Last week, high schoolers across England, Wales, and Northern Ireland received letters notifying them of how they performed in their A-levels, an important exam that often determines their acceptance to a higher education institution. Many more of them were disappointed than usual.
In 1996, one year before Britain’s handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, prime minister John Major made a promise to the colony.
Is China’s bark worse than its bite?
Covid-19 has brought tourism from China to the UK to a standstill. But with relations worsening seemingly day-by-day between the two countries, some wonder when travel—and spending—will resume.
The geopolitical battle between China and the West is playing out in the global telecommunications market.
The British government has banned Chinese telecom giant Huawei from its 5G network.
Young British workers became known as the “crisis cohort” after bearing the brunt of the 2008 global financial crisis.
Last week, members of Britain’s House of Lords debated adding an amendment to a little-known bill regulating the installation of broadband in leasehold apartments. The amendment, introduced by independent peer David Alton in the upper house of Parliament, sought to add language to the bill stating that only telecom operators with clean human rights records could install high-speed internet connections in these apartments—but it had a specific provider in mind.
China has imposed a sweeping new security law on Hong Kong that criminalizes secession, subversion of state power, terrorism, and foreign collusion—broad categories that, as Quartz’s Mary Hui writes, are “so vague and subjective as to be almost infinitely applicable.”
In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a 67-page document with guidelines to improve the development and well-being of children aged 0-to-3. Its conclusion: In order to support kids, we must support their caregivers, because their love and care is what children really need to thrive.
The global 5G equipment market is dominated by three companies: China’s Huawei, Finland’s Nokia, and Sweden’s Ericsson. Together, they account for roughly 80% of 5G base stations around the world, and until recently, Huawei was leading the pack, thanks to high-quality and competitively-priced network equipment.
Members of the European Parliament today (June 19) adopted a resolution condemning China’s unilateral imposition of a new security law in Hong Kong, and called on member states to respond, most notably by filing a case against the Chinese government before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
After the 2008 financial crash, European firms on the verge of bankruptcy desperately looked for buyers and investors, and found them in China. Heeding Winston Churchill’s warning never to let a good crisis go to waste, Chinese companies bought up distressed assets across the continent, which helped them catch up to many of their European rivals just a decade later.
The last time many UK consumers went shopping in a brick-and-mortar store was 12 weeks ago, when the government shut down non-essential businesses in an effort to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
A survey on global perception of democracies has found that, while most people say they prefer living in democratic countries, fewer feel their own countries meet that definition.
In 2016, French cosmetics brand Lancôme organized a free promotional concert in Hong Kong. A few days later, confronted with mass online criticism, they canceled it: The artist meant to perform, pop singer Denise Ho, had met with the Dalai Lama and campaigned for democracy in Hong Kong, two causes antithetical to Beijing’s One China principle. In the face of calls for a boycott, the luxury brand backed down.
In February 2016, when Boris Johnson was still mayor of London, he wrote in The Telegraph newspaper that if the UK voted to leave the European Union, its government would be embroiled “for several years in a fiddly process of negotiating new arrangements” on trade and business with other countries. As prime minister, Johnson has just made that process much harder for himself, by picking a very public fight with China, one his country’s largest economic partners.
The novel coronavirus has provided the European Union a unique opportunity to rebalance its relationship with China—if only it could get on the same page about it.
In New York City, black and Latino people appear to be twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as white people. In the UK, preliminary data shows that nonwhite people have a 10-to-50% higher risk (pdf, p. 45) of death from the disease.
The leaders of Germany and France took a step this week towards a form of integration that has for decades eluded the European Union. It may well save the bloc, and its common currency, from an untimely demise—and it’s all thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Every day, about one thousand new cases of cancer are diagnosed in the UK. This means that, in the seven weeks since the UK shut down to contain coronavirus, roughly 50,000 people should have found out they had cancer.
The novel coronavirus has infected more than 4 million people, and killed more than 286,000 around the world. It’s erased decades of economic gains. Few governments have escaped unscathed. And criticism of slow or inappropriate responses are growing in countries like the US, China, Brazil, and the UK.
When France imposed a nationwide lockdown on March 17 to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, nobody knew how long it would last. Now, almost two months later, the country will gradually begin lifting restrictions in a process it calls déconfinement. And it will start with schools.
The war against the novel coronavirus may be far from over, but stay-at-home orders are lifting around the world.
