Australia fires: PM Scott Morrison sorry for Hawaii holiday during crisis
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has apologised for going on holiday while the country struggled with a mounting wildfire crisis.
Mr Morrison cut short his trip to Hawaii as criticism of him increased.
One person was found dead on Saturday and another was missing as wildfires raged on in three states.
Since September, Australia's bushfire emergency has killed at least nine people, destroyed more than 700 homes and scorched millions of hectares.
Pressure on FAA to approve its 737 Max jets backfires for Boeing
Tensions boiled over as the regulator refused to be rushed in certifying the bestselling plane as safe
A bust-up between Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration, the US regulator, has backed the aviation giant into a corner over the future of its 737 Max aircraft.
The aerospace group said last week that it would halt production of the plane in January after the FAA refused to authorise its return to service until 2020. The Max was grounded around the world in March following two fatal crashes, blamed on new anti-stall software, that claimed 346 lives.
Sandy Morris, an aerospace analyst at Jefferies, said the FAA’s tougher stance with Boeing and its refusal to rush the plane back into service suggested the Max would not be approved until summer at the earliest.
How China changed Macau, ‘the gambling capital of the world’
Twenty years of Chinese rule has transformed Macau’s economy, but as Matthew Keegan finds out, it has come at a price
Looking out over Macau’s Cotai Strip – the southern Chinese city’s equivalent of the Las Vegas Strip – it’s here, among the glittering lights and neon glow of a parade of extravagant casinos, where the large-scale changes that have transformed the city in the past 20 years are most visible.
It’s hard to believe that until 2007, Macau’s Cotai Strip was just a swamp. Built on reclaimed land, it’s now home to numerous multi-billion dollar casinos that, last year alone, generated more than five times the revenue of Las Vegas.
Friday 20 December 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of Macau being handed back to China, ending 442 years of Portuguese rule.
India cracks down on free expression as protests against citizenship law grow
Facing mass protests over a citizenship law that excludes Muslims, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has imposed a crackdown on freedom of expression not seen in the country since the “Emergency” of the late 1970s.
At least 21 people have been killed, dozens injured and more than 1,500 arrested across India over 10 days of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was voted into law on December 11 and has been widely criticised as an affront to India’s secular constitution.
The law creates a path to citizenship for Hindus, Christians and other religious groups who immigrated from Muslim-majority Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan without proper documentation. It does not apply to Muslims. Critics say the law is discriminatory, marking the Modi government’s latest effort to marginalize India’s 200 million Muslims.
Brexit was a distraction. Now Europe is facing a hellish 2020
Updated 0400 GMT (1200 HKT) December 21, 2019
Brexit has been a massive headache ever since the UK voted to leave in 2016. It took two prime ministers, 1274 days, three deadline extensions and two general elections for an exit deal finally to be deemed acceptable by the British Parliament.
But it also sucked up oxygen in Brussels, as the EU's diplomatic energy fixated on the single issue of having a country leave its bloc.
In that time, the EU was forced to pay less attention to other problems among its member states. Problems that present a far greater long-term threat to the European project than Brexit ever could.
INSIDE THE PLOT TO MURDER HONDURAN ACTIVIST BERTA CÁCERES
IT HAS BEEN more than three years since Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home in Honduras. Cáceres was a 44-year-old activist, mother of four, and an international celebrity — she won the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize for leading a grassroots campaign to prevent a private energy company, Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima, from building a hydroelectric dam on Indigenous land. Near midnight on March 2, 2016, hired assassins broke into her home, shot her, and escaped. She died minutes later in the arms of a friend.
In preparation for the trial of the assassins, the Honduras Public Prosecutor’s Office extracted thousands of private call logs, SMS, and WhatsApp messages from their phones. The call log evidence was examined by an independent expert, and it showed that the assassins had communicated through a compartmentalized chain that reached the highest ranks of leadership of the company whose dam she had been protesting. Those messages, analyzed below, provide a striking window into the plot to kill Cáceres.
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