscow's decision to send tanks into Budapest in 1956 and into Prague in 1968. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising was crushed by Soviet tanks and troops. Many people were killed in Budapest. The 1968 Prague Spring was ended when Soviet forces invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Puti...
SEOUL/WASHINGTON — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has arrived in Russia, Japanese media reported on Tuesday, for what the Kremlin said would be a comprehensive discussion with President Vladimir Putin amid warnings from Washington they should not agree on an arms deal.
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By Maayan Lubell JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Thousands of Israeli anti-government protesters rallied at the Supreme Court on Monday, the eve of a historic hearing on a bid by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition to curb the court's powers. Forming a sea of blue and white Israeli flags, the protesters chanted "democracy" in a show of support for the Supreme Court, which on Tuesday will convene its entire 15-judge bench for the first time in Israeli history. The judges will hear appeals against a judicial amendment that was passed by Netanyahu's national-religious coalition in July and which s...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The Biden administration is close to approving the shipment of longer-range missiles packed with cluster bombs to Ukraine, giving Kyiv the ability to cause significant damage deeper within Russian-occupied territory, according to four U.S. officials. After seeing the success of cluster munitions delivered in 155 mm artillery rounds in recent months, the U.S. is considering shipping either or both Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that can fly up to 190 miles (306 km), or Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles with a 45-mile range packed ...
When Ani Aponte fled Venezuela with her family four years ago to escape her home country's economic collapse, she dreamed of a better future in Brazil.
But the deadly cyclone that battered the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul last week has now taken her and her husband's jobs and upended their dreams.
Aponte, 34, and her husband, Yeiferson, both worked at a tannery in the small city of Mucum, one of the places hit hardest by the cyclone, which unleashed torrential rain and flooding on the region, leaving nearly 50 people dead and dozens missing.
The storm left much of Mucum, a city of 4,600 people, in ruins. It spared Aponte's home, but devastated the factory where she and her husband worked.
The tannery, which employed around 500 people, was partially destroyed, its machines swept away by the current.
"Our company was lost in the floodwaters. We don't know what to do," Aponte told AFP.
Aponte and her husband, who live with their three-year-old son and two relatives, lost their source of income to the disaster. The money also supported their 12-year-old son and Aponte's mother and ailing father, who live together back in Venezuela.
She says although the work at the tannery was hard, she and her family always felt welcome and safe in Mucum.
"They adopted us as if we were from here," she said.
Left jobless by the storm, Aponte has turned to volunteering in a local church, sorting clothing donations for people forced from their homes or otherwise affected by the cyclone -- more than 150,000 in all.
"First, let's help get through the disaster. Then we'll figure out what to do," she said.
She and her husband have taken in two Venezuelan colleagues who had to flee as the floodwaters invaded their home.
Better life
The United Nations says more than seven million migrants have left Venezuela as the oil giant's economy has collapsed under socialist President Nicolas Maduro, in power since 2013.
Around 425,000 Venezuelans live in neighboring Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Around 100 of them wound up in Mucum, which has welcomed them "marvelously," according to 52-year-old Luis Enrique Duarte, who also worked at the tannery.
Aura Garcia, 57, who fled to Brazil five years ago, said she always liked peaceful, prosperous Mucum -- especially compared to Venezuela, where there is "no food, no medicine, no work, no nothing."
She and her colleagues now face an uncertain future.
But none talk of returning to Venezuela.
"Not in my wildest dreams. As long as that president is there, I'm not going back," said Garcia, referring to Maduro.
By Alexander Cornwell and Ahmed Eljechtimi TALAT N'YAAQOUB, Morocco (Reuters) - Villagers wept for their lost relatives in the rubble of their homes on Monday as the death toll from Morocco's deadliest earthquake in more than six decades rose to almost 2,700 and rescuers raced against time to find survivors. Search teams from Spain, Britain and Qatar were joining Moroccan rescue efforts after a 6.8 magnitude quake struck late on Friday night in the High Atlas Mountains, with the epicentre 72 km (45 miles) southwest of Marrakech. The state news agency reported the death toll had risen to 2,681 ...
