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While the richest countries in the world are grappling with shortages of Covid-19 vaccines, some of the poorest worry about getting vaccines at all. Yet a solution to both problems may be hiding in plain sight: vaccines from China and Russia, and soon, perhaps, India.

Chinese and Russian vaccines were initially dismissed in Western and other global media, partly because of a perception that they were inferior to the vaccines produced by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNtech or AstraZeneca. And that perception seemed to stem partly from the fact that China and Russia are authoritarian states.

There is suspicion of the Russian vaccine in Iran, of the Chinese vaccines in Pakistan, and of both in Kenya and South Africa.

In interviews with more than two dozen Uighurs living across Europe and the United States, tales of threats across the world are the rule, not the exception. Uighurs living in Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and France all complained of similar threats against family members back in Xinjiang, and some were asked to spy for China.

Emet, originally from Aksu in Xinjiang, has lived in Germany for over two decades and is a naturalised citizen. He does volunteer work for the World Uyghur Congress and is a part-time imam in his community. He has never told his family about his activism, hoping the omission would protect them.

Beyond discouraging activism, Chinese officials have also tried to recruit Uighurs living abroad to spy on others in their community, asking for photos of private gatherings, names, phone numbers, addresses and licence plate numbers. Some are recruited when they go to Chinese diplomatic missions in Europe to request documents, and others are contacted by security agents over WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app. Emet’s number is likely to have been leaked to Chinese security agents this way

“This is a very important and remarkable occasion. Today, we take a momentous step, one that has never been taken before with China, toward a future with a fair and reciprocal trade as we sign Phase 1 of the historic trade deal between the United States and China,”

US officials called the deal a huge win that marked a significant shift in Washington’s relations with China, but said it included a tough enforcement measure that could trigger renewed tariffs if Beijing does not live up to its promises.

China would buy $40 billion to $50 billion in additional US services, $75 billion more in manufacturing goods and $50 billion more of energy supplies.

German authorities raided the homes and offices of three people suspected of spying for the Chinese government, officials said on Thursday, giving no details about their identities or the nature of the alleged espionage.

The raid comes amid an intensifying debate in Berlin over the country’s relationship with Huawei, the Chinese technology giant that Washington says is being used for espionage by Beijing.On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel met with senior lawmakers in her party as part of continuing efforts to resolve a dispute over whether to allow Huawei to help build the country’s 5G next-generation mobile network.

Germany has been concerned about the threat posed by Chinese hackers seeking to steal information from the country’s companies, research facilities and ministries. But if sufficient evidence is found in the current case, it would be one of the first in years involving old-fashioned human espionage.

Rune Rafaelsen has a bold plan that could raise the profile of his remote Arctic town — with a little help, he hopes, from China.

He is the mayor of Sor-Varanger, a municipality in the far northeast corner of Norway, close to the Russian border. His office is in the small town Kirkenes — population a little over 3,500 — which overlooks the icy gray Barents Sea.

"Now you can go from Asia to Europe through the Northern Sea Route.

She, like dozens of other vendors here who supply the T-shirts, masks and bumper stickers for American political campaigns, have a curious window into American politics

Trump being good for China has been, perhaps surprisingly, a common refrain among Chinese policymakers, who see the U.S. president as accelerating America's decline while aiding China's rise.

"Another four years of Trump would further divide the U.S. This is beneficial to Beijing,"

Joseph R. Biden’s presidential campaign has unified the Democratic Party around a shared goal of ousting President Trump from office.

the progressive wing of the party is pushing for appointees with deep ties to labor unions and congressional Democrats. And they are battling against appointees that they say would seek to restore a “status quo” on trade, including those with ties to corporate lobbyists, trade associations and Washington think tanks that advocate more typical trade deals.

Mr. Biden has bridged these divisions so far in the campaign by focusing on criticizing Mr. Trump for his costly and erratic trade policy, which he says has alienated allies like Canada and Europe and failed to convince China to make significant economic reforms.

N THE ANCIENT Chinese game of weiqi, better known in the West as Go

build the largest, strongest structures, and only secondly to weaken and stifle enemy ones. Better players shun contact, preferring to parry threats with counter-threats.

mostly avoided contact

fully understanding the invasion of Ukraine is impossible without considering the geopolitical environment in which it is taking place. Russia is emboldened in its quest to recapture lost influence in Europe partly because of its alliance with China and the calculation that American power is giving way.

China’s rise challenges the notion of the West itself. Where the Soviet Union posed a direct threat to Western Europe, China threatens America’s liberal democratic protectorates on the other side of the world: Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, and others. Suddenly to think of the West comprising only the two sides of the North Atlantic no longer makes much sense. If there is a “West” today—a free world allied to the U.S.—it stretches from Western Europe to the Far East and Australasia.

unlike in the ’40s, Western institutions show little sign of changing to meet the new reality. The old order has been so solidly constructed that it appears to have trapped its defenders, who are unable to muster the energy, ambition, or imagination to build anything new.

While Russian troops have battered Ukraine, officials in China have been meeting behind closed doors to study a Communist Party-produced documentary that extols President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia as a hero.

The humiliating collapse of the Soviet Union, the video says, was the result of efforts by the United States to destroy its legitimacy. With swelling music and sunny scenes of present-day Moscow, the documentary praises Mr. Putin for restoring Stalin’s standing as a great wartime leader and for renewing patriotic pride in Russia’s past.

To the world, China casts itself as a principled onlooker of the war in Ukraine, not picking sides, simply seeking peace. At home, though, the Chinese Communist Party is pushing a campaign that paints Russia as a long-suffering victim rather than an aggressor and defends China’s strong ties with Moscow as vital.

