Six In The Morning 30 January 2022

 

How a tiny European country took on China over Taiwan

Analysis by Luke McGee, CNN

Updated 0911 GMT (1711 HKT) January 30, 2022

A curious spat has unfolded in recent months between Lithuania, a small, Eastern European nation of fewer than 3 million people, and China, a superpower with an economy that could soon exceed that of the United States.

It all started last year, when Lithuania poked Beijing in the eye -- twice in the space of a few months.

First, it withdrew from the so-called "17+1" group, a forum in which 17 eastern and central European countries engage with China, before encouraging others to do the same. Given China's numerous business interests in the region, most notably the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) focused on infrastructure projects, any kind of European pushback is unwelcome in Beijing.

Fruit pickers lured to Portugal by the dream of a ‘raspberry passport’

Beatriz Ramalho da Silva and Corinne Redfern

Sun 30 Jan 2022 13.00 GMT

Farm workers from south Asia describe exploitative conditions at the heart of Europe’s soft fruits industry

Three days after Sagar* arrived as a worker in Portugal from Nepal, he began to worry he had made a terrible mistake. “I had expectations to get good work, good money,” he says. “But the reality was different.”

The only job Sagar, 21, could find was on one of the country’s berry farms in Odemira, a rural region on the south-west coast. Earning less than the legal minimum wage to work 16-hour days in 40C heat, he knows he is being exploited. But quitting could jeopardise his residency application – and that’s a risk he cannot afford to take.

Sagar is one of more than 10,000 young men and women who have left their home countries to find work in Portugal’s £200m berry industry, picking fruit that will be sold in supermarkets across Europe.

An "Unreliable Partner"?The Price of Berlin's Hesitancy on Ukraine

Germany is sending 5,000 helmets to Ukraine, but that's it. Many of Berlin's NATO allies, including the U.S., are unimpressed, and there are a number of voices within the Green Party that agree.

By Matthias Gebauer, Kevin Hagen, Valerie Höhne, Dirk Kurbjuweit, Veit Medick, Ralf Neukirch, Jonas Schaible und Fidelius Schmid

"Berlin, we have a problem." That was how Emily Haber, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, began a confidential dispatch she sent to the German Foreign Ministry on Monday. The memo went on to provide a detailed description of how Germany is being discredited in the United States as an "unreliable partner," due to its reticence in the Ukraine crisis. The media, she wrote, isn’t alone in seeing Berlin as a brake when it comes to sanctions, the U.S. Congress does as well. In addition, Berlin’s blocking of weapons deliveries to Kyiv has also been a source of frustration. Washington, Haber wrote, believes that Germany’s position is born of a desire to continue procuring cheap natural gas from Russia.

Sudan security forces kill protester in crackdown on anti-coup march

Sudanese security forces killed a protester Sunday as they cracked down on thousands marching for civilian rule, medics said, taking the number killed since last year's military coup to at least 79.

"Blood is the path to freedom," protesters waving the Sudanese flag chanted, as they marched through the streets of Omdurman, which lies across the Nile river from the capital Khartoum.

"Go back to the barracks," protesters in eastern state of Gedaref shouted at soldiers, witnesses said.

Pro-democracy activists have upped calls for protests to restore a transition to civilian rule, following the October 25 military takeover led by general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.

4 top publishers to sue U.S. IT firm for ‘pirate’ manga

By YASUKAZU AKADA/ Staff Writer

January 30, 2022 at 18:32 JST

Four leading manga publishers are set to file a lawsuit against a U.S information technology company in early February, arguing it is breaching their copyrights by distributing data from pirate manga sites, according to sources.

The lawsuit to be heard by the Tokyo District Court targets Cloudflare Inc., a U.S. web infrastructure company that serves as a content delivery network.

Publishers Shueisha Inc., Kodansha Ltd., Shogakukan Inc. and Kadokawa Corp. will seek combined damages totaling about 400 million yen ($3.48 million), the sources said.

Northern Ireland commemorates 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday

Five decades on, memories are still painful for the relatives of civil rights protesters killed by British troops.

Fifty years since one of the worst massacres in Britain, residents in Londonderry, also known as Derry, have marked the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when British troops opened fire on civil rights protesters and gave way to decades of chaos in Northern Ireland.

On January 30, 1972, a British elite parachute regiment shot 14 Catholic marchers dead on the streets of Northern Ireland’s second-largest city.

Retracing the steps of the original march, relatives of the victims staged a walk of remembrance on Sunday.