It was delicate work for the searchers to remove the woman's body from the rubble of a village that effectively ceased to exist in Morocco's deadliest earthquake in over six decades.
Her 25-year-old fiancé Omar Ait Mbarek watched the digging Sunday with his eyes red and full of tears, and surrounded by onlookers, just kilometers from the quake epicentre in the Atlas Mountains.
He was on the phone with her when the shaking started late Friday and he heard kitchen utensils crash to the floor before the line cut out. He knew she was gone.
"What do you want me to say? I'm wounded," he told AFP after Mina Ait Bihi, weeks from becoming his wife, was carried away in blankets to a makeshift cemetery that already held 68 others.
The men who had carefully used their hands to scoop away the dirt that covered her also found her phone and handed it over to the grieving man.
All around him the village of Tikht, previously home to at least 100 families, was a tangle of timbers, chunks of masonry as well as broken plates, shoes and the occasional intricately patterned rug.
"Life is finished here," said Mohssin Aksum, 33, who had family living in the tiny settlement. "The village is dead."
- Traditionally built homes -
Like many of the hardest-hit villages, it was a small rural place with a significant number of buildings constructed with a traditional mix of stone, timber and a mortar composed of mud.
Dozens of residents, mourning relatives and soldiers were gathered at the ruins. Several said they couldn't remember any previous earthquake in the area.
"It wasn't something people here thought about when building their houses," said 23-year-old student Abdelrahman Edjal, who lost most of his family in the disaster.
But the quality of the building materials was not uppermost in his mind as he sat on a boulder among the rubble under the strikingly blue sky and surrounded by mountains.
He had gone out for a walk after dinner when the shaking began, and saw people trying to escape their collapsing houses.
He pulled his own father from the ruins of the family home, but the injuries were too serious. He died with his son close by.
Twisted steel reinforcement rods poked out of the debris in Tikht, so clearly some more recent building techniques were part of the local structures.
Daily life was already hard in the area, which is a roughly two-hour drive from the jobs that Marrakesh's massive tourist industry can offer.
- 'Less than nothing' -
Aksum, who has local roots but lives in Rabat, said the quake has taken away the little bit that people had.
As he spoke, he gestured to his nose, and said the livestock that had been kept by locals was now buried under the debris and beginning to rot.
"Now, people have less than nothing," he noted.
While he spoke, two young men in clothing streaked with the white dust of the ruins sat on boulders and cried, but said nothing.
By Sunday, emergency housing in the form of yellow tents was visible on the road into town.
Members of the government's civil protection service were carrying camp beds from a military-type truck toward the tents.
Non-profit groups were also in the area, assessing what the people remaining in villages like Tikht need, beyond the obvious shelter, food and water.
Several people said they were still in shock over their losses and the scale of the damage, and could not say with any certainty what their next steps might be.
But Omar Ait Mbarek said he was sure of one thing.
"I will rebuild my house," he said, still holding his late fiancee's dust-covered phone, before walking away into the debris.
A Dutch court on Monday sentenced former Pakistan international cricketer Khalid Latif to 12 years in prison for urging the murder of anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders.
Latif, 37, had offered 21,000 euros ($22,500) for the head of Wilders in an online video after the firebrand lawmaker sought to arrange a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
"It was not a stretch to think that somebody around the world would have taken heed of the call to kill Mr Wilders," presiding judge G. Verbeek told the court.
"The accused knew this and his call fueled the fire to have Wilders killed."
It is extremely unlikely that Latif, who was convicted in absentia, will serve his sentence. Dutch authorities have sought in vain to question Latif over the case and requested legal assistance from Pakistan, also to no avail.
"It's a good sentence, but it's a pity that the accused is not here in court," Wilders told reporters outside, sporting his trademark peroxide hairdo.
"It is no longer acceptable that the Pakistani authorities refuse to cooperate. I am going to ask the prime minister to ensure that Khalid Latif is arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the Netherlands," he added.
Wilders cancelled the cartoon contest after protests broke out in Pakistan and he was inundated with death threats. He has been under 24-hour state protection since 2004.