Then came Omicron. The new lineage, which first appeared in South Africa last fall, is by far the most transmissible. Some experts described the earlier form of Omicron, the BA.1 sublineage, as the most contagious respiratory virus they’d ever seen, owing in part to key mutations on the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect human cells.

The BA.2 sublineage that soon replaced BA.1 is even worse: potentially 80 percent more contagious than BA.1. There’s also a very rare “recombinant” form of Omicron called XE that combines the qualities of BA.1 and BA.2 and might be 10 percent more transmissible than even BA.2.

BA.1 and BA.2 shrugged off China’s strict social distancing. Even the most fleeting contact between family members, neighbors and coworkers was enough to ignite a viral firestorm in China starting in January.

Making computer chips requires a lot of advanced equipment. Much of that advanced equipment is made by American companies. The new rules from the Biden administration make it so that any company, anywhere in the world, using certain advanced American equipment to make chips can’t sell those chips to Chinese-controlled companies.

at the stroke of a pen, China is getting cut off from the kind of advanced chips it can’t manufacture on its own. Which will cripple both military progress and tech-sector progress, too.

in case there was any question, it is clear that China is being viewed as an adversary, and that that view is a bipartisan one. Any tech company with business in China would do well to note that any further investments are fraught with risk, and previous investments need to be diversified sooner rather than later.

Unlike the Trump tariffs, these controls have a clear goal: to prevent or at least delay Beijing’s attempts to produce advanced semiconductors, which are of crucial military as well as economic importance. If this sounds like a very aggressive move on the part of the United States, that’s because it is.

But it needs to be put in context. Recent events have undermined the sunny view of globalization that long dominated Western policy. It’s now apparent that despite global integration, there are still dangerous bad actors out there — and interdependence sometimes empowers these bad actors. But it also gives good actors ways to limit bad actors’ ability to do harm. And the Biden administration is evidently taking these lessons to heart.

Obviously it didn’t work. Russia is led by a brutal autocrat who invaded Ukraine. China appears to have retrogressed politically, moving back to erratic one-man rule.

In 2020, many Americans told themselves that all it would take to halt the pandemic was replacing the president and hitting the “science button.”

In 2023, it looks like we’re telling ourselves the opposite: that if we were given the chance to run the pandemic again, it would have been better just to hit “abort” and give up.

you can see it in Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s book “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind,” excerpted last month in New York magazine under the headline “Covid Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.”

No leader of a big Western power will attend the games. The pandemic has provided some with an excuse for staying away. But the main reason is the scale of the repression that Xi Jinping has unleashed since he took power in 2012.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, does not share their scruples. As tensions mount over Ukraine, he will enjoy the limelight as the most important guest and Mr Xi’s “best friend”.

Iraq was the top target for China's Belt & Road infrastructure initiative in 2021, receiving $10.5 billion in financing for projects including a heavy oil power plant, a study published on Wednesday said.

In total, China's engagement through investments and contractual cooperation across the 144 Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) countries was $59.5 billion, in line with the $60.5 billion in 2020, according to the report by the Green Finance & Development Center at Shanghai's Fudan University.

However, in Arab and Middle Eastern countries, investment last year rose by about 360% and construction engagement by 116% compared to 2020, the study said.Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.comRegisterIraq, where the United States ended its combat mission last year, has become the third-biggest partner in BRI for energy engagement since 2013, after Pakistan and Russia, the study said.

Russia’s audacious military mobilization in and around Ukraine is the first major skirmish of a new order in international politics, with three major powers jostling for position in ways that threaten America’s primacy.

Russia and China have built a thriving partnership based in part on a shared interest in diminishing U.S. power. Unlike the Sino-Soviet bloc of the 1950s, Russia is a critical gas supplier to Europe, while China isn’t an impoverished, war-ravaged partner but the world’s manufacturing powerhouse with an expanding military.

To do this, Mr. Putin shifted military units from Russia’s border with China, showing confidence in his relations with Beijing. The two powers, in effect, are coordinating to reshape the global order to their advantage, though their ties stop short of a formal alliance.

They had just finalized a statement declaring their vision of a new international order with Moscow and Beijing at its core, untethered from American power.

Over dinner, according to China’s official readout, they discussed “major hot-spot issues of mutual concern.”

Publicly, Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin had vowed that their countries’ friendship had “no limits.” The Chinese leader also declared that there would be “no wavering” in their partnership, and he added his weight to Mr. Putin’s accusations of Western betrayal in Europe.

China was the first country to experience the panic of Covid when it emerged from Wuhan in 2019. Then, for the past three years, the country largely suppressed the virus with a costly mix of mass testing, strict lockdowns and border closures. The government could have used the time to bolster its health system by stockpiling medicine and building more critical care units. It could have launched a major vaccination drive targeting the millions of vulnerable older adults who were reluctant to receive a jab or booster. China did little of that, however, plunging into crisis mode again like in the early days of Wuhan.

A Shanghai hospital predicted half of Shanghai’s 25 million residents would eventually be infected and warned its staff of a “tragic battle” in the coming weeks, according to a now-deleted statement the hospital posted last week on the social media platform WeChat.

“In this tragic battle, all of Shanghai will fall, and all the staff of the hospital will be infected! Our whole families will be infected! Our patients will all be infected!” the statement read. “We have no choice, and we cannot escape.”

Beijing would not abandon North Korea

value of supporting North Korea even as it continues to develop nuclear weapons and unleashes new threats to attack the United States and South Korea.

It is doubtful that China will reinforce the United Nations sanctions by imposing penalties of its own