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Alok Sharma: Net zero targets can be met with incentives With the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow looming ever closer, Andrew Marr spoke this morning to Alok Sharma, the President for COP26. Marr asked about what the UK government was preparing to do in order to meet its ambitious targets of zero carbon emissions by 2050: How will the UK meet net zero emissions commitments by 2050? "We will address what we need to do across a whole range of sectors," says COP26 President Alok Sharma, "on a 30 year view, we have managed to cut emissions by over 40%" https://t.

The German election campaign has been entirely lacking in substance. Laschet, Baerbock, Scholz: none seem to grip the public’s attention. None are good enough to stand out, yet none are bad enough to drop out as the media and the opposition struggle to land definitive blows. Amid the monotony of political circus and sclerosis, the German press’s tactics are becoming increasingly outlandish, as two 11-year-old children asking questions about land requisition processes on television showed.

Zhou Xiaoxuan was in tears when she emerged from the Beijing court around midnight on Tuesday. ‘I’m really sorry there wasn’t a better result,’ she said in a video clip shared by supporters after the court threw out a sexual harassment case against one of the country’s most famous television hosts. Zhou claimed she had been forcibly groped and kissed while working as an intern at state broadcaster CCTV in 2014. The case was seen as a test of China’s proclaimed determination to clamp down on abuse, and it galvanized the country’s fledgling #MeToo movement.

The forming of the Australia-UK-US (Aukus) military alliance in the Pacific shows how everything Trump can say, Biden can do. The problem is, Biden isn’t doing it very well. Biden’s administration, like Trump’s, is committed to building its Pacific alliances while sustaining Nato. Yet on Australia as in Afghanistan, the Biden team are doing exactly what they accused Trump of: unpicking the frayed bonds of Nato without a clear idea of what might replace it.