World

Hong Kong, ‘Asia’s World City’, is becoming a place where legislators fear that they could face years in prison for talking to politicians from other countries, including British MPs. So many of us have fond memories of Hong Kong. Dynamic and vibrant, the city is a melting pot of different cultures, which represents the meeting point of East and West. Yet in recent days, the mood in Hong Kong has soured. Moral, courageous people now face the choice of standing up and risking arrest; or staying quiet and giving up on their way of life as they know it. For many Hong Kongers who are descendants of refugees from the worst of

The Hong Kong government has recently extended its Covid regulations banning gatherings of more than eight people until 4 June. How convenient. Last year, according to organisers, 180,000 people gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on 4 June 1989. In future, being an organiser may well land you in court under a new national security law, which Beijing announced last week at its annual National People’s Congress. Perhaps we should have expected it. After all, the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s ‘constitution’, lays down that the Hong Kong government should enact such a law, and the big party meeting in October told us that the ‘legal systems and

How will the world be different after coronavirus? Will everything return to the way it was or will there be lasting change? For this country, there is one thing that will clearly be different: the government’s approach to China. I understand that while Boris Johnson’s grand, integrated foreign policy review has been put on hold because of the pandemic, the work on Anglo-Sino relations has been brought forward as a matter of urgency. One of those heavily involved in the development of this new policy tells me that the aim is to get this country ‘off the trajectory of ever-increasing dependence’ on China. The issue is not that Covid-19 emerged

Imran Khan has dedicated much energy to the plight of Muslims around the world. Now, his government has finally decided to pay heed to the suffering of its own religious minorities, by putting together a long-planned commission last month. Days after the commission was formed, it was decided to exclude Ahmadis from it. Since coming to power in 2018, Khan has vociferously spoken up for Muslim minorities, most notably for those in India. In the meantime, Khan has overturned decisions to include a preeminent Ahmadi economist in a financial advisory body, and has now retracted membership of Ahmadis from a commission that merely reaffirms them as a religious minority. Pakistan is the

Eladio’s bar on the outskirts of Avila in central Spain has splendid views of the ancient town’s medieval walls. It also has a remarkable collection of Francoist memorabilia. Indeed, the whole bar is a shrine to the memory of the dictator who ruled Spain with an iron fist from 1939 until his death in 1975. It’s not just the photographs and posters; even the names of the tapas celebrate the Falange and the ‘glorious victory’ over the ‘communist hordes’ in Spain’s Civil War. No one who enters the bar is likely to be shocked by any of this; the facade is painted with a huge Spanish flag visible from afar.

Schools might never have closed in the first place had the coronavirus not started in China. Imagine it had started in Sweden. Whoever responded first was going to set the tone for the nations that followed. When we are uncertain about what to do, we look to the behaviour of others to guide us. Imagine walking down a street with a new restaurant on either side (you remember restaurants, right?), and that you do not know anything about either of them. One has some customers inside, the other has none. Assuming you can get a table, you would choose the one with people in it because, in the absence of

This coronavirus has been cruel to the European Union. The supposed fraternity of member states was the first casualty of the virus, as countries hoarded their medical equipment and banned exports to each other. When Italy’s borrowing costs soared Christine Lagarde, now president of the European Central Bank, said this was not her problem. After much soul-searching — and an apology to Italy from Ursula von der Leyen, the new Commission president — Brussels is trying to repair the damage. But in a way that is exposing new, deeper cracks. For weeks, Angela Merkel has been giving a resolute ‘Nein’ to the proposal that the eurozone should issue common bonds,

My great-grandfather did not fight in the war. He wasn’t a conscientious objector — he was a scientist helping to develop radar. It’s tempting to imagine family history repeating itself. I’m not alongside my colleagues on the NHS front line; instead I’ve been part of a large team at the Crick Institute, helping to develop tests for Sars-CoV-2, the causative agent of Covid-19. For the first phase of our struggle against this virus, we’ve had minimal testing capacity — no radar — and we’ve suffered the consequences. The director of our institute, Sir Paul Nurse, borrowed another wartime analogy when he imagined academic labs as a flotilla of ‘little ships’,