04 Aug
News and Analyses, A Foreign Perspective
Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Alerts issued in Portugal and Spain as Met Office forecasts 31C for southern England
Cooling off in a fountain in Madrid. Heat warnings have been issued for 41 of Spain’s 50 provinces. Photograph: Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP/Getty Images
Much of southern Europe is sweltering in near record-breaking temperatures with the mercury expected to exceed 45C (113F).
A scorching 46C (115F) was forecast for Setúbal, near Lisbon, on Saturday, as emergency services in Portugal issued a red alert until Sunday and urged people to avoid picnics and outdoor activities.
Sixteen weather stations in Portugal registered record temperatures on Friday with Alcácer do Sal, near Setúbal, climbing to 45.9C (114.6F).
The Met Office did not, however, expect the record European temperature of 48C, set in Athens in 1977, would be broken this weekend.
In Spain, a high of 45C was forecast for Córdoba and heat warnings have been issued for 41 of the country’s 50 provinces.
UK temperatures are expected to peak at 31C (88F) on England’s south coast this weekend, the Met Office predicted.
Areas along the Hampshire and Dorset coast, such as Gosport, are most likely to feel the heat on Saturday, while the hottest areas on Sunday are expected to be around London and stretching north to the Midlands.
Cloudy conditions are expected in Scotland and Northern Ireland, with some patchy rain to the north and west of Scotland.
The north-west/south-east split will continue early next week, with further showers expected across Scotland and Northern Ireland, while England and Wales stay generally dry and warmer.
Temperatures as high as 32C (90F) are possible around London on Monday and Tuesday.
Temperatures will need to climb significantly if they are to come close to England’s current August record of 38.5C (101.3F) recorded in Faversham, Kent, in 2003.
The intense heat is likely to lessen come Wednesday, as conditions turn “fresher and more changeable”, the Met Office said.
The mercury is being driven higher by a hot air mass moving north from Africa, bringing dust from the Sahara.
In the Netherlands, authorities closed some motorway sections after the heat melted the road surface.
In France, four nuclear reactors have been closed to avoid raising the temperature of rivers whose water is used to cool reactors and then returned.
More On The Environment:
World Politics
China
Intellectuals voice criticism as analysts point to disharmony in the Communist party
Some have also called for an end to the cult of personality surround the Chinese president. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
Rumours have swirled in Beijing in recent weeks that China’s seemingly invincible leader, Xi Jinping, is in trouble, dogged by a protracted trade war with the US, a slowing economy and a public health scandal involving thousands of defective vaccines given to children.
Xi’s name seemed to have disappeared for a while from the cover of the People’s Daily, replaced with articles about his deputy, Li Keqiang, and large portraits of him were said to have been taken down after a young woman filmed herself throwing ink at his image.
No. 1 will rest while Ocean takes over the military
Cryptic slogan on internet
On 13 July, online reports claimed there was gunfire in central Beijing as a coup unfolded. A cryptic slogan emerged online: “No. 1 will rest while Ocean takes over the military,” a reference to a rival politician taking power.
For now, Xi remains in full control of the government and party, and mentions of him in state-run media are as frequent as ever, but the hearsay is a sign all is not right with China’s most powerful leader in decades.
“Such rumours may well lack credibility, but they do offer some indication that the disharmony within China’s party elite is increasing ,” the Hong Kong political analyst Lee Yee wrote in in the online journal China Heritage.
This week, an essay by a law professor at Tsinghua University, one of the country’s top schools, made the rounds on Chinese social media. The essay – Our dread now and our hopes – by Xu Zhangrun offered one of the most direct criticisms of the Chinese government under Xi’s direction.
Referring to Xi only as “that official”, Xu accused him of reversing years of reforms, effectively returning China to an era of totalitarian politics and a style of dictatorship last seen under Mao Zedong.
“After 40 years of reform, overnight we’re back to the ancien régime,” he wrote, calling for the return of term limits, abolished under Xi earlier this year, the rehabilitation of those punished for the 4 June pro-democracy protests crushed by the government and an end to the cult of personality surrounding Xi.
“The party is going to great lengths to create a new idol, and in the process it is offering up to the world an image of China as modern totalitarianism,” he wrote.
