Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Monlam, or the great prayer festival, is the most important prayer event for many Tibetans. It was banned during the Cultural Revolution in China but is now celebrated in many areas.
Considered the most important event for Tibetan Buddhists, the Monlam great prayer festival starts three days after the lunar new year in western China’s ethnic Tibetan region and is held for almost two weeks. During Monlam, millions of pilgrims travel to monasteries to pray for good fortune in the new year and make offerings to their late relatives.
Top Uighur official says there will be fewer and fewer students at centres thought to house a million people
Top officials in Xinjiang have hinted that the system of internment centres used to hold a million Muslim minorities may one day be phased out.
Researchers say huge numbers of people, mostly Uighurs, are being held in detention and re-education camps in the far western territory as part of a huge security crackdown in the name of counter terrorism efforts.
Former trade minister delivers scathing criticism of Coalition colleagues for souring relations
The former trade minister Andrew Robb, who took an $880,000 job with a Chinese company as soon as he left parliament, has blasted his former party room colleagues and Australia’s security agencies for creating a “toxic” relationship with China.
Robb confirmed he had left Landbridge, which holds the lease over the Darwin port, late last year, after a health precinct project he had been working on was rejected by Beijing.
Serikjan Bilash, who has fought for victims of China’s Muslim internment camps, detained in Almaty
Kazakh police have arrested an activist who has campaigned for victims of China’s internment camps in Xinjiang, sealing his group’s office and taking its computers.
Serikjan Bilash, who has led a high-profile awareness drive centred on ethnic Kazakh victims of China’s crackdown in the region, was arrested in Kazakhstan’s largest city Almaty and flown to the capital Astana, his partner told AFP.
Chinese aviation regulator suspends operation of aircraft after second tragedy involving the new plane in four months
China’s aviation authorities have ordered the country’s airlines to ground their Boeing 737 Max 8 jets after a crash in Ethiopia killed 157 people.
The disaster was the second involving the new aircraft in the last four months. In October, a Lion Air plane crashed into the sea off the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, killing all 189 onboard.
Smart devices will be used to record students’ health data and when they raise their hand
A high school in southern China has come under fire for buying “smart bracelets” to track its students.
Guangdong Guangya High school has purchased 3,500 bracelets that would record students heart rate and physical activity, as well as the number of times a pupil raised his or her hand in class, according to local media reports. The bands have a location function and can be used to pay for items as well as track attendance.
Foreign minister suggests recent actions against Chinese firms are ‘deliberate political suppression’
China’s foreign minister has said Beijing will “take all necessary measures” to defend the rights and interests of Chinese companies such as Huawei, which is locked in an escalating legal dispute with the US.
Beijing’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, said in response to a question about the company suing the US: “It is not difficult to see that the recent actions against specific Chinese enterprises and individuals are not just judicial cases, but deliberate political suppression.
Chinese company files lawsuit claiming restriction is unlawful, harms consumers and violates constitution
Huawei is suing the US over a government ban on its products, raising the stakes in a protracted diplomatic incident between China, the US and Canada, where a senior Huawei executive is facing extradition.
In a statement on Thursday, the Chinese telecoms equipment and smartphone manufacturer said it had filed a lawsuit in the US district court in Plano, Texas, home to the company’s US headquarters, calling for the ban on US government agencies buying Huawei equipment or services to be overturned.
Mark Carney is then asked about activist investor Edward Bramson, who has used a $1.4bn loan from Bank of America to buy his stake in Barclays (and agitate for a board seat),
Q: Would that loan affect his ability to meet the City’s ‘fit and proper person’s test’?
Earlier in the hearing, Mark Carney suggested that that City has underestimated future interest rate hikes.
The governor pointed out that Bank of England’s most recent economic forecasts - based on market expectations of borrowing costs - showed inflation above the BoE’s target over its three-year forecast period
“In other words, the path of interest rates is not firm enough, it’s not quite high enough for us to be fulfilling our mandate, which sends a broad signal in terms of the stance of policy.”
Activists rounded up and dissent stifled as Xi Jinping faces public scrutiny over trade, Xinjiang and Huawei at annual meeting
China’s largest political event of the year, a meeting of legislative delegates and political advisers known as the “two sessions”, gets under way this week and comes at a time when Chinese leader Xi Jinping faces one of the most challenging periods since coming to power.
Thousands of delegates will descend on the Great Hall of the People in Beijing while authorities go into overdrive to prevent any semblance of dissent during the two weeks of meetings of the 3,000-strong National People’s Congress (NPC) , and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), an advisory body.
Chinese CFO claims she was detained and interrogated before being told she was under arrest
Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese technology company Huawei, is suing the Canadian government, its border agency and the national police force over her high-profile detention. Meng claims they detained, searched and interrogated her before telling her she was under arrest.
Lawyers for Meng said on Sunday they had filed a notice of civil claim in the British Columbia supreme court. Canada arrested Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, at the request of the US on 1 December at Vancouver airport. US prosecutors will accuse her of misleading banks about the company’s business dealings in Iran.
