Six In The Morning Wednesday 5 May 2021

 

The world sent India millions in Covid aid. Why is it not reaching those who need it most?

By Jessie Yeung, Manveena Suri and Swati Gupta, CNN

Updated 0948 GMT (1748 HKT) May 5, 2021

As India's Covid-19 crisis tipped past breaking point last month, dozens of countries pledged critical aid.

Planeloads of ventilators, oxygen supplies and antiviral drugs began arriving last week, with photos showing massive parcels being unloaded at New Delhi airport.

There's just one problem: for many days, much of the cargo sat in airport hangars as hospitals on the ground pleaded for more provisions.

Tory quarrels determined UK’s post-Brexit future, says Barnier

Revealed: EU chief negotiator’s diaries, The Great Illusion, give blow-by-blow account of moves behind UK’s departure

Jon Henley Europe correspondent

@jonhenley

Wed 5 May 2021 09.15 BST

Britain’s post-Brexit future was determined by “the quarrels, low blows, multiple betrayals and thwarted ambitions of a certain number of Tory MPs”, the EU’s chief negotiator has said in his long-awaited diaries.

The UK’s early problem, writes Michel Barnier in The Great Illusion, his 500-page account, was that they began by “talking to themselves. And they underestimate the legal complexity of this divorce, and many of its consequences.”

Soon, however, the talking turned to Conservative party infighting, and by the end it had become “political piracy … They will go to any length. The current team in Downing St is not up to the challenges of Brexit nor to the responsibility that is theirs for having wanted Brexit. Simply, I no longer trust them.”

China's New Silk Road is full of potholes

As the harsh realities of China's growing power sink in, the country's appeal is diminishing in the West. To keep it in check, more coordinated efforts are needed and come September the tone from Germany may be decisive.

There are cracks appearing in the New Silk Road, otherwise known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Launched in 2015 as Chinese President Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy project, it received a warm welcome from countries keen to benefit from Chinese globalization.

Since then, the attitude to China has hardened, especially in many democratic countries. Revelations about 1 million Uyghurs held in reeducation camps and reports of forced labor in Xinjiang, serious questions about China's handling of the coronavirus and its origins, and Beijing's dismantling of democracy in Hong Kong have cooled international enthusiasm for Xi's pet project.

1.5C warming cap could 'halve' sea level rise from melting ice

Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius could halve how much sea levels rise due to melting ice sheets this century, according to a major new study modelling how Earth's frozen spaces will respond to ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Since 1993, melting land ice has contributed to at least half of global sea level rise and scientists have previously warned that the vast ice sheets of Antarctica were disappearing faster than worst-case scenarios.

An international team of more than 50 climate scientists combined hundreds of melt simulations of the Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets, which contain enough frozen water to raise the world's seas some 65 metres (213 feet).

For the ruined, Turkey’s crypto crackdown comes too late

Crypto mania swept Turkey as investors sought to shield their savings against inflation. Then two exchanges collapsed.

By Andrew Wilks

5 May 2021

Hulya Ozkal thought she was investing wisely when she ploughed her savings into Bitcoin.

“Maybe it wasn’t millions but I saved half a Bitcoin for the future,” the 65-year old pensioner told Al Jazeera.

In most circumstances, that bet would be paying off handsomely this year. One Bitcoin was worth just over $29,000 at the open of 2021, according to Coinbase, soaring to a high of nearly $65,000 last month before giving back some of those gains to currently trade above $55,000.

Japan should cut its losses and tell the IOC to take its Olympic pillage somewhere else

By 

Sally Jenkins

Columnist

Somewhere along the line Baron Von Ripper-off and the other gold-plated pretenders at the International Olympic Committee decided to treat Japan as their footstool. But Japan didn’t surrender its sovereignty when it agreed to host the Olympics. If the Tokyo Summer Games have become a threat to the national interest, Japan’s leaders should tell the IOC to go find another duchy to plunder. A cancellation would be hard — but it would also be a cure.

Von Ripper-off, a.k.a. IOC President Thomas Bach, and his attendants have a bad habit of ruining their hosts, like royals on tour who consume all the wheat sheaves in the province and leave stubble behind. Where, exactly, does the IOC get off imperiously insisting that the Games must go on, when fully 72 percent of the Japanese public is reluctant or unwilling to entertain 15,000 foreign athletes and officials in the midst of a pandemic?