World leaders will be unable to halt climate breakdown without strong action from biggest emitter
The US, the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is now committed to halving emissions this decade.
Joe Biden’s announcement, at a White House virtual climate summit, has thrown the spotlight clearly on the world’s biggest emitter: China.
Continue reading...Yoshihide Suga under pressure to act after sharp rise in infections in Tokyo, only months before Olympics
Japan is hoping that a short blast of tough coronavirus measures will halt a recent surge in coronavirus cases, with the prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, poised to announce a targeted state of emergency for Tokyo, Osaka and two other prefectures, just three months before the Tokyo Olympics.
Suga has come under pressure to take action after a sharp rise in infections in the capital, and evidence that new variants of the virus are driving serious outbreaks in Osaka and the two neighbouring prefectures of Hyogo and Kyoto.
Continue reading...Palau was hit by Typhoon Surigae last week, but even the typhoons that don’t claim lives or flatten cities are devastating for those who live through them
My adopted home country of Palau, in the northern Pacific, was hit by a typhoon last week. Thankfully no one died here, though it did lead to deaths in the Philippines.
The impact on Palau of Typhoon Surigae didn’t make headlines overseas and this might be the first you will have heard of it. Compared to other natural disasters and other cyclones or typhoons in the Pacific, it was a relatively “good” one. But it left me shaken, exhausted and our community rattled.
Continue reading...Race to find missing navy vessel as authorities warn oxygen in KRI Nanggala-402 will run out within 24 hours
Indonesia’s president has ordered an all-out effort to find a missing submarine in a race against time to save the 53 crew, whose oxygen supply was only expected to last another 24 hours.
As the US military said on Thursday that it was joining the search, the Indonesian navy said its ships had found an unidentified object at a depth of 50-100 metres (165-330ft).
Continue reading...Analysis: Country has confirmed itself the weak link in the intelligence chain it joined with the US, UK, Canada and Australia
Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister from the centre-left Labour party, has offended devotees of the Anglosphere by indicating she is not prepared to take her country into the kind of trade war with China that Australia has found itself facing.
Asserting her country’s sovereignty has potentially deep implications for the “Five Eyes” alliance, the intelligence sharing partnership that emerged after the second world war and blossomed in the cold war. Indeed some say New Zealand has confirmed itself as the weak link in the intelligence chain that it joined with the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Continue reading...Vote does not compel government to act but marks further decline in relations with China
British MPs voted to declare that China is committing genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province.
The motion passed on Thursday does not compel the government to act but is likely to mark a further decline in relations with China.
Continue reading...Analysis: Xi Jinping is likely to push back against US claim to global leadership, but both know their interests overlap on tackling environment
Observers of the US and China this week may ponder whether a joint call to tackle the climate crisis marks a positive change in their fraught relationship, as the two leaders meet for the first time since Joe Biden was sworn into office.
After four years of Donald Trump, the bilateral relationship has reached its lowest ebb since formal ties were established in January 1979. In both capitals, fear of a “new cold war” is on the rise. Many highlight growing competition, and the opposing nature of the two countries’ political systems.
Continue reading...The critical questions of who is really in charge and who has the money still need to be answered
After decades of neglect, inequality, and outright racism in New Zealand’s health system, a shift toward indigenous sovereignty and tino rangatiratanga in healthcare is long overdue. The Māori Health Authority that the government announced this week seems like a step in the right direction. But the devil will be in the details, as we wait to see if this will produce true change, or just more window dressing.
The failure of the health and disability system to serve Māori has been apparent for decades. A visit to the Ministry of Health website will yield report after report documenting the seven-year life expectancy gap between Māori and non-Māori, higher rates of cancer and other preventable illness, worse outcomes in care, and a myriad of other inequities. Being able to describe Māori health inequities is necessary. But ultimately, it’s insufficient.
Continue reading...Search operation under way after vessel disappears about 60 miles north of Bali
Indonesia’s navy is searching for a submarine that went missing north of the resort island of Bali with 53 people onboard.
The country’s military chief, Hadi Tjahjanto, said on Wednesday that the KRI Nanggala 402 was participating in a training exercise when it missed a scheduled reporting call. The vessel is believed to have disappeared in waters about 60 miles (95km) north of Bali, he said.
Continue reading...Australia’s glacially slow delivery of jabs derided as a ‘farce’, while in New Zealand only 4.5% of eligible people have been vaccinated
They were held up as Covid success stories, two countries at the bottom of the world that kept outbreaks under control and deaths low as the pandemic swept the rest of the globe.
Daily life in cities including Sydney and Auckland now feels largely back to pre-pandemic normal – restaurants are full, theatres are open, masks are scarce and offices are busy. A degree of international travel is also a reality thanks to the new “trans-Tasman travel bubble” – a two-way quarantine-free corridor between the neighbours.
Continue reading...Canberra diplomat tells press club China should not be milked with a ‘plot to slaughter it in the end’
A senior Chinese diplomat has accused the Australian government of triggering a downward spiral in the relationship by “conniving with the United States in a very unethical, illegal, immoral suppression” of Chinese telco Huawei.
