Month: March 2024

So concludes the latest update of a massive study, published last week in the Lancet medical journal, based on demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study and tracking data over 150 years – back to 1950 and forecasting to 2100. According to co-lead author Natalia Bhattacharjee, demographic changes “will completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power – and will necessitate reorganising societies”. But as with climate change, we are not very good at developing policies to help us deal with deep, slow, relentless forces…

Tobgay, who returned to power after January’s election having previously served as prime minister from 2013 to 2018, promised to strengthen ties with India, Bhutan’s key trading partner. Bhutanese Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay pictured at Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial in New Delhi on March 15. Photo: EPA-EFE But Lin Minwang, deputy director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said that the impact on Chinese-Bhutan border talks could be “obvious and direct”. “We have seen some momentum since 2020 and the negotiations have achieved significant progress,”…

“China’s current political and ideological debates with the United States are essentially defined in China along nationalist, cultural and civilisational queues – ‘the East versus the West’ – not between socialism and capitalism, between proletariat and bourgeoisie, or between worldwide proletariat revolution and imperialism in the traditional Marxist-Leninist conceptual framework,” Wang wrote. Narrative war: China’s TikTok users are being told that Aristotle did not exist He said the other notable shift is the “absence of Leninism”, which could be related to the Leninist emphasis on violent revolution and other radical…

One of China’s largest private education operators, XJ International, formerly Hope Education Group, is facing a winding up petition brought by international bondholders after it failed to meet a repayment deadline earlier this month. The Bank of New York Mellon London branch, acting for a group of creditors, filed a petition with the High Court in Hong Kong on Wednesday to liquidate XJ and seeking payment of US$324 million of convertible bonds and US$27,056 of interest, the education company said in a stock exchange filing late on Thursday night. Bank…

Huawei Technologies’ 2023 net profit more than doubled, as rising sales of its mainstay telecoms equipment and a comeback in consumer products – funded by a record R&D budget – helped the privately held company hack a profitable path out of restrictive US sanctions. The Shenzhen-based firm’s 2023 revenue grew 9.6 per cent to 704.2 billion yuan (US$97 billion), Huawei said in its annual report released on Friday. Sales of information and communications (ICT) technology infrastructure grew by 2.3 per cent to 362 billion yuan, making up half of the…

The findings were presented at an American Heart Association (AHA) conference in Chicago held from March 18 to 21, with a paper set to be published soon in a peer-reviewed journal, according to a statement from the AHA on March 19. Restricting daily eating to a short period of time has gained popularity in recent years because it is thought to have benefits such as weight loss and improved heart health, lead author Zhong Wenze from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine said. “However, the long-term health effects of…

The shift in those international partnerships comes after former president Mohamed Bazoum was ousted in a military coup in July last year. Bazoum was a key US ally. Since his departure, relations between Niger and the West, especially France and the US, have deteriorated, culminating in their troops being ordered to pack up and move out. But while Niger has been distancing itself from its former Western partners it has been moving closer to China and Russia. Each of those new relationships offer something different to the National Council for…