Category Archives: Asia Pacific

Hong Kong protests: arrests as thousands sing protest anthem on anniversary of clashes

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Riot police send snatch squads to detain demonstrators throughout night after declaring gatherings illegal

Thousands of Hongkongers have sung a popular protest anthem and chanted slogans across the city as they marked the first anniversary of major clashes between police and pro-democracy demonstrators.

Riot police declared Friday’s gatherings unlawful assemblies and a breach of anti-coronavirus bans on public meetings of large groups, sending snatch squads to make multiple arrests throughout the evening.

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Apple removes two podcast apps from China store after censorship demands

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Pocket Casts says it refuses to restrict its content at request of Chinese authorities

Apple has removed two podcast apps from its Chinese app store, following government pressure to censor content.

Pocket Casts and Castro were both pulled from distribution in China after the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) demanded that the apps stop allowing content that breached the country’s restrictive speech laws.

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New Zealand to relax borders for essential workers – and US America’s Cup team

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With no active Covid-19 cases, NZ to open borders to certain migrants but the move will also help team American Magic for March 2021 competition

New Zealand is relaxing its borders to grant exemptions for certain workers – including America’s Cup sailors – and partners of New Zealand citizens to enter the country.

The move comes after 21 days with no new Covid-19 cases across the country and no current live cases.

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Twitter deletes 170,000 accounts linked to China influence campaign

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Content focused on Covid-19 and the protests in Hong Kong and over George Floyd in the US

Twitter has removed more than 170,000 accounts the social media site says are state-linked influence campaigns from China focusing on Hong Kong protests, Covid-19 and the US protests in relation to George Floyd.

The company announced on Thursday that 23,750 core accounts – and 150,000 “amplifier” accounts that boosted the content posted by those core accounts – had been removed from the platform after being linked to an influence campaign from the People’s Republic.

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Zoom admits cutting off activists’ accounts in obedience to China

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Meetings on Tiananmen Square massacre and Hong Kong crisis were taken down because Communist government complained

Zoom has admitted it suspended the accounts of human rights activists at the behest of the Chinese government and suggested it will block any further meetings that Beijing complains are illegal.

On Thursday the video conferencing platform was accused of disrupting or shutting down the accounts of three activists who held online events relating to the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary or discussing the crisis in Hong Kong. None were given an explanation by Zoom.

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City of Hamilton in New Zealand removes statue of British naval captain

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City council says memorial to Captain John Hamilton comes down after Māori elder calls him a ‘murderer’ and threatens to remove by force

A statue of a British naval captain has been removed by the city council in Hamilton, New Zealand after a local Māori elder threatened to take it down by force.

The statue of Captain John Hamilton, after whom the city in the central North Island is named, was gifted to the city by a local company in 2013.

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Chris Lilley’s Jonah is not from Tonga, I am. It’s time to dismantle racist brownface stereotypes | Seini F Taumoepeau

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Netflix was right to pull Lilley’s shows. We have no need for him to whitesplain Tongan people for entertainment

When I first watched Summer Heights High, seeing the character of Jonah – a lazy, dumb, breakdancing, Tongan teenager – I was mortified and struck dumb by the fact that in 2007 brownface was allowed on Australian TV.

This week it was revealed that Netflix had quietly pulled four of Chris Lilley’s television shows, specifically those that featured Lilley in black- or brownface portraying Tongan schoolboy Jonah Takalua and African American rapper S.mouse.

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No future benefit in Kim’s relationship with Trump, says North Korea

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Pyongyang says since summit two years ago US has appeared friendly but has instead sought regime change

North Korea sees no future benefit in maintaining a relationship between its leader, Kim Jong-Un, and Donald Trump, the country’s state media has said on the two-year anniversary of the pair’s first summit.

US policies prove Washington remains a long-term threat to the North Korean state and its people, foreign minister Ri Son Gwon said in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA.

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Global report: India reports surge in Covid-19 cases as lockdown eased

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Almost 10,000 new cases in India on Thursday as WHO warns situation outside Europe deteriorating

India reported almost 10,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, with hospitals swamped in the worst-hit cities of Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai, and predictions that the infection rate will not peak before the end of next month.

The country of 1.3bn people now has the fifth highest number of confirmed cases in the world, at 286,579. Over the last 24 hours 357 people have died from the virus, bringing the official toll to 8,102.

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Hong Kong to establish new police unit to enforce new security laws

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‘Action arm’ will have intelligence-gathering capabilities, security chief says, as state media says legislators are working ‘day and night’ on new laws

Hong Kong’s security chief has announced that a dedicated police unit is being set up and would be ready to enforce controversial new national security laws from day one.

There is widespread international and commercial concern about the impact of the laws that are being imposed on the semi-autonomous region directly by Beijing, bypassing Hong Kong’s legislature. The move has prompted the UK to offer a visa to millions of Hongkongers if they felt uncomfortable staying.

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‘I raised hell’: how people worldwide answered the call of World Oceans Day

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From protecting fishing communities to regrowing coral reefs, Guardian readers and environmentalists share how they’re working to defend the ocean

World Oceans Day, which took place on Monday, is marked by hundreds of beach cleans and events globally. Despite Covid-19 restrictions, environmentalists and readers from around the world shared how they are continuing to work to protect the ocean, and told us about the local marine issues that matter to them.

