China’s military yesterday showed off its machine-gun equipped robot battle “dogs” at the start of its biggest ever drills with Cambodian forces.

The 15-day exercise, dubbed Golden Dragon, also involves 14 warships — three from China — two helicopters and 69 armored vehicles and tanks, and includes live-fire, anti-terrorism and humanitarian rescue drills.

The hardware on show included the so-called “robodogs” — remote-controlled four-legged robots with automatic rifles mounted on their backs.

Handlers kept the dogs of war on the leash, demonstrating only their walking capabilities to watching journalists and top brass — not their shooting skills.

Opening the exercises, Cambodian armed forces commander-in-chief Vong Pisen said that they would “enhance the capabilities” of the two armies in the fight against terrorism.

Vong Pisen said that Cambodia would never allow a foreign military base on its territory, echoing previous assertions by Cambodian leaders.

After Cambodia dismantled facilities at Ream naval base near the Cambodian port city of Sihanoukville, built partly with US funding and having played host to US military exercises, China began funding its renovation.

Two Chinese warships docked at Ream in December last year for the first time after work began to expand the base.

Washington says that Ream could give Beijing a key strategic position on Gulf of Thailand near the disputed South China Sea.

Earlier this week, Cambodian army spokesman Thong Solimo told reporters that the exercises were biggest ever of their kind and China would cover the cost.

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The multibillion-dollar question of how Houston ISD intends to balance its budget went largely unanswered Thursday night, with district administrators revealing few specifics about job or program cuts as they unveiled a long-awaited spending plan for 2024-25.

HISD Superintendent Mike Miles said the district will move forward with slashing over $500 million, equivalent to about 20 percent of the district’s spending in the 2023-24 school year, due to an upcoming budget squeeze, but he only gave broad outlines of which departments would see the reductions. HISD likely will need to eliminate a significant number of jobs and scale back initiatives to trim $500 million next school year.

“We cut a lot of positions in central office and that’s very painful,” Miles said. “Anytime you cut, they’re real people, real jobs.”

HISD released its budget plan to the media Thursday afternoon at the start of the first and only scheduled board meeting about the budget, which trustees expect to vote on next month. However, destructive winds and power outages at HISD’s central office forced board members to cancel the workshop before Chief Financial Officer Jim Terry could present the budget to trustees. Miles spoke to the media prior to the meeting and release of the budget plan Thursday afternoon.

HISD is already behind its typical schedule for detailing its spending plans for the upcoming year. By mid-May last year, HISD had held four public budget workshops to explain plans to the board and gauge community members’ feedback, district records show. District officials plan to reschedule Thursday’s canceled meeting for May 23.

The delay in releasing detailed information to the public concerns elected trustee Sue Deigaard, especially with drastic cuts planned.  Deigaard and the rest of HISD’s elected school board technically remain in place, though all of their power has been temporarily transferred to a state-appointed board of managers as part of sanctions against the district.

“It’s easier for the distrust to grow if enough people don’t understand why this is happening,” Deigaard said.

Miles argues the deep cuts are necessary because the district is headed toward a “fiscal cliff” created by years of enrollment declines and HISD’s recent use of pandemic stimulus funds to prop up its budget. HISD is using roughly $325 million in federal stimulus dollars this fiscal year, the documents HISD released Thursday evening show. Those funds are set to expire in the fall.

Miles’ plan to balance the budget comes primarily from cuts to HISD’s central office, which includes non-academic operations, technology and curriculum, among numerous other departments.

School budgets, which largely cover teacher and campus administrator salaries, would stay relatively flat under Miles’ plan. 

The 130 campuses participating in Miles’ “New Education System” next year will receive funding increases to cover higher teacher salaries, bringing their average budget to $5.6 million. Many of the roughly 140 campuses not included in the program will see budget cuts, bringing their average total to $4.8 million, with roughly two dozen campuses required to shave 12 percent of spending due to enrollment declines.

