Burberry has reported a sales surge of almost a fifth thanks to a bounceback in China, but the luxury British fashion brand has warned that London is losing out to rivals such as Paris and Milan, which are enjoying a stronger tourist shopping boom. The British fashion brand, best known for its signature check bags and raincoats, said that global sales grew 18% year on year to £589m in the quarter to 1 July – its fastest growth rate in two years. The company pointed to a strong sales recovery…
Tag: Coronavirus
No direct proof Covid-19 stemmed from Wuhan lab leak, US intelligence says
US intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report declassified on Friday said. The four-page report by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) said the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, however, and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic. “The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the Covid-19 pandemic,…
China withholds key indicator of Covid death toll as it fails to release cremation data
China has dropped the number of cremations held last winter from a quarterly report, withholding a key indicator of the pandemic death toll during the country’s largest Covid wave. The Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs released summary statistics on marriage and social welfare for the fourth quarter of 2022 last Friday, after months of unexplained delays, which had prompted speculation that the country was not able to track the relevant data. Missing from the quarterly report was the number of cremations held across the country – a figure the ministry…
Covid lab leak theory should not be ruled out, top Chinese scientist says
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…
Surge in strikes at Chinese factories after Covid rules end
Protests in China are often small- scale. On 17 May, a handful of workers at an air-purifier factory in Xiamen, a coastal city in Fujian province, south-east China, gathered to demand the payment of wages that, they said, were in arrears. The protest was quiet, but it was one of nearly 30 similar demonstrations this month alone. With China’s factories reopened and draconian coronavirus measures abandoned, workers are also going on strike at a remarkable rate. This year in China there have already been at least 130 factory strikes, more…
China’s Covid whistleblower in Wuhan reportedly freed after three years
A Chinese citizen journalist who disappeared three years ago while reporting on the Wuhan coronavirus lockdown – and was later revealed to have been detained by authorities – has reportedly been released. Fang Bin was let out of detention on Sunday, according to multiple media reports that cited people close to the family. The reports said he had gone to Beijing, where some of his family live, before being sent back to Wuhan on Monday morning, where he remains under strict supervision. A Chinese human rights monitoring group said neither…
China’s ‘zero Covid’ policy was a mass imprisonment campaign | Murong Xuecun
In one week last December, five members of Guan Yao’s family in Beijing died, including his father, his father-in-law and his grandmother. In an interview with a journalist, Guan, who lives in California, appeared powerless and dejected. Yet – for reasons that anyone from China understands – he chose his words carefully. Avoiding directly mentioning the Chinese government, he referred only to an ambiguous “them”. “It is difficult to understand,” Guan said, “why they abruptly lifted all restrictions.” If you choose to believe official Chinese government documents, the deaths of…
Newly released Chinese Covid data points to infected animals in Wuhan
Newly released data from early in the Covid-19 pandemic has offered a crucial insight into the outbreak’s origins, suggesting that Covid-infected animals were present at a market in Wuhan and could have been a “potential source of human infections”. A pre-print report on Monday by a team of international researchers fleshed out analysis of previously unseen genomic samples collected by Chinese scientists at the Huanan market in Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic. Initially leaked last week after a meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) committee studying…
Biden orders release of intelligence on potential links between Covid and Wuhan lab
A bill requiring the release of intelligence materials on potential links between the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan has been signed into law by US president Joe Biden. “We need to get to the bottom of Covid-19’s origins … including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Biden said in a statement. “In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible. “I share the Congress’s goal of releasing as much information as…
Australia news live: total fire bans in parts of Victoria, NSW and SA amid autumn heat blast
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