Day: September 4, 2022

In India and China, farmers fret as drought and heat threaten rice harvest

Chin@Strategy

Extreme weather across the world’s major rice producing countries including India, China and Pakistan is threatening global output of the grain this year, possibly affecting more than 2 billion people in Asia that depend on it as a staple food, experts say. Due to the drought, China’s rice yields will be affected, and thus may affect the export capacity Guillherme Campo Even against a backdrop of soaring food prices this year, rice has remained largely affordable due to four years of plentiful harvests previously. Advertisement But a confluence of factors,…

Chinese motorcyclists join Chongqing wildfire battle

Chin@Strategy

Throughout August, wildfires raged across parts of China, triggered by a record long heatwave and drought. Thousands of firefighters were mobilised across the country. Around the south-western city of Chongqing, which was one of the worst-hit areas, local off-road motorcyclists joined the effort, transporting emergency workers and essential supplies to areas that were otherwise hard to reach. Two of the volunteers spoke to the BBC about their efforts and coming face to face with the effects of climate change. BBC

India’s Electric Vehicle Push Is Riding on Mopeds and Rickshaws

Chin@Strategy

In the United States, luxury-car buyers are snapping up Teslas and other electric cars that cost more than $60,000, and even relatively cheap models cost more than $25,000. Here in India, those are all out of reach of the vast majority of families, whose median income is just $2,400. But an electric vehicle movement is taking place nonetheless, not on four wheels, but on two and three. Electric mopeds and three-wheeled rickshaw taxis that sell for as little as $1,000 are zipping along India’s congested urban thoroughfares, cheered on by…

Joe Biden has picked a fight with tyranny. The west must hope he wins | Simon Tisdall

Chin@Strategy

It was a deadly week for democracy. US president Joe Biden launched a rescue effort to save the “soul of the nation” that the dementor-in-chief, Donald Trump, AKA Lord Voldemort, is conspiring to steal. Russia lost a great man whose titanic struggle for reform was fatally torpedoed by a pint-sized usurper named Vladimir Putin. And China was saddled with indefinite dictatorship under the dead hand of Xi Jinping. Is there hope of resurrection? Perhaps. The more the western democracies are threatened externally by totalitarian regimes and internally by populist extremism,…

China Threatens Reaction After U.S. Announces Arms Sales to Taiwan

Chin@Strategy

HONG KONG — China threatened over the weekend to take countermeasures after the Biden administration approved the sale of more than $1.1 billion worth of arms to Taiwan. A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said the sale of military equipment to Taiwan, designed to repel a seaborne invasion from China, would “severely jeopardize China-US relations and peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait.” In a series of messages posted to Twitter on Saturday, Liu Pengyu, the spokesman, also called on the United States to “immediately revoke” the decision…