China's middle class: We're being picked like leeks by the government
Spike Wang, a 29-year-old financial professional based in Shanghai, is struggling to live the Chinese dream.
Wang is one of millions of Chinese middle-class men and women who grew up in a roaring economy. Now, amid soaring rents and a plunging stock market, they are finding daily life increasingly difficult.
The past year has been especially tough.
Like many middle-class investors, Wang dumped most of his shares in Chinese stocks after his portfolio suffered a 40% loss in just two years.
“THE UNITED STATES IS NOT A SAFE COUNTRY”: CANADIAN ADVOCATES WANT TO END A POLICY THAT TURNS ASYLUM-SEEKERS BACK TO U.S.
RONALD SYLVAIN WAS feeling confident as he approached the U.S.-Canada border crossing in Champlain, New York in a taxi with his wife and their 9-month-old son last July. The 36-year-old Haitian national had been assured that it was best to “do it legally.” After all, they are professionals: Ronald is an economist and his wife Pamela is a nurse. While other refugees opted to roll their suitcases into Canada over a narrow dirt path five miles to the west at Roxham Road, border agents would surely understand Ronald’s asylum request, based on the fact that gangs in Haiti had threatened him.
Instead, an agent directed his family to wait overnight. They slept uncomfortably on hard benches at the Lacolle Inspection Station next to a public restroom. The next morning, they were turned back to the United States. Under the Safe Third Country Agreement, a 2004 treaty between the United States and Canada, most refugees who approach Canada at an official border crossing are rejected, on the grounds that they should have tried for asylum in the United States first.
Qatar, wealthy, worried, and isolated
by Angélique Mounier-Kuhn
This summer the tourists stayed away and the traditional dhows waited idle in the bay of Qatar’s capital city, Doha. These wooden sailing boats, once used for fishing and transporting goods, are a rare concession to nostalgia in a city that’s been relentlessly modernising since the 1990s.
But now the Arab-Persian Gulf region is troubled and feelings of insecurity abound: there has been unprecedented turmoil since Qatar, rich but less than a sixth of the size of Ireland, was ostracised by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain (all fellow members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, GCC), and Egypt. In June 2017 the four, with a few other states, severed diplomatic and economic relations with Qatar, and Saudi Arabia closed its border, Qatar’s only link to the Arabian Peninsula. Some Saudis have even suggested digging a canal 60km long and 200m wide to further isolate the emirate, but this plan lacks official backing and Qataris view it as fantasy.
How FIFA's President Failed To Clean Up Football
When Gianni Infantino took the helm at FIFA, he promised to rescue football's global governing body from the crisis in which it found itself. Yet thousands of internal memos suggest he is just the latest in a line of despots bending the global organization to their will. By DER SPIEGEL Staff
Get yourself to Brig! If you want to hear something good about Gianni Infantino -- only good, that is, or anything good at all -- go to Valais. To the Swiss mountains, to Brig, the small town where he grew up before becoming the big man he is today. The most powerful person in world football.
To get there from Zurich, you snake your way through the switchbacks of the Furka Pass. You first see the signpost pointing toward Brig once you're over the top of the pass, even though you're still more than 50 kilometers away. There's not really much to put a sign up for here, anyway. Once in Brig, you'll go past the Imboden Bakery, where owner Philibert Imboden invented a "Gianni" bread -- with olives and tomatoes in rye dough -- when Infantino was elected FIFA president. Then past the Geschina sports field, where last year, some 4,500 spectators crammed themselves in right up to the touchlines to watch a legends match. Even Maradona was there for the match, held in honor of the FIFA president. Maradona! In Brig! For their Gianni!
Liverpool makes a stand and runs far-right marchers out of town
Fringe far-right group abandon plans due to numbers of counter-demonstrators
A far-right group has abandoned plans to march through Liverpool after members were visibly outnumbered by counter-demonstrators, including the mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson.
A handful of marchers from the so-called North West Frontline Patriots were met by hundreds of anti-fascist counter-protesters co-ordinated by groups such as Merseyside Together and Unite Against Fascism as they arrived in Liverpool on Saturday.
“Peaceful people power chased the fascists off our streets,” Anderson, a Labour politician, said, adding that he wanted to “show these people they are not welcome in this city”.
Japan's nuclear industry growing, but slower than government hoped
By Aaron Sheldrick and Osamu Tsukimori
Japan's resurgent nuclear industry will miss a government target of providing at least a fifth of the country's electricity by 2030, a Reuters analysis shows.
With eight reactors running and one more set to come online in November, nuclear has this year overtaken non-hydro renewables in power output for the first time since the 2011 catastrophe, when all of the country's nuclear plants were idled.
Yet operators can expect as few as six units to restart in the next five years, and fewer than 20 by 2030, the analysis shows. That is far short of the 30 needed to meet the government target reiterated this year.
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