Vibrant soundscape shows Indonesian reef devastated by blast fishing is returning to health
From whoops to purrs, snaps to grunts, and foghorns to laughs, a cacophony of bizarre fish songs have shown that a coral reef in Indonesia has returned rapidly to health.
Many of the noises had never been recorded before and the fish making these calls remain mysterious, despite the use of underwater speakers to try to “talk” to some.
Continue reading...Scott Morrison says athletes will compete in next year’s Games because sport and politics should not mix
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, has confirmed Australian officials will not attend the Beijing Winter Olympics, joining the United States in a diplomatic boycott of next year’s Games and prompting accusations from Beijing of political posturing.
Morrison told reporters in Sydney it was “not surprising”, given the deterioration in the diplomatic relationship between Australia and China, that officials would not attend next year’s winter Games.
Continue reading...Drone footage has captured some of the devastation following the eruption of Mount Semeru on the Indonesian island of Java. Dozens of people have been killed and thousands remain displaced. The volcano continues to spew hot gas and ash, hampering rescue efforts
Continue reading...Pro-independence groups have called for Indigenous voters not to take part in Sunday’s long-awaited ballot, saying proper campaigning has been prevented
New Caledonia is set to hold a referendum on independence from France this weekend, the third and final poll meant to conclude a decolonisation process initiated 30 years ago.
For anyone who witnessed the first two referenda, the contrast with the vote set for 12 December is striking: instead of the countless Kanaky flags or the red, white and blue of the French tricolour that adorned houses, balconies, roadsides, pickups or even people in the run-up to the 2018 and 2020 votes, this year there is little to see. On the Place des Cocotiers, in the centre of Nouméa, the capital, the quiet is disturbed only by the incessant patrolling of police trucks, part of the increased security around the vote.
Continue reading...Yusaku Maezawa to become first space tourist sent to space station by Russia in more than a decade
The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa has said he can barely contain his excitement on the eve of blasting off to the International Space Station in a prelude to a more ambitious trip around the moon with Elon Musk’s SpaceX planned in 2023.
The 46-year-old fashion magnate and art collector has been training at a space centre outside Moscow before becoming the first space tourist to travel to the ISS in more than a decade.
Continue reading...Beijing dismisses no-show and says American officials had not been invited in the first place, as other countries consider their positions
China has reacted angrily to the US government’s diplomatic boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics, as more countries said they would consider joining the protest over Beijing’s human rights record and New Zealand announced it would not send representatives to the Games.
Chinese officials dismissed Washington’s boycott as a “posturing and political manipulation” and tried to discredit the decision by claiming that US diplomats had not even been invited to Beijing in the first place.
Continue reading...Beijing to increase business lending and build more affordable housing as post-Covid recovery falters
China’s politburo has signalled measures to kickstart the faltering economy as the crisis gripping the country’s debt-laden property sector continued to play havoc with growth forecasts.
Amid a warning from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that a slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy could hurt the global recovery from Covid-19, President Xi Jinping’s senior leadership committee rubber-stamped a plan from the central bank on Monday for more targeted lending to businesses. They also outlined support for the housing market.
Continue reading...A Pacific labour scheme has been transformative for Kiribati families but the brain drain has hit the country’s hospitals hard
Every night, sitting in her room in the remote Queensland town of Doomadgee, Bwerere Sandy Tebau calls her husband and daughter 4,300km away in Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati.
“There is no sea!” Sandy says, when asked about the difference between her new home in the red desert of Australia and her island home in the central Pacific. “There is just a lake and in the lake are crocodiles!”
Continue reading...With $82.5m repayment due, property developer appears to be heading for restructuring
Shares in the struggling Chinese property developer Evergrande hit a record low on Monday after strong indications that it is on the verge of a potentially disastrous default and could be forced into a full-blown restructuring.
The company has lurched from one crisis to another in recent months as it faced a series of repayments on debts – three times waiting until the last possible moment to stump up the cash needed to stay afloat.
Continue reading...Manasseh Sogavare defends switching diplomatic ties from Taiwan to China
The prime minister of Solomon Islands has defended his government’s decision to establish diplomatic relations with China, accusing “agents of Taiwan” of attempting to destabilise the government.
Manasseh Sogavare made the comments during a heated day in parliament as the opposition leader, Mathew Wale, attempted to remove the prime minister through a no-confidence motion that was defeated by a significant majority.
Wale blamed Sogavare for the deadly anti-government protests and riots that have shaken the country in recent weeks. Protesters marched on the parliamentary precinct in the east of Honiara on 24 November, where they allegedly set fire to a leaf hut next to Parliament House where MPs and staffers go to smoke and eat lunch. Riots followed lasting hours with buildings being torched in Chinatown, as well as at a police station and a school.
Rioting continued for days. The bodies of three people were found in a burnt-out building in a store in the Chinatown district of Honiara.
Many of the protesters come from Malaita province, the most populous province in the country, where the provincial government has had tense relations with the central government for years. Tensions increased in 2019 when Sogavare announced that Solomon Islands would switch its diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to China, a decision that the Malaita premier, Daniel Suidani, has strongly criticised.
Venues that say they respect personal choices may sound community-minded but really they undermine efforts to keep everyone safe
Like most Aucklanders, I can’t wait to get out of the city. After more than three months in lockdown, I’m keen for a break. Last summer, my partner and I went to Tauranga. We had so much fun that we’re planning to return – but this time, things will be different.
