23 September 2020 China took a major stride forward on climate on Tuesday. President Xi Jinping, addressing the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, for the first time committed China to a hard target for future greenhouse gas emissions. By 2060, he promised, his country will be carbon neutral (‘net-zero’). After that, China …
22 July 2020 Is there going to be a new Cold War with China? Probably not. Consider the case of Huawei. Mike Pompeo swept into London on Tuesday like an overweight Darth Vader, while his local satrap, Boris Johnson, waited nervously in Downing Street for judgement. People swore they could hear Pompeo’s cloak swish as …
“We will grant BNOs five years’ limited leave to remain (in the United Kingdom), with the right to work or study,” British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the UK parliament on July 1. “After five years, they will be able to apply for settled status. After a further twelve month with settled status, they will …
Never bring a knife to a gunfight, the saying goes, but China does it differently. It brings clubs. Last Monday, China and India had the nastiest frontier incident since their border war of 1962. In the Galwan Valley of the Aksai Chin, a disputed region the size of Switzerland in the western Himalayas, Chinese and …
“We are the meat on the chopping board,” said Martin Lee, founder of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party. “They have set a precedent for Beijing to legislate on Hong Kong’s behalf.” Or as Dennis Kwok put it, former member of the Legislative Council, put it rather more succinctly: “This is the end of Hong Kong.” It’s …
Is it time for Dr Anthony Fauci to quit? Brazil’s health minister, Luiz Mandetta, was fired last Friday for criticising the country’s mini-Trump, Jair Bolsonaro. Like Trump, President Bolsonaro needs a booming economy in order to be re-elected, and denies the threat from coronavirus because shutdowns hurt the economy. Mandetta did what he could to …
Wuhan, the Chinese city where it all started, was locked down for 79 days before the restrictions on movement were finally lifted last week. A bit over-cautious, perhaps, but in China the coronavirus does really seem to be under control – not totally eradicated, but controllable without extreme measures. If Donald Trump “reopens” the United …
Wuhan, the Chinese city where it all started, was locked down for 79 days before the restrictions on movement were finally lifted last week. A bit over-cautious, perhaps, but in China the coronavirus does really seem to be under control – not totally eradicated, but controllable without extreme measures. If Donald Trump “reopens” the United …
It’s wrong to say that there is no exit strategy from the anti-coronavirus lock-downs that have proliferated across the world. There is, and the first phase is to keep the lock-downs going long enough to bring new Covid-19 infections down to a manageable number. Maybe by June. Then you start playing whack-a-mole until there is …
The basic choice all along with Covid-19 has been: do we let the old die, or do we take a big hit economically? So far, the decision almost everywhere has been to take the hit and save the old (or most of them), but in some places it has been a very near-run thing. Today …