In the Netherlands, the plan to stage the contest was criticized widely with politicians, local media and ordinary citizens slamming the idea as needlessly antagonizing Muslims.
But the call to kill Wilders appeared to resonate in the real world, with a Pakistani man sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2019 for plotting his assassination in the wake of the cancelled contest.
Judge Verbeek said Latif's video was not just an attack on Wilders personally, but also on the concept of free speech in the Netherlands.
Latif played five one-day internationals and 13 T20 internationals for Pakistan but was banned from cricket for five years in 2017 for spot-fixing in a Pakistan Super League match in Dubai.
His last Pakistan appearance was against the West Indies in Abu Dhabi in September 2016.
However, Verbeek said that Latif had benefitted from his fame as an international cricketer to "add oil to the fire" at a time when the Netherlands was already the target of several threats.
The Golden Lion in Venice was awarded Saturday to a hilarious and shockingly explicit reworking of Frankenstein, "Poor Things", starring Emma Stone as a sex-mad reanimated corpse, which had festival-goers in stitches.
An ongoing Hollywood strike may have robbed Venice of its usual bevy of stars, but its strong selection showed the world's oldest film festival was still a launchpad for Oscar contenders.
"Poor Things" by Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos was labelled an "instant classic" by critics. It looks set to repeat the success of his 2018 film "The Favourite", which won two awards in Venice on its way to a string of international prizes.
Stone plays Bella, a woman brought back to life with an infant's brain by a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe).
Accepting the award, Lanthimos said the film "couldn't exist without another incredible creature, Emma Stone", who could not appear due to the strike.
The film features some of the most explicit sex ever seen in an A-list Hollywood film as Stone's character discovers -- and very much enjoys -- her sexuality.
It brilliantly skewers the way men try and fail to control the innocent Bella -- particularly a rogueish Mark Ruffalo -- triggering bursts of spontaneous applause and riotous laughter from audiences in Venice.
- 'Terrifying' AI threat -
The Volpi Cup for best actress went to 25-year-old Cailee Spaeny, who said she was "overwhelmed by the responsibility" of portraying Elvis Presley's wife in Sofia Coppola's "Priscilla".
Best actor went to Peter Sarsgaard for his performance as a man living with dementia in "Memory", playing alongside Jessica Chastain.
He used his speech to back the Hollywood strike and warn of the "terrifying" threat from artificial intelligence, one of the key issues in the dispute.
"If we lose that battle in the strike, our industry will be the first of many to fall," Sarsgaard said.
Independent films like "Memory" and Michael Mann's "Ferrari" were given exemptions by the unions, allowing the stars to come to Venice.
Chastain earlier said that actors had been silenced for too long about "workplace abuse" and "unfair contracts".
But director David Fincher, who premiered his assassin movie "The Killer" starring Michael Fassbender and has been closely associated with Netflix, triggered controversy by saying he understood "both sides".
- 'Deprived of dignity' -
The winners were chosen by a jury led by director Damien Chazelle ("La La Land") and including Jane Campion and Laura Poitras, who won last year with Big Pharma documentary "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed".
The runner-up Silver Lion went to Japan's Ryusuke Hamaguchi for "Evil Does Not Exist", a quiet and eerie eco-fable that follows his Oscar-winning "Drive My Car".
Venice audiences were floored by two brutal migrant dramas, and both went home with awards.
"Io Capitano", the epic story of Senegalese teenagers crossing Africa to reach Europe, won best director for Italy's Matteo Garrone ("Gomorrah") and a best newcomer prize for its star, Seydou Sarr, in his first-ever film.
"Green Border", a harrowing account of refugees trapped between Belarus and Poland, took the third-place Special Jury Prize.
"While we're sitting here tonight, the situation is still going on," said its Polish director Agnieszka Holland, accepting the award.
"People are still hiding in forests, deprived of their dignity, from their human rights... Some of them will lose their lives here in Europe not because we don't have the resources to help but because we don't want to."
One of the stranger entries, "El Conde", which reimagined Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet as a vampire, won best screenplay for writer-director Pablo Larrain.