As Aotearoa New Zealand shifts from the Covid-19 “alert level” system to the new “traffic light” system, hospitality venues have been given a choice. Under the “red” and “orange” settings, they can welcome customers inside, but only if they’re willing to check vaccine passes. If they don’t want to do that, their service has to be contactless.
Continue reading...Bitget reportedly loses licence after it promoted Army Coin, named after group’s ‘BTS army’ followers
Singapore’s financial regulator has reportedly suspended Bitget, a crypto exchange that is mired in a row involving South Korea’s biggest boyband, BTS.
Bitget has removed the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s logo from its website, the Guardian confirmed. The platform still claims to have licences from Australia, Canada and the United States, according to its website.
Continue reading...Iran’s natural allies are said to have been surprised by how much it had gone back on its own compromises
The US is hoping pressure from Russia, China and some Arab Gulf states may yet persuade Iran to moderate its negotiating stance in regards to the steps the Biden administration must take before both sides return to the 2015 nuclear deal.
Talks in Vienna faltered badly last week, when the new hardline Iranian administration increased its levels of uranium enrichment and tabled proposals that US officials said at the weekend were “not serious”since they had gone back on all the progress made in the previous round of talks.
Continue reading...Japanese and Korean are in top five choices in UK this year at online platform Duolingo
Whether it’s down to Squid Game or kawaii culture, fascination with Korea and Japan is fuelling a boom in learning east Asian languages. Japanese is the fastest growing language to be learned in the UK this year on the online platform Duolingo, and Korean is the fourth fastest.
Most of the interest is driven by cultural issues, the firm said in its 2021 Duolingo language report, which will be published tomorrow and analyses how the 20 million downloads of its platform are used.
Continue reading...Dozens more were injured when the highest volcano on densely populated Java island spewed a huge cloud of ash into the air
The death toll from the eruption of the Semeru volcano on Indonesia’s Java island has risen to 13, with nearly 100 others injured, the country’s disaster mitigation agency has said.
Mount Semeru, the highest volcano on Indonesia’s most densely populated island of Java, spewed thick columns of ash more than 12,000 meters into the sky on Saturday, with searing gas and lava flowing down its slopes and triggering panic among people living nearby.
Continue reading...A roundup of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Mexico to Manila
Continue reading...The new National leader is a millionaire, anti-abortion, ex-CEO who owns seven homes and is against increases to the minimum wage
In the end, the party of business picked the businessman. Former National party leader Simon Bridges is out – again – and former Air New Zealand chief executive and MP for Botany, Christopher Luxon, is in.
In hindsight it seems like it was always a done deal. Sir John Key, the former prime minister and National party leader, was a prominent supporter while outgoing leader Judith Collins was running an “anyone but Bridges” policy, effectively handing the leadership to Luxon (and making him a hostage to her and her faction’s demands in the process). Political commentators were picking Luxon as a future leader before entering parliament and, only one year later, here he is.
Continue reading...As tensions with Russia and China increase, the prime minister meddles in foreign policy to distract from domestic woes
Relations between the world’s great powers are tenser than ever since the cold war. Troops are massing along Russia’s border with Ukraine. Chinese ships and planes are openly threatening Taiwan. Japan is rearming in response. Turkey is renewing its belligerence towards its neighbours. Russia is backing east-west fragmentation in Bosnia.
Where Britain stands in all this is dangerously unclear, drifting on a sea of Boris Johnson’s gestures and platitudes. The Royal Navy currently has a £3.2bn aircraft carrier waving the union flag in the South China Sea, completely unprotected. China could sink it in an hour. In the Black Sea, a British destroyer provocatively invades Russian waters off Crimea, showing off to the world’s media. Last week, the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, advanced her bid for her party’s leadership by sitting astride a tank in Estonia and warning Russia that Britain “stood firm” against its “malign activity” in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Britain’s outgoing defence chief, Sir Nick Carter, estimates that the risk of accidental war with Russia is now “the highest in decades”.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
It was shot in a week and premiered to 12 people, but micro-budget sci-fi movie Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has become the breakout success of the year
“We made the film in seven days, shooting non-stop from six in the evening to six in the morning. It was hell. We were always tired. And the cast and crew were always picking on me because my brain would just go completely dead at 2am every day.” Japanese film-maker Junta Yamaguchi is talking about his first feature film, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, which was shot almost entirely inside a real cafe in Kyoto. “We couldn’t film anything during their opening hours.”
But Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes isn’t your average small-scale indie film. It’s a nicely innovative time-travel yarn that asks: in our world of remote working and Zoom calls, what if the face staring back at us from our computer was a version of ourself two minutes in the future? It’s also the latest example of the nagamawashi (long-shot) film, the micro-genre currently putting no-budget Japanese cinema on the map after the success of One Cut of the Dead – the 2017 zombie horror-comedy that became an international cult sensation, grossing over $30m (£22m) worldwide from a $25,000 budget.
Continue reading...Journalist permitted to receive peace prize in person after judge eases travel restrictions
The Philippine journalist Maria Ressa will be allowed to travel overseas so she can accept her Nobel peace prize in person after a court gave her permission to leave the country to visit Norway this month.
Ressa, who is subject to travel restrictions because of the legal cases she faces in the Philippines, shared the prize with the Russian investigative journalist Dmitry Muratov, amid growing concerns over curbs on free speech worldwide.
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