Under-18s will be allowed to play online games for one hour on Fridays, weekends and holidays
China has ordered its online gaming companies to further reduce the services they provide to young gamers, in a move intended to curb what the authorities described as “youth video game addiction”.
Under the new rule, young gamers are only allowed to spend an hour playing online games on Fridays, weekends and holidays, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Continue reading...For those aboard a recent whale watching cruise off Cape Cod, the decomposing carcass of a year-old humpback calf floating in the waters of the Stellwagen Bank national marine sanctuary made for a heartbreaking sight.
Related: Experience: I was attacked by two sharks at once
Continue reading...The livelihoods of 1.5 million people are at risk as the lake’s occasional dry spells occur ever more frequently
• All photographs by Dennis Lupenga/WaterAid
There was a time when the vast Lake Chilwa almost disappeared. In 2012 it had been extremely hot in southern Malawi, with little rain to fill the rivers that ran into the lake.
“Many fishermen were forced to scramble for land near the lake banks, while others had to migrate to the city,” says Alfred Samuel. “We could barely feed our children because the lake could not provide enough fish, or water for rice growing.”
Continue reading...At least 12,000 women are still abducted and forced into marriage every year in Kyrgyzstan. But pressure is growing to finally end the medieval custom
Aisuluu was returning home after spending the afternoon with her aunt in the village of At-Bashy, not far from the Torugart crossing into China. “It was 5 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday. I had a paper bag full of samsa [a dough dumpling stuffed with lamb, parsley and onion]. My aunt always prepared them on weekends,” she said.
“A car with four men inside comes in the opposite direction to mine. And all of a sudden it … turns around and, within a few seconds, comes up beside me. One of the guys in the back gets out, yanks me and pushes me inside the car. I drop all the samsa on the pavement. I scream, I squirm, I cry, but there is nothing I can do.”
Continue reading...The modernist maestro had carte blanche to build a great museum. The result? A breathtaking icon hopeless for displaying art. British architect David Chipperfield relives his gargantuan repair job
Never has so much praise been lavished on so dysfunctional a building. The last major project of modernist master Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie is a perfectly square temple of steel and glass, raised above the street on its own granite acropolis. Built in 1968, not far from the recently erected Berlin Wall, it was intended to symbolise the freedoms of the west, its big black roof enclosing an epic column-free hall for the display of modern art. It has long been venerated as a 20th-century Parthenon, the ultimate example of Mies’s pursuit of “universal space”.
But as a museum, it has always been a disaster. Ever since it opened, the New National Gallery has been dogged by cracking windows, heavy condensation and awkward display spaces, presenting a curatorial nightmare for its staff. Beneath the impractical grand hall are subterranean galleries for the permanent collection that have the dreary feeling of a windowless office complex. It is one of the most extreme examples of the quest for purity of form trumping the demands of function.
Continue reading...Country will be first to adopt cryptocurrency as legal tender next month – but economists are sounding warnings over risks
Litha María de Los Angeles slaps two cheese-filled pupusas – the El Salvadoran cornmeal flatbread – on the griddle. With a camera click on the QR code, she receives her payment: four hundred-thousandths of a Bitcoin. Then, as the rain pelts the corrugated iron roof and a gust of wind lifts the blue plastic table cloths, the power cuts out.
A tumultuous few weeks awaits El Salvador as it prepares to become the first country to adopt Bitcoin, the world’s most popular decentralised digital currency, as legal tender on 7 September. With that deadline looming, a host of challenges – technological, financial and criminal – threaten to sink the plan of the president, Nayib Bukele, to ride the Central American economy out of its current choppy waters on the back of a cryptocurrency wave.
Continue reading...With a nationwide lockdown and some of the world’s strictest restrictions, Jacinda Ardern is counting on her people’s goodwill again
In locked-down New Zealand, life orbits around the 1pm briefing. As the home-bound nation digests its lunch, the director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield – frequently alongside prime minister Jacinda Ardern – takes the stage behind a socially distanced podium and updates the country.
In the midst of a Covid outbreak, those briefings occur almost every weekday. They are so clockwork-regular, so predictable in their essential structure, that certain sentences became memes: “Kia ora koutou katoa. There are X cases of Covid-19 in the community,” each begins. After the last outbreak, media outlet The Spinoff spliced together Bloomfield saying it 44 times.
Continue reading...After 18 months of remote learning, some students will re-enter classrooms as the capital sees a fall in coronavirus infections
After almost 18 months, children in Jakarta will begin to re-enter classrooms on Monday, as Indonesia, which faces on of the worst Covid outbreaks globally, eases restrictions in some areas.
Indonesia began gradually loosening its lockdown measures last week, allowing restaurants and places of worship to open their doorsat 25% capacity, and malls to operate at 50% capacity. The relaxed rules were introduced across several regions in Java and Bali , including greater Jakarta, greater Bandung and greater Surabaya.
Continue reading...Public indifference to abuse of the Pasifika community is especially concerning – we all need to show compassion in this crisis
The past week in lockdown has been tumultuous for many in my community. I was on my way to pick up my daughter from school when media outlets began reporting that New Zealand was headed for a possible level 4 lockdown, suggesting the Delta variant had breached our borders and there was a probable case in the community. By the time I arrived at the school, notifications were filling my messenger feed with supermarkets packed to the brim as the rush for toilet paper began. New Zealand went into full lockdown that night in its fight against Covid-19.
Within a matter of hours, news emerged that a person from the North Shore of Auckland had tested positive followed by people who had attended a large church gathering in south Auckland. Church plays a pivotal role in the Pacific community. It serves as a hub to express our faith, language and culture, where we reconnect with friends and family. It grounds us and allows us to recharge before we head back into a society that is different to what we knew in our home islands dotted around the Pacific.
