The last 24 hours of Trump
Updated 0641 GMT (1441 HKT) December 23, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump long ago earned a reputation for being unpredictable in his statements, but he outdid himself on Thursday.
In the span of just a few hours, Trump shook international relations by undercutting the Obama administration over a UN resolution on Israeli settlements, indicated he would ramp up nuclear competition with Russia and then jolted a major defense contractor -- and its shareholders -- by suggesting he would ask Boeing to replace a fighter jet being made by Lockheed Martin.
Here's a look at his day:
Shanghai water supply hit by 100-tonne wave of garbage
Ships are suspected of dumping waste upstream on China’s Yangtze river before it floats into a key city reservoir
Medical waste, broken bottles and household trash are some of the items found in more than 100 tonnes of garbage salvaged near a drinking water reservoir in Shanghai.
The suspected culprits are two ships that have been dumping waste upstream in the Yangtze river. It has then flowed downstream to the reservoir on Shanghai’s Chongming island which is also home to 700,000 people.
The reservoir at the mouth of the river is one of the four main sources of drinking water for the country’s largest city, according to local media.
British woman held in Iran told she can keep two-year-old daughter in prison or lose custody
'What kind of refined cruelty is it that would involve presenting a mother with a "choice" to either,' says Amnesty International's Kathy Voss
A British mother being held in an Iranian prison has been told she can either keep her two-year-old daughter with her in jail or give up custody.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested by Iranian Revolutionary Guards in April on unspecified “national security charges” as she was travelling back to Britain from Tehran after a trip to visit family.
The British-Iranian was with her two-year-old daughter Gabriella at the time. The child, now three, has since been living with her grandparents.
Japan - a wealthy nation with poor children
NGOs and volunteers say increasing numbers of young Japanese are existing below the poverty line and that the government should be doing more to tackle a problem with major implications for society. Julian Ryall reports.
Given its status as one of the wealthiest nations in the world and a reputation as a nurturing and caring society, Japan is not usually associated with poverty. But it is a growing problem here and the issue is causing particular concern when it impacts children.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) released a report in April in which it painted what can only be described as a grim picture of child poverty in Japan. It stated that the children of the poorest households in Japan are significantly more disadvantaged than their counterparts in most other industrialized nations.
Reporter’s arrest in Belgium shows extent of Turkey's press crackdown
The arrest last week of a French-Turkish journalist of Kurdish origins in Belgium has sparked condemnation from his colleagues, press freedom groups and has highlighted Turkey’s attempts to muzzle journalists in the EU.
On December 15, Maxime Azadi was in the Belgian town of Turnhout near the Dutch border when he was stopped by the police for a routine check. What followed though was not the standard sequence of events that a journalist in the EU can expect. But it could well become the new normal for reporters of Turkish descent trying to do their jobs as Turkey widens its crackdowns on the press outside its borders.
A dual French-Turkish national of Kurdish origins, Azadi is a well-known byline among Turkish expats in Europe. A news director at the Amsterdam-based Firat News Agency and a blogger on the respected French investigative journalism site Mediapart, Azadi has been covering Kurdish issues for over a decade.
How The Citizen Lab polices the world's digital spies
University of Toronto professor Ron Deibert launched The Citizen Lab in 2001 to become the 'CSI of the internet.' Since then, it has become one of the leading watchdogs for digital censorship and online suppression.
It's well known that WeChat censors conversations between hundreds of millions of mainland Chinese who regularly use the country's most popular chat app.
Censorship is a fact of life in China, and Beijing's censors have raced to keep pace with the rapid spread of digital communications. But the full scope of how WeChat controls what users say, read, and share wasn't known until a small team of technology researchers at the University of Toronto began to suspect the company was blocking conversations among users in North America, too.
“In the past, when we spoke about globalization, we said it would erase censorship because there were no borders. Now we’re seeing that argument disappear,” says Jason Ng, a researcher at The Citizen Lab, an outfit based based at the university's Munk School of Global Affairs that focuses on exposing how technology can be used to violate free speech and endanger human rights. “This is a new way of thinking about how to restrict information based on who or where users are.”
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