Families are now being urged to have at least two children, but it may be too late to convince parents to embrace the change
For Xu Meiru, 38, the thought of having a second child is exhausting. Her days typically begin at 5am, don’t end until 11pm, and are filled with shuttling her nine-year-old son to school, helping him with his homework, preparing meals and running an online clothing business.
“It’s hard to find time even to sleep for a few minutes in a chair,” she says, sitting in a McDonald’s while her son plays a game on a phone, the detritus of a Happy Meal in front of him.
The US president says it is ‘very important for our farmers’ while adding that trade talks are ‘moving along nicely’
Donald Trump has urged China to abolish tariffs on agricultural products imported from the United States – adding that trade talks between the rival powers were going well.
“I have asked China to immediately remove all Tariffs on our agricultural products (including beef, pork, etc.),” the US president wrote on Twitter.
China has demanded the release of Meng Wanzhou, the company’s chief financial officer, who is in Vancouver under house arrest
Canada has approved extradition proceedings against the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies, prompting a furious reaction from China.
Meng Wanzhou, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, was detained in Vancouver last December and is under house arrest. In late January, the US justice department charged Meng and Huawei with conspiring to violate US sanctions on Iran.
Iran reforms drive 90% fall in death penalty worldwide, but report warns hardline approach to minor cases violates human rights
Global efforts to abolish the death penalty are in danger of being undermined by anti-drug governments that use capital punishment to enforce a zero-tolerance approach, experts have warned.
The caution comes even though the number of people sentenced to death for drug offences around the world has actually fallen by nearly 90% over the past four years, according to a study by Harm Reduction International, with 91 known deaths last year compared with 755 in 2015.
Kay Daniel Neufeld, managing economist at the CEBR thinktank, is relieved that America avoided an abrupt slowdown in the last quarter.
However, he also expects growth will be slower in 2019 - averaging 2.3% (again, below that 3% target).
Contrary to most other large economies, the US has bucked the trend and recorded faster GDP growth in 2018 than in the previous year. The weak retail sales recorded for December alarmed analysts fearing an abrupt slowdown to the US expansion in the final quarter of last year, but today’s stronger than expected GDP data suggest the December figures might have been a blip.
Nevertheless, there is little room for complacency. With the world economy slowing and the US –China trade conflict merely on hold, there are plenty of pitfalls to avoid if the US wants to achieve another stellar performance in 2019.”
The US has “proved the doubters wrong” by growing faster than expected in the last quarter of 2018, says James Knightley, ING’s chief international economist.
Here’s his take:
The details show a partial slowdown in consumer spending growth (2.8% versus 3.5% in 3Q18), but it continues to make a strong contribution. In fact, given the equity market turmoil at the time and the poor official retail sales figure for December, this isn’t a bad outcome at all.
Non-residential investment spending actually posted a decent performance, recording growth of 6.2% despite the concerns about what escalating trade tensions could mean in terms of supply chains and corporate profitability.
The US has usually been the decisive voice of calm, but its influence has waned under Trump
During previous bouts of militarised aggression between India and Pakistan, US presidents used personal diplomacy to convince both sides to pull back from the brink.
Such was the case in 1999 during the Kargil war and then again in 2002. Similarly in December 2008 Condoleezza Rice, then US secretary of state, travelled to India to persuade the government to pull back from a planned severe response after the Mumbai attacks, putting the onus on Pakistan to cooperate transparently.
UN security council officials clash over ‘politicised’ aid to troubled country as peace-building chief warns of ‘grim realities’
Infant mortality in Venezuela has soared by roughly 50% during the prolonged political crisis in the country.
Briefing the UN security council, the UN’s political and peace building chief, Rosemary DiCarlo, depicted a devastating collapse in Venezuela’s health system. She warned that 40% of medical staff had left the country and said hospital stocks of medicine had dwindled to 20% of the required level.
The North Korean leader has been filmed taking a pre-dawn smoke break while a woman who appears to be his sister holds a crystal ashtray for him. The footage was captured at Nanning railway station in China, hours before Kim's arrival in Vietnam for a summit with the US president, Donald Trump
At the Shenzhen dump, huge shards of dusty concrete lie in imposing piles. Once the very foundation of this Chinese city, these blocks now seem grotesque in their magnitude, and unsettling in their utter uselessness. Jumbled up with the other relics of modern construction – bricks, wood and steel – and dotted with plastic bags and bottles, it could take centuries, even millennia, for Shenzhen’s discarded concrete to disintegrate back into sand.
China produces more construction waste than any other country - around 2 billion tonnes per year (pdf), or around 4kg per person per day. Two million tonnes of this is concrete. In Shenzhen, which has grown from a town with 30,000 residents to a megacity with 11 million in just 35 years, a full 84% of that construction waste is unceremoniously dumped. It doesn’t even all make its way to official landfills, which don’t have the capacity to handle it, so almost half is disposed in unlicensed sites, or illegally tipped.