Joe Biden has introduced a vaccine mandate affecting millions, but some countries have gone further
Following the decision by the US president, Joe Biden, to introduce a vaccine mandate for millions of workers, and the UK government’s decision to row back on its push to require vaccine passports for nightclubs and other crowded events, where does the issue of insisting on vaccination stand globally?
Continue reading...Australia didn’t announce the ‘forever partnership’ while Donald Trump was in the White House. What happens if he returns?
Ever flexible, ever the pragmatist, Scott Morrison started thinking about his new “forever partnership” with the United States and Britain 18 months ago while Australia was still tied to a $90bn contract with France to build submarines.
Australia looked to America because of a practical consideration. If the Morrison government was going to jettison the troubled French proposal, and countenance the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, the US possessed the technology that would suit Australia’s purposes.
Continue reading...Aukus described as ‘exclusionary’ amid French anger at scrapping of $90bn submarine deal with Australia
China has told the US, the UK and Australia to abandon their “cold war” mentality or risk harming their own interests after the three countries unveiled a new defence cooperation pact.
The trilateral security partnership, named Aukus, was announced on Thursday by the three nations’ leaders via video link, and will include an 18-month plan to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines.
Continue reading...New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern says her country was ‘not approached’ to be part of a new security pact between Australia, the UK and US. ‘Nor would I expect us to be,’ she adds. ‘The anchor of this arrangement are nuclear-powered submarines and it will be very clear to all New Zealanders and to Australia why New Zealand would not wish to be a part of that project.' Since the mid-1980s, New Zealand has had a strict policy keeping its territorial sea, land and airspace as nuclear-free zones
Analysis: military alliance is more wide-ranging than Five Eyes agreement and may come to define future approach to Indo-Pacific security
For those who study the history of the cold war, Washington’s new initiative with London and Canberra – known by its acronym “Aukus” – has eery echoes of an intelligence-sharing agreement signed 75 years ago. This agreement is now more commonly known as the Five Eyes partnership.
When the seven-page full text of UKUSA agreement – as it was originally known – was finally released in June 2010, Time magazine called it one of the cold war’s most important documents that “reveals one of the foundations of the special relationship the UK and the US still hold dear”.
Continue reading...Government pauses reopening plans after 837 new daily infections, despite just four deaths in a month among 80% vaccinated population
Singapore has reported its highest one-day Covid case total in more than a year, with 837 cases recorded on Tuesday.
In response to the growing outbreak, the government has paused reopening plans and reimposed some restrictions.
Continue reading...Launch comes as Chinese foreign minister is in Seoul to discuss stalled nuclear diplomacy and two days after North tests a new long-range cruise missile
North Korea fired two ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast on Wednesday, South Korea’s military has said, two days after the North claimed to have tested a new missile in its first weapons test in six months.
South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff (JCS) said the missiles flew from a central inland area towards the waters off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast and that further analysis with US officials was under way. “Our military maintains a full readiness posture in close cooperation with the US,” the JCS said.
Continue reading...Zhou Xiaoxuan, who accused CCTV host of sexual harassment, vows to appeal ‘unfair treatment’
A Chinese woman whose sexual harassment case against a popular TV host sparked a nationwide debate over #MeToo has accused a Beijing court of unfair treatment and vowed to appeal after it ruled against her.
The Haidian people’s court said in a judgment released late on Tuesday that Zhou Xiaoxuan did not meet the standard of proof in claiming that Zhu Jun, her superior at work, sexually harassed her.
Continue reading...Move agreed by Speakers of Commons and Lords follows imposition of sanctions on British MPs by Beijing
The new Chinese ambassador to the UK has been barred from parliament by the Speakers in the Commons and Lords after the imposition of sanctions on British MPs by Beijing.
The new ambassador, Zheng Zeguang, was due to attend a meeting of the broadly pro-Chinese all-party group on China, but after a letter from MPs who were subjected to sanctions by China, including the former Conservative party leader Iain Duncan Smith, the Commons Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, has said the meeting is not appropriate.
Continue reading...Disgruntled investors voice anger at headquarters as company appoints advisers and says firesale of assets won’t cover debts
Property giant China Evergrande Group has said that it cannot sell properties and other assets fast enough to service its massive $300bn debts, and that its cashflow was under “tremendous pressure”.
Only hours after angry investors besieged its Shenzhen headquarters and the company denied it was set for bankruptcy, Evergrande issued a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange saying that a significant drop in sales would continue this month, which was likely to further deteriorate its liquidity and cash flow.
Continue reading...Party wants all original te reo Māori place names to be officially restored across the country in the next five years
The Māori party has launched a petition to change New Zealand’s official name to Aotearoa, the te reo Māori, indigenous language name for the country.
“It’s well past time that Te Reo Māori was restored to its rightful place as the first and official language of this country,” Te Pāti Māori leaders, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer said in a statement launching the petition. “We are a Polynesian country – we are Aotearoa.”
Continue reading...If we must wait for the perfect circumstances to speak or sing te reo, we may as well sign the language’s death certificate
My sisters and I are the first generation in almost 50 generations of our family who didn’t grow up speaking te reo Māori as a first language. At first, that fact seems startling – a dramatic rupture from our past and the language that gives form to it. We are only three generations removed from ancestors who were Māori-speaking monoglots, ordering their lives and their world in a language almost foreign to their 21st-century descendants.
But this break between the language our ancestors spoke and the language we speak – English – is the typical Māori experience: only one in five Māori can hold a conversation in their ancestral language, and in the past three national surveys this number has fallen. That makes us anglophones a firm majority in our Indigenous populace.
