It has taken Roger Tyers four days to reach Moscow by train from Kiev. His destination is Beijing: a trip that will take 14 days, with a couple of overnight stops along the way. Tyers, an environmental sociologist at the University of Southampton, is on his way to China to research attitudes to the environment,…
Month: May 2019
Last name first, first name last: Japan minister tells foreign media to get it right
Japan’s foreign minister will ask international media organisations to use the family name first when writing Japanese names – as is customary in the Japanese language – in an attempt to reverse a century of linguistic convention. Taro Kono – or perhaps that should be Kono Taro – said foreign media should follow the same…
San Francisco boasts world’s highest salaries amid rising homelessness
Stock market gadflies were predicting a wealth boom to strike San Francisco this year, with several big-name tech companies set to enter the public market. But according to Deutsche Bank, the city is already there. San Francisco beat out all other world cities for having the highest salaries and most disposable income, according to Deutsche…
‘I get called a sell-out all the time’: Trump’s voters of colour speak out
Donald Trump likes to claim, among other things, that his presidency has been a huge success for non-white Americans. But for all his claims, repeated polls show the president remains very unpopular among people from ethnic minority backgrounds. Nowhere is that more apparent than at his rallies. In Montoursville, Pennsylvania, on Monday evening, the line…
Chagos Islands: isolated UK and US face thrashing in UN vote on ownership
The UK and US are facing a diplomatic rout at the United Nations on Wednesday when the general assembly is expected to vote overwhelmingly to demand Britain relinquish hold of one of the last vestiges of empire in the Indian Ocean. Both countries have lobbied intensely at the UN to avoid support for Britain dropping…
Congo violence sparks fears over UK Ebola response
The UK has agreed not to publicly disclose how much funding has been allocated to the Ebola response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, following warnings this might put those responding to the outbreak at risk. Harriett Baldwin, minister of state for Africa, said the Congolese government had asked for these details not to…
Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa entrench gender biases, says UN
Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency. Research released by Unesco claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systems to many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient….
The lost Louvre of Uzbekistan: the museum that hid art banned by Stalin
I am sitting at a huge table at the Ministry of Culture in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, as officials explain what sounds like a wonderful opportunity. There’s currently an international call-out to find someone to run a gallery in the country, one housing the world’s second-largest collection of Russian avant garde art. What an amazing job, I…
Far-right Facebook groups ‘spreading hate to millions in Europe’
A web of far-right Facebook accounts spreading fake news and hate speech to millions of people across Europe has been uncovered by the campaign group Avaaz. Facebook, which is struggling to clean up the platform and salvage its reputation, has already taken down accounts with about 6 million followers before voting in the European elections…
Is Renee Zellweger’s Netflix thriller the best trash TV show of 2019?
It’s tricky to explain Renee Zellweger’s new Netflix show What/If to somebody who hasn’t seen it, because it’s an exercise in diametrically opposed contradictions. It’s a sexy thriller, even though it’s about as sexy as slow-transit constipation. Its unique selling point is that it follows the consequences of actions, even though that also describes every…