Iran have signed a deal with China.
It’s really crazy he gets to sign off on this report on behalf of the WHO.
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China is increasingly desperate for oil - the clock is ticking. The Axis of Evil is fortifying itself.
No country is going to do anything even if it’s conclusively proven that not only did the virus release from a Chinese lab, they designed it, lied about it and covered it up.
Not a single country has shown that kind of resolve in the past decade. All they’ll do is blabber about it on Twitter and make a show of acting tough. No real action.
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That’s a $14 BILLION dollar a year deal. In context of China’s $14 trillion GDP- scary!
Must be why the price of oil has surged so dramatically. Why, it’s back to pre-covid levels- still far below the price of 2014, or even 2018.
Iran has basically no money because of US sanctions; China has spare capacity for building infrastructure. It’s a form of barter, with the value of what each side pretends it is. Xi didn’t even bother to sign this vaguely-worded deal.
A view of trade on the ground in China. Informative throughout.
A couple of interesting excerpts:
After covering up details about the virus, and detaining and punishing early whistle-blowers, the government eventually instituted effective policies aimed at eliminating the spread of infection. But relatively little direct economic support was given to citizens. During the first financial quarter of 2020, the Chinese economy shrank by nearly seven per cent, the first time the government had reported a contraction since the Mao Zedong era. Nevertheless, the government didn’t issue across-the-board stimulus payments. “If the Chinese government did that, people would just put it in the bank,” Li told me.
Entrepreneurs mentioned other ways to avoid negative attention. In Yuhuan, a city near the coast, I met a woman who managed foreign trade for a company that manufactured precision parts for automobiles. She said that U.S. clients had her sign contracts that prevented her from listing their names on her company’s Web site.“We can’t say publicly that we do business with this American company,” she said. “They don’t want people to know they’re getting this part from China.”
A number of students followed the election coverage on Fox News. In a detail that is unlikely to appear in any of the station’s promotional materials, the Communist Party didn’t bother to block Fox’s Web site, unlike those of CNN, the Times , and other American sources. In class, my students and I discussed what they were seeing on Fox, and I introduced them to Lauren Boebert, who was campaigning in Colorado to represent me and my family in Congress. All November, a student in the front row of my journalism class wore a “Trump: Keep America Great” baseball cap. He referred to the President as Chuan Jianguo, an ironic Chinese nickname that pairs the Trump surname with a Communist-era patriotic moniker—essentially, Make-China-Great-Again Trump.
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you had me at Amazonglish
I really like the style of Czech republic as they put board to demonstrate about the Tiananmen square massacre, for their tourist. It is very interesting way to let the know world about china and Xi jinping suspension policy, how cruely they killed their own 1000 of innocent citizens for no reason.
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Would a crisis in the South China Sea, presumably caused by a Chinese attempt to claim control, have such a huge adverse effect? It is routinely pointed out that the volume of trade passing through the South China Sea ($US3.4tn according to one estimate) is very large, amounting to 20% of world trade.
But the great majority of this trade is going to or from China. As I observed back in 2016, the Chinese government can control this trade in any way it chooses using domestic policies. As it turned out, the Chinese government has exercised this power against Australia in relation to a wide range of exports.
The remaining $1tn or so of trade (about 1.5% of global GDP) might, in the event of a crisis, be forced to take more circuitous routes, as happened when the Suez canal was blocked. Some might even take routes through the Southern Ocean. This would undoubtedly be costly and inconvenient. But using the same method as was applied to Suez, it’s easy to see that the total impact would be modest.
NASA falls in line:
And correctly so. NASA’s “nation” recognizes only China not Taiwan. Proving once again that individual entities have no power or responsibility about international political disputes.
Perfect response given by the IOC as well:
“ Thomas Bach, head of the IOC, said the committee is not a “super world government” that could solve issues for which “not a United Nations security council, no G7, no G20 has a solution.”
No guts, just empty talk. Good to see the US and allies are taking concrete steps.
Xi Jinping of course knows the story well, and the crackdown on some of the wealthiest in China, done very visibly, is intended I think to demonstrate the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to the poor. Whether he can do more of this without damaging the machine that created his country’s aggregate GDP is the question. I may be wrong in my speculation on the nature of his acts, but the fact is that the status of China, by any measure, has bred a wealth equal to the best in the world, and a poverty equal to the worst.
Bravo Australia 
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I didn’t know the female Tony Blair was a Mormon:
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Emphasis on “was”.
Raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in New Zealand, Ardern left the church in 2005 because, she said, it conflicted with her personal views, in particular her support for gay rights.[217][218] In January 2017, Ardern identified as agnostic, saying “I can’t see myself being a member of an organised religion again”
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I wonder of the current situation involving covid-19 in India is causing other countries to compare it to China?
Taiwan should get ready to blow up all its EUV machines and all other semiconductor making equipment and materials should China succeed in its invasion.