Continue reading...Our wellbeing is inextricably linked to our childhoods, which in turn is influenced by the lives of our parents and grandparents
If there is one patient who has opened my eyes to my own cognitive bias and who has helped me to recognise the profound effect of the past on a person’s health, it is my patient Arama*.
“Hey, what’s up, doc?” says Arama as he walks into my consulting room one day. He’s weaving a little, his breath reeks of alcohol, his speech is slurred. He wants to get some antibiotics for a chesty cough that he’s had for a week.
Continue reading...Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
Earlier:
Time to wrap up....
Here’s today’s main stories:
Related: Alibaba shares plunge as Beijing ‘seeks to break up Ant’s Alipay’
Related: Stock market pullback likely by year end, Deutsche Bank survey finds
Related: Evergrande investors face 75% hit as company edges closer to restructure
Related: UK cancels Covid vaccine deal with French firm Valneva
Related: Higher taxes could leave low-paid frontline workers £1,000 worse off
Related: EU Brexit controls are pointless bureaucracy, says M&S chairman
Related: Brexit trade barriers added £600m in costs to UK importers this year
Related: Primark hit by ‘pingdemic’ but it says supply crisis won’t lead to shortages
Related: West End theatres bank on staging a revival with big-budget productions
Related: All Sainsbury’s stores to stay shut on Boxing Day as a ‘thank you’ to staff
Related: UK to offer £265m in subsidies for renewable energy developers
European stock markets have shrugged off growth fears and talk of a stock market pullback, to end the day higher.
In London, the FTSE 100 gained 39 points or 0.55% to end at 7068 points. Royal Mail (+3%), Lloyds Banking Group (+2.8%), and hedge fund management group Pershing Square (+2.6%) led the risers.
Spain's Ibex up 1.3%. German Dax up 0.6%
The major European indices are ending the day with gains across the board:
German DAX, +0.56%
France's CAC, +0.2%
UK's FTSE 100, +0.55%
Spain's Ibex, +1.3%
Italy's FTSE MIB, +0.9%
In other markets as European/London traders look to exit:
News outlet points out that US Open champion once attributed her winning confidence to ‘Chinese style of inner faith’
Chinese state media has said the “Chinese style of inner faith” gave British player Emma Raducanu the confidence to win the US Open over the weekend, but some of the country’s internet users asked: why are we calling her Chinese?
Raducanu, 18, became the youngest grand slam winner since Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon in 2004. The pride in her success was simultaneously shared in China, where her mother was born.
Continue reading...A wide-ranging crackdown and leftist rhetoric have stirred fears of a return to the apogee of Maoism
Fifty-five years ago, China was in turmoil. Mao had launched the Cultural Revolution to eradicate opposition in the party and cleanse the country’s political soul, using the power of the masses. It would last a decade and claim well over a million lives; 36 million people were hounded, including Xi Jinping’s father, who had previously been a senior leader. The current president was himself denounced and spent years living in bleak rural poverty.
Unsurprisingly, Mr Xi has spoken scathingly of the Cultural Revolution in the past. Yet many now see growing echoes of the era. The Communist elders who survived the disaster sought to cage the power of the leader through consensus and new conventions. Under those, Mr Xi would be expected to step down as general secretary of the party – the role that gives him real power – next autumn, after 10 years. But putative successors have been sidelined or ousted, and dismantling term limits for the presidency, his other position, was a clear sign he plans to continue. The overt hostility to foreign influences is growing. A personality cult is flourishing; new textbooks on Xi Jinping Thought tell young schoolchildren that “Grandpa Xi Jinping has always cared for us … ”
Continue reading...Populists and nationalists are spreading anti-Muslim, anti-feminist messages – but also backing the Communist party line
In the early days of the 2016 US election campaign, Fang Kecheng, a former journalist at the liberal-leaning Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly and then a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania, began fact-checking Donald Trump’s statements on refugees and Muslims on Chinese social media, hoping to provide additional context to the reporting of the presidential candidate back home in China. But his effort was quickly met with fierce criticism on the Chinese internet.
Some accused him of being a “white left” – a popular insult for idealistic, leftwing and western-oriented liberals; others labelled him a “virgin”, a “bleeding heart” and a “white lotus” – demeaning phrases that describe do-gooders who care about the underprivileged - as he tried to defend women’s rights.
Continue reading...Despite its unpopularity, the ruling LDP party looks unassailable. The country is stagnating because of it
Japan will soon have a new prime minister. Not because there is a general election coming up – although there is – but because the leader of the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP), the deeply unpopular Yoshihide Suga, abruptly resigned last week. Following a series of local election defeats, an Olympics staged against the public will, and a related fifth Covid wave that has pushed Japan’s medical system into “disaster mode”, Suga’s approval rating had plummeted to its lowest since the LDP’s return to power in 2012. Resignation was surely a wise decision, one that put the party first.
Given how disastrous the last few months have been, one might imagine that Suga’s replacement – almost certainly a man – would have his work cut out to avoid catastrophe in the general election. But that’s not how Japanese democracy works.
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms from Thailand to Texas
Continue reading...The country’s goal of eliminating Covid transmission looks within reach – but health experts’ optimism is cautious
Less than a month ago, New Zealanders disappeared into their homes, retracting from the public domain like spilled water into a dry sponge. The motorways and city streets stood mostly empty, shops closed, schools and playgrounds were deserted. A single case of the highly contagious Delta variant had been detected and the government called a snap level-4 lockdown, introducing some of the strictest restrictions in the world.
It was a new threat for a country whose Covid-zero pandemic response had been ranked one of the best globally. New Zealand had never faced a Delta outbreak before, and no one knew if its past strategies would prove up to the task.
Continue reading...