Xu is one among several intellectuals voicing dissent. Zi Zhongyun, an international politics scholar, blamed the US-China trade war on the Xi administration’s failure to implement reforms in an article in June. Wenguang Sun, a retired professor at Shandong University published an essay in July urging Xi to stop spending money abroad on projects such as the Belt and Road initiative, and spend it at home instead.
“For the first time since Xi Jinping gained power in 2012, he is facing a pushback from within the party, from liberal intellectuals and so forth,” said Willy Lam, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation and adjunct professor at the Center for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
The pushback is also emerging in other ways. A group of alumni from Tsinghua published an open letter on Wednesday calling for the sacking of a professor over his claims China had emerged as the world’s top superpower.
Hu Angang, who claimed in a series of speeches that China had surpassed the US in economic strength and technological know-how, is one of many who have echoed Xi’s claims that China has entered a new era of power on the world stage, reversing his predecessors’ more muted global aspirations.
“[Hu] misleads government policy, confuses the public, causes other countries to be overly cautious about China and for neighbours to be afraid of China. Overall, it does harm to the country and its people,” the former students said, according to images of the letter posted online.
Such criticism is an indirect rebuke of Xi’s more assertive foreign policy, and comes as his opponents use economic troubles and failed trade negotiations with the US as pretext to question him, according to analysts.
That dissent, while very unlikely to push Xi from power, could impede what had appeared to be his absolute hold over the party and the government. “His position is safe,” Lam said. “It’s just his authority has been dented to some extent. His authority has suffered.”
United States
President condemned for ‘strategic’ attacks as Sarah Sanders refuses to disagree with Trump’s view of the press as the enemy
A ‘CNN sucks’ sign at a Trump rally in Tampa on Tuesday night. Trump has intensified his criticism of the media and embraced the hostile attitude among his supporters towards members of the press. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Donald Trump’s attacks on the media have been condemned by experts at the United Nations, who warned that the US president’s vitriolic rhetoric could result in violence against journalists.
In a joint statement, two experts on freedom of expression – David Kaye, who was appointed by the UN human rights council, and Edison Lanza, who holds the corresponding position at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said: “These attacks run counter to the country’s obligations to respect press freedom and international human rights law.”
Trump’s attacks “are strategic, designed to undermine confidence in reporting and raise doubts about verifiable facts”, they added, while noting the president “has failed to show even once that specific reporting has been driven by any untoward motivations”.
“We are especially concerned that these attacks increase the risk of journalists being targeted with violence.”
The rebuke comes as Trump has intensified his criticism of the media and appeared to embrace the hostile attitude among his supporters towards members of the press.
The president unleashed a Twitter tirade against the media on Sunday, labeling reporters as “unpatriotic”.
“When the media – driven insane by their Trump Derangement Syndrome – reveals internal deliberations of our government, it truly puts the lives of many, not just journalists, at risk! Very unpatriotic!” Trump tweeted.
“Freedom of the press also comes with a responsibility to report the news … …accurately,” he added. “90% of media coverage of my Administration is negative, despite the tremendously positive results we are achieving, it’s no surprise that confidence in the media is at an all time low!”
Earlier this week, the president and his son, Eric Trump, shared a video on their Twitter accounts of attendees at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, shouting “CNN sucks!” at journalists covering the event.
The taunts came a week after the White House was roundly criticized for banning the CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins from covering an event that was open to the press after she had repeatedly directed questions to the president about his relationship with his former attorney, Michael Cohen.
Trump’s combative approach toward the media has been emblematic of both his tenure in the White House and candidacy for president; in 2016, the Trump campaign routinely barred media outlets from covering rallies in retaliation against coverage of which they disapproved.
Trump has often used his podium to hurl insults at the press and single out reporters by name, frequently before an angry mob of his supporters, and has derided coverage he dislikes as “fake news”.
The president has also labeled the media the “enemy of the American people” – a characterization his daughter, Ivanka Trump, rejected on Thursday.
“I’ve certainly received my fair share of reporting on me personally that I know not to be fully accurate, so I have some sensitivity around why people have concerns and gripe, especially when they’re sort of targeted,” she said at an event hosted by Axios.
Like this:
Like Loading...
This entry was posted
on Saturday, August 4th, 2018 at 12:33 pm and is filed under General.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