Continue reading...The White House on Sunday reasserted its promise to capture or kill the perpetrators of the deadly attacks on Kabul airport, as Joe Biden travelled to Delaware for the repatriation of the bodies of the 13 US troops who died.
Related: Pentagon names troops killed in Kabul – some were babies at time of invasion
Continue reading...By deeply connecting with the people and idyllic landscape of his island, Perry channelled a stream of ideas into mindblowing music
“Until reggae it was all Kingston … Kingston, Kingston, Kingston! Ska? … Rocksteady? … they were Kingston things with the same Kingston men doing the same Kingston things.”
Lee “Scratch” Perry – who has died aged 85 – was talking me through perhaps the most significant gear change in the earlier years of Jamaican music – and was understandably animated, even by his own hyperactive standards.
Continue reading...Decline in exports from Taiwan combines with port closures in China and Japan to hinder growth
A recovery in global trade during the summer is beginning to wane, according to some early warning signs pointing to the negative effects of widespread Covid-19 outbreaks in the manufacturing centres of east Asia.
A dramatic decline in exports from Taiwan, which makes many of the computer chips used in cars and mobile phones, has combined with temporary port closures and lockdowns in Australia, China and Japan to cut the level of global trade.
Continue reading...At least three explosions took place at al-Anad airbase, officials said
A missile and drone attack on a key military base in south Yemen has killed at least 30 troops, a Yemeni military spokesman said. It was one of the deadliest attacks in the country’s civil war in recent years.
Mohammed al-Naqib, the spokesman for Yemen’s southern forces, said the attack on Sunday on al-Anad airbase in the province of Lahj wounded at least 65. He said the casualty toll could rise since rescue teams were still clearing the site.
Continue reading...US forces have launched a 'defensive' military strike in Kabul against a vehicle carrying 'multiple suicide bombers' from the Islamic State’s local affiliate in Afghanistan who were aiming to attack the airport, American officials have said.
There was no immediate word on casualties and few other details have so far emerged about the incident, which may have triggered a second blast in a nearby house.
Witnesses reported an explosion near Kabul airport and television footage showed black smoke rising into the sky. Taliban officials confirmed the US account. According to some reports, a child died in the second blast
Ruling United Russia party silences critics, cracks down on poll monitors and offers cash to voters as its support slumps
The Russian government has silenced opposition voices, approved cash payouts to potential voters, and made it nearly impossible to monitor the polls as it prepares for parliamentary elections next month that the opposition has warned will be marred by fraud.
United Russia, the ruling party that has supported Vladimir Putin through nearly his entire presidency, is expected to maintain a majority of the seats in the next Duma, despite state polling that shows that just 26% of Russians are ready to vote for the party – its lowest rating since 2008.
Continue reading...Prized collection smuggled across Europe by Jewish owners in 1930s expected to fetch more than $2m
A collection of prized Meissen porcelain smuggled across Europe after its Jewish owners were forced to flee the Nazis and later procured for Hitler before being uncovered in a salt mine by the “Monuments Men”, is to be auctioned in New York next month.
The extraordinary journey that the 18th-century artworks have undergone, reflecting the turmoil of the second world war years, has been reconstructed by art historians and restitution lawyers before their sale by Sotheby’s, the international auction house.
Continue reading...Producer and performer who worked with Bob Marley and pioneered both dub and roots reggae styles dies in hospital in Jamaica
• Obituary: one of Jamaica’s finest and most unpredictable musicians
Lee “Scratch” Perry, whose pioneering work with roots reggae and dub opened up profound new depths in Jamaican music, has died aged 85.
Jamaican media reported the news that he died in hospital in Lucea, northern Jamaica. No cause of death has yet been given. Andrew Holness, the country’s prime minister, sent “deep condolences” to Perry’s family.
Continue reading...Paintings commissioned by East India Company in 18th and 19th century up for sale at Sotheby’s
Remarkable paintings of the flora and fauna of India, including a work once owned by Jackie Kennedy Onassis depicting a stork eating a snail, are to go on sale in the first auction dedicated to Company School art.
Sotheby’s has announced details of a sale that shines light on overlooked Indian artists today regarded as forgotten masters.
Continue reading...Trillions of metallic nodules on the sea floor could help stop global heating, but mining them may damage ocean ecology
In a display cabinet in the recently opened Our Broken Planet exhibition in London’s Natural History Museum, curators have placed a small nugget of dark material covered with faint indentations. The blackened lump could easily be mistaken for coal. Its true nature is much more intriguing, however.
The nugget is a polymetallic nodule and oceanographers have discovered trillions of them litter Earth’s ocean floors. Each is rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt and copper, some of the most important ingredients for making the electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels that we need to replace the carbon-emitting lorries, power plants and factories now wrecking our climate.
Continue reading...She risked arrest, torture and jail to fight racism in 1980s South Africa, and her story is being made into a film
As a white South African, Sue Dobson risked arrest, torture and imprisonment spying for the black nationalist cause during the latter days of the brutal apartheid regime. She was a middle-class woman in her 20s when she joined the African National Congress (ANC) and infiltrated the white minority government – even having a honey-pot affair with a police official to obtain information, with the full support of her husband, a fellow activist. When her cover was blown in 1989, she fled to Britain, where she sought political asylum after threats to her life.
Now, for the first time in 30 years, she is ready to talk publicly about her story – that of a “very ordinary” woman who played an extraordinary part in fighting racism.
Continue reading...