The Chinese economy is likely to grow again this year, but the crisis is still pressing on the country’s economy. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the recovery is still very dependent of public investment and consumption remains weak. Partly for this reason, the fund has slightly lowered its growth forecast for China. The second largest economy in the …
The Turkish parliament has adopted a law which, according to critics, severely restricts the freedom of non-governmental organizations. A majority voted this morning for a bill submitted by president Erdogan’s AK Party. Under the law, the Turkish minister of the interior can now suspend the leadership of an ngo as soon as the Justice Department opens an investigation into the …
Iran has found a way to obtain millions of vaccine doses, despite the sanctions imposed on it by the United States. It has purchased almost 17 million doses through the COVAX initiative, supported by the World Trade Organization. The $230 million needed to pay for the vaccines were arranged through two banks, one Turkish and one European. According to the …
Two more people have been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Vienna bombing at the beginning of November, according to the Austrian prosecutor on Sunday. On 2 November, a man in the center of the Austrian capital shot four people and injured more than twenty others. The killer was then killed by the police. One of the arrested suspects …
Armenia and Azerbaijan accuse each other of having broken the armistice in and around the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. According to Azerbaijan, four Azerbaijani soldiers have died in fighting in the region in recent weeks. The Armenian authorities claim on Sunday that six of their soldiers were injured in an Azerbaijani attack. The Azerbaijani government claims that the skirmishes, which …
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen to the highest level in 12 years. More than 11,000 square miles of rain forest was lost between August 2019 and July of this year, according to figures from Brazil’s space agency INPE. That’s an increase of 9.5 percent compared to last year. Brazil has, in fact, laid down in the law that, …
The murder of the man behind the Iranian atomic program Mohsen Fakhrizadeh yesterday near Tehran is the second short-term liquidation attributed by Iran to Israel. In August, al-Qaeda’s second man on the streets of Tehran was killed by assailants who escaped on a motorcycle. The victim, the Egyptian Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, also known as Abu Muhammed al-Masri, was the mastermind …
The EU is heading for a financial, economic and institutional debacle as Poland and Hungary persist in their refusal to link EU subsidies to respect for the rule of law. Warsaw and Budapest on Thursday anchored their veto even deeper, which means that the Union is expected to have to fall back on an emergency budget from 1 January in …
In Turkey, life-long prison sentences were handed out for the 2016 coup attempt. There were mostly former army officers and pilots on trial. One of them would have bombed the Turkish parliament. Another pilot had dropped two bombs at a busy intersection near the Presidential Palace in Ankara, reports Turkish news agency Anadolu. According to the charges, the convicts led …
The US has made significant progress in the fight against the threat posed by North Korean and Iranian missiles. During a test in the Pacific, for the first time, a long-range missile was destroyed from the sea and fired towards the United States. The Intercept at Hawaii is part of the missile shield designed to protect the United States from …
