African officials have begun to publicly speak out on the treatment of their citizens by the Chinese government after a week which saw the widespread circulation of videos, most of them from Guangzhou, showing black migrants being harassed and evicted from their homes by Chinese police. Numerous videos of alleged mistreatment have begun to circulate […]
The thing about the lockdown, as a thirty-something year old man, is that it’s a lot like purgatory probably is. Think about it: You get to sit at home, on the couch, in front of the television all day long. But there’s no sport on. The creator himself could hardly have devised a more frustrating […]
As questions abound about the original source of the COVID-19 outbreak the Washington Post has reported that it has acquired official documents that show that in 2018 the US Embassy in Beijing sent scientists to analyse the conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying, amongst other things, coronaviruses in bats. Two […]
After Donald Trump, at least partly to distract from his own failures over Coronavirus, announced last night that he would be defunding the World Health Organisation, the reaction in Ireland was pretty much exactly what you would expect. “An indefensible decision”, pronounced Simon Coveney, accusing the US President of “undermining trust” in the WHO: This […]
A leading charity in the UK has claimed the coronavirus is “running wild” in care homes for older people. Caroline Abrahams, the charity director for Age UK said the figures being released by the authorities in the country were “airbrushing older people out like they don’t matter”. She says the official death toll for Britain is not […]
Ren Zhiqiang, a wealthy developer and outspoken critic of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), disappeared last month. Now the Chinese authorities say he was arrested and is being investigated. The New York Times previously reported that Mr Ren, a member of the CCP, had written a “scathing essay” describing the Chinese Premier, Xi Jinping, as a […]
An interesting little addendum to the story this morning about Ireland being the tenth worst country in the world for Coronavirus deaths per million people: All of the ten countries that head that list, Ireland, and the nine worse than us, are in the European Union. You have to get to 11th on the list, […]
A former Amnesty International Research Consultant, Hind Khoudary, has come under fire after apparently causing the arrest of a Palestinian peace activist by Hamas. Rami Aman, the activist in question, is one of the organisers of an event called “Skype With Your Enemy”, which sets up video calls between Palestinian and Israelis in an attempt […]
Ireland is, both in population and land mass, a tiny country. As a result, the total number of daily deaths from Covid 19 in Ireland is unlikely – barring absolute catastrophe – ever to hit the horrifying four-figure numbers we’re getting close to seeing in the UK, and the USA, and Spain and Italy. Add […]
The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday announced that they will be sending 6 million medical masks to foreign countries as part of an international humanitarian assistance package. The masks will be shipped to the EU, the US, Latin America and the Caribbean, and other nations who have friendly relations with Taiwan. 10 million medical […]
Coronavirus is starting to look more and more like the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Just when you think you’ve smashed it and it’s now a puddle on the ground, it starts re-forming and coming back more determined than ever: The coronavirus may be “reactivating” in people who have been cured of the illness, according to […]
What’s interesting about this is that usually when countries spend great wads of cash to stop their companies from manufacturing things overseas, it’s in order to move that production – and the jobs – back to the home country for political benefit. But not in this case. No, Japan doesn’t seem to much care where […]