A dozen poor countries are facing economic instability under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign loans, much of them borrowed from China under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). An analysis has found paying back this debt is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open,...
Yevgeny Prigozhin said 20% of the 50,000 convicts Wagner had recruited, and a similar number of its regular troops, had been killed over several months in the fight for Bakhmut.
Alexander Shiplyuk, head of Siberia’s Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM), is suspected of handing over classified material at a scientific conference in China in 2017. The 56-year-old maintains his innocence and insists the information in question wasn’t classified and was freely available...
The daughter of Nikolai Gusev, director of the Vympel Design Bureau, which designs and produces the missiles used by the Russian army, has been living in Florida since 2021. The 20-year-old student Natalia Guseva rents an appartment in Miami for $3,500 a month, while a year of study at the University of Miami costs the family...
The China Labour Bulletin recorded 108 factory workers’ protests since early January, more than twice the amount recorded in all of 2022. Reduced orders from international buyers and poor economic conditions have led factories to lay off workers, relocate to reduce costs, or shut down altogether, the Bulletin says.
In theory, the import of drones into Russia should have been choked off by Western sanctions. In practice, however, it is clear that avenues for their procurement remain open for drones as well ad advanced microchips - used in everything from missiles to demining robots. They are flowing into Russia from abroad through companies...
Contrary to its promise, the German company not only continued its deliveries, but also began exporting laser rangefinder binoculars and night vision scopes. Laser rangefinders and levels from the Swiss company Leica Geosystems are also making their way into Russia, albeit through third countries. The equipment may have military...
Russia’s official public services portal, Gosuslugi, notified users of an upcoming forum titled “Strong ideas for a new era” and invited them to submit “an idea, a public initiative, or a project” that would contribute to “the country’s development” on an online platform created for the event....
Unilever became the first major European food company to stop imports and exports from Russia, as well as media and ad spending there, in March 2022. It continued, however, to supply “essential” food and hygiene products to Russians while pledging not to take any profits from those sales. Its Russian subsidiary Unilever Rus,...
Ann Widdecombe, who joined the Reform UK party this year, made the comments when she was asked what she would say to consumers who could not afford to pay for basics such as the ingredients of a cheese sandwich. The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson, Sarah Olney, said: “How out of touch can you get? Ann Widdecombe joins a...
As the brutal war against Ukraine costs Russia’s army ever more casualties, recruitment drives for fresh replacements are now turning to migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus to fill the boots of the dead left behind by their prospective comrades. Meanwhile, Mikhail Matveyev, a Duma member, criticised "naturalised...
Chinese authorities raided three advisory firms over the past few months which offered investigative and strategic analysis for the Chinese market to foreign investors. Their staff -all Chinese nationals- were detained, one of them was sentenced to six years in prison for “stealing national secrets”. Alfred Wu, a researcher...
Drawn up in 2021 by the Kremlin’s Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation, the Kremlin’s plans do not focus on cooperation. “This is the old KGB method: ‘We should weaken our enemies. And the best way to weaken them is from inside, not from outside.’ What they are good at is dividing societies, creating problems,...
Twitter user Carl Zee outlined the situation in a series of May 11 posts accompanied by a memo from the Florida Department of Education. Zee explains, “My friend showed Disney’s Strange World in a Florida classroom and one student reported it to their parents. Now she’s under investigation by the state. Florida is not safe...
Hideji Suzuki, the former President of Japan China Youth Exchange had been locked up in a ‘Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location’ (RSDL) facility for the seven months. RSDL is a notorious system where the suspect is kept incommunicado without access to a lawyer for months at a time. It is a system that has been...
On Sunday, Russia was accused of using phosphorus on the besieged city of Bakhmut, with Ukraine releasing footage purporting to show it raining down on its positions. Phosphorus creates flash fires that are incredibly hard to put out. If people are hit with the chemical they suffer horrendous burns, which actually accelerate if...
Bank shareholders and executives should bear the risks of mismanagement, the Berkshire Hathaway chair and CEO says, with vice chair Charlie Munger criticising that executives are more concerned with getting rich than with customers.
Regarding protesters who were holding up signs reading ‘Not My King’ near Buckingham Palace during Saturday’s coronation, Tory MP Lee Anderson wrote on Twitter: “If you do not wish to live in a country that has a monarchy the solution is not to turn up with your silly boards.” Meanwhile, human rights organisations...
The Communist Party has been widening the legal landscape for imposing exit bans and is increasing their use against human rights defenders and their families, for holding people hostage to force targets overseas to come back to China -a practice called ‘persuade to return’, a form of transnational repression-, controlling...
Officials said that ‘members of the public’ are not allowed to bring on ‘political slogans or materials’ to the parliamentary estate. The material was eventually returned under pressure from David Davis, a former minister. The row comes at a sensitive time for UK-China relations, with ministers already facing pressure to...
A man contacted the authorities arguing that the MP’s “extreme views” would damage her children and they should be removed from her care. Creasy has been a prominent campaigner on misogyny and violence against women. The man’s complaint was quickly dismissed, but the police decided that this man, who had no personal...
On Tuesday this week, Giuliani revealed voter suppression tactics to the far-right Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon and Arizona’s defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake during a discussion on his America’s Mayor Live program.
The Gay Games, an international LGBTQ+ sport and cultural event, are set to begin in November 2023 in Hong Kong and Mexico. However, pro-Beijing Hawish networks wanted the authorities to step in and scrap the event. Junius Ho, one of Hong Kong’s most vocal anti-LGBTQ+ politicians, launched an online petition on April 20...
Observers have warned that the expanded law, to take effect on 1 July, increases the risk faced by foreign individuals and entities working in China, particularly those in key technology, research and monitoring and other potentially sensitive sectors.
Dong Yuyu, who often met with foreign diplomats, academics and journalists in the course of his work, was detained on February 2022 while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat at a hotel in Beijing. His family was notified in March 2023 that his case would be sent to trial, though the charges remain unclear.