- 'Laughless debacle' -
The strong line-up helped distract from the controversy around the inclusion of Roman Polanski in the out-of-competition section.
As a convicted sex offender, the 90-year-old director was already struggling to find distribution in the US and other countries for his slapstick comedy "The Palace".
The response from Venice will not have helped: it currently holds a resounding zero percent on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, variously described as a "laughless debacle" and "soul-throttlingly crap" by critics.
Another director effectively blacklisted in the US, Woody Allen, had a better time with his 50th film (and first in French), "Coup de Chance". Some critics considered it his best in years.
US President Joe Biden hailed closer ties with Vietnam on Sunday as the two countries struck a deal to deepen cooperation, including on semiconductors, but said he was not aiming to contain China.
The "comprehensive strategic partnership" with Hanoi is part of Washington's push to bolster its network of allies around Asia and the Pacific in the face of Beijing's rising influence.
Biden accused Beijing of seeking to bend the international order to its will.
"One of the things that is going on now is China is beginning to change some of the rules of the game, in terms of trade and other issues," Biden said.
Sometimes to Beijing's chagrin, Washington has invested heavily in building alliances as part of its Indo-Pacific strategy, including the Quad security dialogue with India, Australia and Japan, and the AUKUS pact with Britain and Australia.
Biden said he wanted to establish clear ground rules for relations.
"I don't want to contain China. I just want to make sure we have a relationship with China that is on the up and up, squared away, everybody knows what it's all about," he said.
Biden flew in to Hanoi straight from a G20 summit that failed to agree to a phase-out of fossil fuels and highlighted deep divisions over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The US president said he had met Chinese Premier Li Qiang at the G20 -- a meeting the White House had not announced -- and discussed "stability".
- Semiconductor deal -
Global supply chain shocks and fears about US reliance on China for strategic resources have further driven the push to boost ties with the likes of Vietnam.
The new partnership includes an agreement on semiconductors, with the United States committing to help Vietnam develop its capabilities and expand production.
There is also a section on rare earth minerals, which are used in the manufacture of high-tech devices such as smartphones and electric car batteries.
Vietnam has the world's second-largest deposits of rare earths after China and US officials say it has a key role to play as it looks to diversify and strengthen its supply chains.
Biden moved last month to restrict US investment in Chinese technology in sensitive areas including semiconductors, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
"This can be the beginning of even a greater era of cooperation," Biden said as he met Nguyen Phu Trong, the head of Vietnam's ruling Communist Party and the country's paramount leader.
"Vietnam and the United States are critical partners at what I would argue is a very critical time."
The deal puts the United States on a par with China -- as well as Russia, India and South Korea -- at the top level of the Vietnamese hierarchy of diplomatic relations.
Trong thanked Biden for his contribution to improving US-Vietnamese ties and said his country would work hard to implement the new agreement.
Although it is careful to be seen as not taking sides between the United States and China, Vietnam shares US concerns about its neighbour's growing assertiveness in the contested South China Sea.
However, The New York Times reported just ahead of Biden's visit that Vietnam was secretly arranging to buy arms from Russia in contravention of US sanctions.
The report cited a Vietnamese finance ministry document that laid out plans to fund arms purchases from the Kremlin through a joint oil and gas project in Siberia.
AFP has contacted the Vietnamese government for comment.
US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer told reporters that Washington acknowledged Vietnam's decades-long military relationship with Russia.
But he said there was "increasing discomfort on the part of the Vietnamese with that relationship", and the new partnership would help Hanoi "diversify away from those partnerships" by allowing it to source from the United States and its allies.
- Human rights -
Biden said he had raised human rights in his meeting with Trong and pledged to "continue our candid dialogue in that regard".
Vietnam has a dire rights record. Government critics face intimidation, harassment and imprisonment after unfair trials, and there are reports of police torture to extract confessions, Human Rights Watch says.
While Biden has often criticized China's human rights record, he has largely stayed quiet on Vietnam and campaigners feared he may not raise the subject.
On Monday Biden visit a Hanoi memorial to his friend John McCain, the former US senator shot down and held captive during the Vietnam War who in later years helped rebuild ties between the two countries.