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Global protests throw spotlight on alleged police abuses in West Papua

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The Black Lives Matter actions have given renewed impetus to the campaign against injustices in the Indonesian province

Student Eden Armando Bebari, 19, was allegedly shot and killed by Indonesian security forces while fishing in his home town in West Papua in April.

Indonesian media described Bebari as a member of an armed criminal group, a claim denied by his parents. Many residents in Papua, the eastern-most province of Indonesia, now fish and tend crops to ease food shortages brought about by coronavirus lockdowns.

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Pacific countries plead for inclusion in ‘trans-Tasman bubble’ as travel restrictions ease

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Many Pacific nations are Covid-free but have been devastated by the economic impacts of the virus

Pacific Island nations are urging Australia and New Zealand to include them in a planned travel “bubble”, as flights across the region resume.

Pacific governments face a delicate balancing act, weighing the devastating economic impact of border closures and travel restrictions on their tourism-dependent economies, with the risk of widespread and uncontrollable Covid-19 infections if the virus is introduced.

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Bird figurine is earliest Chinese artwork ever discovered, say experts

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‘Refined’ 2cm carving found in Henan dates to palaeolithic period up to 13,000 years ago

A tiny figurine of a bird, carved from burnt bone and no bigger than a £1 coin, is the earliest Chinese artwork ever discovered, according to an international team of archaeologists. 

The carving, less than 2cm in length, has been dated to the palaeolithic period, between 13,800 and 13,000 years ago, which pushes back the earliest known date of east Asian animal sculpture by more than eight millennia. 

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Anger at huge shareholder payout as US chain Kohl’s cancels $150m in orders

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Retailer paid $109m in dividends just weeks after cancelling clothing orders, leaving suppliers in Bangladesh facing financial crisis

Kohl’s, one of the US’s largest clothing retailers, cancelled millions of dollars worth of existing orders from Bangladeshi and Korean garment factories just weeks before paying out $109m (£85m) in dividends to shareholders, the Guardian can reveal.

The company cancelled orders of clothing worth approximately $100m from Korea and $50m from Bangaldeshi factories after the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and refused petitions from suppliers asking for the option to renegotiate payments. 

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EU says China behind ‘huge wave’ of Covid-19 disinformation

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Brussels shifts position by accusing Beijing for first time of running false campaigns

China has been accused by Brussels of running disinformation campaigns inside the European Union, as the bloc set out a plan to tackle a “huge wave” of false facts about the coronavirus pandemic. 

The European commission said Russia and China were running “targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns in the EU, its neighbourhood, and globally”. While the charge against Russia has been levelled on many occasions, this is the first time the EU executive has publicly named China as a source of disinformation. 

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Coronavirus live news: Argentina records more than 1,000 daily cases for first time

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WHO official walks back asymptomatic transmission comments; world faces worst food crisis in 50 years; UK NHS waiting list could hit 10m

Japan’s lower house of parliament has approved an emergency budget worth nearly over £230bn, doubling the scale of measures to pep up the world’s third-biggest economy after the coronavirus tipped it into recession, AFP reports.

Their raucous clucking deprives residents of sleep. They leave the neighbourhood “wrecked”. And food left out for them attracts “rats the size of cats” to an otherwise peaceful, leafy suburb.

New Zealand’s national lockdown to quell the spread of Covid-19 appears to have vanquished the virus, but it has had one unintended consequence: the re-emergence of a plague – not of frogs or locusts but of feral chickens, a flock of which is once again menacing an area of west Auckland.

Related: 'Like a Stephen King movie': feral chickens return to plague New Zealand village

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Coronavirus live news: Africa passes 200,000 confirmed cases after Burundi president dies of suspected Covid-19

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Asylum applications in Europe fall to lowest level for a decade as borders closed; world faces worst food crisis in 50 years

Louise Taylor and David Conn report:

Premier League clubs should be braced for a collective £500m loss of revenue because of the coronavirus pandemic, Deloitte has warned.

Related: Premier League clubs set for £500m collective loss due to coronavirus

Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak so far today include:

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Minneapolis has vowed to defund its police. New Zealand needs to have that conversation | Julia Amua Whaipooti

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Dropping the armed police trial is a good step but we need transformational change to show black lives actually do matter

“We honour him today because when he took his last breath, the rest of us were able to breathe.” These were the words spoken at George Floyd’s funeral that I felt directly in my bones, here, on my whenua, or land, of Aotearoa New Zealand. On Tuesday, the New Zealand police commissioner told the country a trial of Armed Response Teams (ARTs) – frontline officers who routinely carry guns – will not continue, and the teams will not be a part of the country’s policing model in the future. 

The United States is 400-500 years deep in a history of colonisation and slavery. In Aotearoa New Zealand, we are 200 years into our colonial history, and the way in which colonisation functions here is also rooted in white supremacy. Colonial structures, by design, take powers away from indigenous people and people of colour, putting them into the hands of the colonisers. 

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Russia will open nuclear disarmament talks with US

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But Moscow warns against insisting on including China in New Start negotiations

Russia has confirmed that it will open talks with the US this month on extending a major nuclear disarmament treaty but warned that Washington’s insistence on including China could scuttle efforts.

The deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov will meet the US envoy Marshall Billingslea in Vienna on 22 June to begin negotiations on New Start, which expires in February.

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