HISD plans to offset next year’s deficit, in part, by selling $80 million in property and dipping into $130 million of its “rainy day” fund. That would leave $800 million in reserves, which Miles said is a healthy level to maintain the district’s strong bond rating.

While he didn’t detail layoff totals, Miles outlined the level of planned cuts to central office departments, including some that will see the biggest hits. Staff salaries make up most of the spending in the departments.

• The operations office would lose roughly $101 million, equivalent to 45 percent of its 2023-24 budget. Several thousand people work in the department, including custodians, bus drivers and numerous other non-teaching staff work.

• The human resources office would lose roughly $97 million, equivalent to 88 percent of its 2023-24 budget.

• The academics office would lose about $69 million, equivalent to 37 percent of its 2023-24 budget. The office includes employees who develop curriculum, support teachers and engage with parents.

• The information technology office would see roughly $68 million in cuts, equivalent to 58 percent of its 2023-24 budget.

How many of you remember when one of the NBA’s most famous players shared a documentary claiming that Jews had fooled the world into believing that they were God’s chosen people, including by fabricating the Holocaust?

Kyrie Irving’s promotion of “Hebrews to Negroes” came around the same time as antisemitic outbursts by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and caused only a relatively brief outcry.

Irving alternately played coy — saying that sharing the link didn’t constitute promoting it — and inflamed tensions, denying that he could be antisemitic by hinting that, as the movie suggested, Africans were the real Jews.

He was suspended, donated to the Anti-Defamation League, made more inflammatory comments, saw his donation get rejected, eventually apologized and returned to the court and then months later deleted the social media post containing his apology after being traded from the Brooklyn Nets to Dallas.

Now he’s leading the Mavericks on a playoff run and concerns about his alleged antisemitism have all but disappeared.

“It doesn’t come up unless Kyrie Irving does something good,” explained my colleague Louis Keene, who covered the original controversy. When that happens, Irving’s legions of young fans will bemoan the past efforts to cancel him.

Louis just published a piece about his conversations with Jewish Mavericks fans who, whether they like him personally or not, are rooting for Irving to succeed. “I’ve forgotten about the antisemitism,” said Ben Calmenson, a 28-year-old who grimaced when Iriving wore a keffiyeh to a recent press conference but quickly excused it.

I still cringe when I watch Irving win, as he’s been doing throughout the playoffs and did again against the Minnesota Timberwolves Wednesday night. But I’m not saying he should have been kicked out of the league for sharing a film that concludes Jews are to blame for Black suffering. He mostly seems like a weird guy who doesn’t believe in vaccines and isn’t sure whether the earth is flat or round.

“There’s a lot of young fans who see Kyrie Irving as an iconoclastic figure whose vulnerability to conspiracy theories is just part of that,” Louis explained to me. “He’s very charitable — even by the standards of professional athletes — and he’s very outspoken on social issues, so they just see him as a genuinely and deeply good person who is a little bit unusual.”

The Kyrie Irving saga shows how selective the organized Jewish world can be when it comes to calling out antisemitism. The American Jewish Committee and other leading groups quickly aborted a campaign to convince Amazon, which still sells the antisemitic film on its Prime Video service, to remove the movie after Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, refused.

Right now, the concern is about what’s happening with left-wing students on elite college campuses. But if Irving was playing basketball thirty years ago, when Jewish groups were focused on how so-called “Black antisemitism” threatened American Jews, it is possible reporters wouldn’t have so quickly stopped asking him about “Hebrews to Negroes” and his social media post referring to Israelis as “murderous oppressors” would have received more attention.

There’s also the fact that Irving is playing for a basketball team that Mark Cuban, who Louis described as a “Jewish community legend,” is in the process of selling to Miriam Adelson, wife of the late Jewish casino mogul and philanthropist Sheldon Adelson.

And Irving is a celebrity. Jewish leaders have a fair amount of sway on campus and even in Congress. But it’s really, really hard to sanction superstars for what fundamentally amounts to intemperate comments. “They recognized their power is kind of limited,” Louis said.