Month: May 2023

The End of an Era: Beijing LGBT Center Closes

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Advertisement The Beijing LGBT Center closed on May 15. With it went the empowering community events, safe space networking, workshops, and counseling that made the center so crucial and pioneering to the Chinese capital’s queer community, according to a prominent local LGBTQ organizer who goes by AJ. “At least at the moment, there are no other such counseling alternatives for LGBTQ+ people,” said AJ (who asked not to give his real name, for fear of retribution from the authorities). “We have to go online now. I hope another organization can…

Covid lab leak theory should not be ruled out, top Chinese scientist says

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The former director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) has said the lab leak theory for the origins of Covid-19 should not be discounted. George Gao, an internationally respected virologist, also said another branch of the Chinese government had investigated the lab leak theory – the first such acknowledgment that some kind of official investigation took place. “They haven’t found wrongdoing,” he said. Gao served as the CDC head until July 2022, putting him at the forefront of China’s investigations into the origins of Covid. The virus…

China investigated Covid lab leak claims, says top scientist

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A top Chinese scientist has said China investigated whether Covid-19 might have originated in a Wuhan laboratory — the first admission from a senior official that Beijing took the so-called lab leak theory seriously after years of heated denials. Professor George Gao, former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a BBC Radio 4 podcast that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was checked by experts to see whether the facility could have been the source of the coronavirus pandemic. “The government organised something,” he said in…

Wall Street futures jump on optimism over debt ceiling deal

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Wall Street futures rose sharply on Tuesday, as traders were encouraged by news that US policymakers had agreed a deal on the debt ceiling, with the bill set to face Congress this week. Contracts tracking the technology-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose 1.4 per cent ahead of the New York open, while those tracking the benchmark S&P 500 added 0.7 per cent, reaching their highest level since August. The rise was bolstered by Saturday’s deal between US lawmakers and the White House, which would raise the country’s $31.4tn debt ceiling for two…

Call for Better Mental Health Support for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh, After Cyclone Mocha

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Kolkata, India —  On a cold evening, after completing her maghreb (post-sunset) prayer, a woman holds her children close to keep them warm with her threadbare scarf. They sit huddled together outside a now-dilapidated shelter made of bamboo sticks and plastic sheets — their home. Shielded from her children’s gaze, the mother of two lets tears slip down her face. The widowed woman, 28-year-old Konsoma Khatun, is one among the million Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, who have been affected by the devastating Cyclone Mocha that hit parts of…

China calls for ‘stable’ ties with US in meeting with Elon Musk

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China has called for “stable and constructive” ties with the US in a meeting with Elon Musk that highlighted the complex relationship between Beijing and the billionaire boss of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX. In a statement, the Chinese foreign ministry quoted Musk, who arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for his first visit since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, as comparing US-China interests to conjoined twins and as saying Tesla opposed “decoupling” of the world’s two biggest economies. Musk, one of the world’s richest men and a powerful figure in…

Intel inside? Chinese firm Powerleader’s ‘home-grown’ chip suspected of being a rebadged microprocessor from US giant, test results show

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The Geekbench findings were widely reported by both Chinese and foreign media outlets focused on computer hardware. Should the Geekbench findings get confirmed, Powerleader’s Powerstar CPU would mark the latest scandal to tarnish China’s development of indigenous chips, following the infamous Hanxin case in 2006. Advertisement A government investigation found that the developer of the Hanxin series of chips, Chen Jin of Shanghai’s prestigious Jiaotong University, had “committed serious falsification and fraud”, the university and state media said at the time. The Hanxin, or China chip, was initially hailed as…

Protesters clash with police in China over partial demolition of mosque

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Hundreds of police have clashed with protesters in a Muslim town in south-west China over anger at plans to partially dismantle a 14th-century mosque. The unrest broke out on Saturday, seemingly in response to attempts by the authorities to dismantle parts of Najiaying mosque in Nagu, a town in Yunnan province. In 2020, a court ruled that recent additions to the mosque, including a domed roof and minarets, were illegal and should be removed. But when the deconstruction work started over the weekend, local people in Nagu, which is populated…

Protesters clash with police outside mosque in China – video

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Videos shared on social media show protesters clashing with police outside a mosque in Yunnan in south-western China. Tensions rose after a ruling ordered parts of the Najiaying mosque to be removed and verified videos from Saturday show police officers near the entrance of the mosque and demonstrators chanting and appearing to try to enter the grounds The Guardian

Chinese jet: Airbus orders will divert to homegrown ‘patriot express’

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Some people avoid buying a new model of car on the basis that it may be unreliable. But Chinese air passengers nevertheless clamoured for seats in the first commercial flight of the homegrown C919 airliner on Sunday. That augurs well for future sales of the jet. Beijing hopes it will challenge the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing. It took the state-backed Commercial Aviation Corp of China 15 years to bring the 164-seater jet into service. China Eastern Airlines was the first buyer and is using the aircraft to fly between…