Wang Xining, the deputy head of the Chinese embassy in Canberra, told the National Press Club that China had “done nothing intentionally to hurt this relationship”, despite the Australian government’s complaints about Beijing trade actions against a range of export sectors over the past year.
Continue reading...Virtual summit on Thursday will be the first meeting between the two leaders since Biden took office
China’s President Xi Jinping will attend a US-led climate change summit on Thursday at the invitation of President Joe Biden, in the first meeting between the two leaders since the advent of the new US administration.
Biden has invited dozens of world leaders to join the two-day virtual summit starting on Thursday, after bringing the US back into the 2015 Paris agreement on cutting global carbon emissions.
Continue reading...China placed 177th in Press Freedom Index, with warning that persecution of reporters can have international impact
Persecution of journalists in China may have contributed to the global coronavirus outbreak by stopping whistleblowers coming forward in the early days of the pandemic, according to the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.
China ranks 177th out of 180 countries on the organisation’s annual Press Freedom Index, with the organisation warning that persecution of journalists in totalitarian regimes affects citizens in western democracies.
Continue reading...Judith Collins may trail badly in the polls, but MPs should only think about replacing her if a natural alternative leader emerges
Followers of baseball in the US have a saying: winning fixes everything. A team can suffer player scandals and be beset by dysfunctional management. If they’re hitting enough home runs, however, things don’t tend to fall apart.
The corollary of this would be that losing breaks everything. And while it’s a bit trite to compare sports to politics, New Zealand’s opposition National party resembles nothing if not a losing baseball team. Thumped in last year’s general election, conceding a rare absolute parliamentary majority to Jacinda Ardern’s Labour , nothing seems to have gone right for the party that was once called the natural party of government in New Zealand.
Continue reading...Two south-east Asian neighbours face a challenge after keeping infection numbers low last year
After managing to control the coronavirus for much of 2020, Thailand is battling a fresh outbreak of Covid-19, with officials setting up thousands of beds in field hospitals and warning the public to stay at home.
A cluster of Covid cases emerged in Bangkok’s nightlife venues last month, just before the Songkran new year holiday, when many Thais travel across the country to celebrate with their families. Following record daily increases last week, tighter measures were introduced from Sunday, including the closure of schools for two weeks. Bars have been shut, restaurants banned from serving alcohol and the opening hours of shopping malls have been reduced in areas such as Bangkok.
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch urges more coordination by governments to tackle China’s treatment of Turkic Muslims
The Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, where it has escalated its oppression of Turkic Muslims to unprecedented levels, Human Rights Watch has said, as the NGO called on governments to take direct action against officials and companies that profit from labour in the region.
HRW also recommended the EU delay ratifying its recent trade agreement with China until forced labour allegations were investigated, victims compensated, and there was “substantial progress toward holding perpetrators to account”.
Continue reading...Chinese firm could have been monitoring calls of KPN’s 6.5m users without its knowledge, report claims
The Chinese telecoms equipment supplier Huawei was able to monitor all calls made on one of the Netherlands’ largest mobile phone networks, according to a confidential report seen by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.
The report, made for KPN by the Capgemini consultancy firm in 2010, concluded that the Chinese company could have been monitoring the calls of the provider’s 6.5m users without the Dutch company’s knowledge, according to the newspaper.
Continue reading...Emotional scenes in arrivals hall as hundreds of travellers touch down on first day of quarantine-free travel from Australia
Lisa Tetai warned her son not to take a sick day when he picked her up from Auckland airport. “I thought there might be media there,” she explains.
She wasn’t wrong.
Continue reading...New law means people could face 20 years in prison for lockdown breaches, as campaigners warn of ‘human rights disaster’
Cambodians who break Covid rules could face 20 years in prison under a new law that human rights groups say takes the country “a step towards a totalitarian dictatorship”.
Prime minister Hun Sen warned that Cambodia was “on the brink of death” as a two-week lockdown was imposed in Phnom Penh on Thursday to try to control the spread of the virus.
Continue reading...Ex-CNN reporter and founder of the news site Rappler on life under the relentless social media assault of the Duterte regime
As terrible as the events were that played out on Capitol Hill on 6 January, Maria Ressa admits to feeling “a small amount of relief” about them. An ex-CNN bureau chief, and now the founder of her own news organisation, Rappler, she had spent the past two years sounding a warning about what she’d seen happen in her native country, the Philippines.
There, a Facebook-fuelled tsunami of lies had assisted an authoritarian into power. And she had seen where that had led: to opponents of the state being killed in their homes or turning up dead in ditches. As a Filipino American with a foot in both countries – she calls herself “the first of the CNN hybrids” – she was perfectly positioned to warn America about what happens when a populist president is allowed to spread out-of-control lies across a vast, unregulated tech platform. “A lie told a million times becomes a fact,” she repeated again and again.
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