UK demands China explain redacted parts of London embassy plan
A letter sent by Rayner's housing department to the Chinese embassy said it must provide unredacted drawings of the plans or 'identify precisely and comprehensively' the parts that have been withheld, and 'explain the rationale and justification' for the blacked-out sections.
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Sydney Morning Herald
5 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
A telling moment has revealed the path Trump is on, and it's scary
If you heard the news last week that Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the United States' Bureau of Labor Statistics, and responded with a shrug, you probably weren't alone. Wasn't this just another instance of the United States president attacking someone whose findings he didn't like? Not according to experts from across the political aisle, who have raised the alarm that this move represents a different threat altogether. Even from Trump. Speaking with host Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, our international and political editor Peter Hartcher talks about what history tells us happens once a country's leader starts controlling facts. Click the player or watch the video below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation. Selinger-Morris: We know, certainly I know now more than I did before, after reading your column, that reliable statistics are absolutely crucial to democracy, right? So walk us through this. Why so? Hartcher: Well, there are the specifics, like what should interest rates be set at, but the much bigger picture and why this is such a telling moment, I think, is that if you have agreed points of reality, if you can agree on some official data, then you have a starting point and perhaps even an ending point for debate and policy. Loading But if nothing is fixed, nothing is agreed and everything is subject to political manipulation, which presumably everybody will now suspect the numbers in future will be because Trump will no doubt appoint eventually a politically reliable, trustworthy figure to run this bureau… so even if that person does the job honestly and punctiliously, there will forever now be a suspicion over the numbers produced by that bureau. Now there will be compensating. Things will happen. Private sector outfits will try to produce their own estimates, that's exactly what happened in China when the Chinese government was plainly fudging their figures to make growth look better than it was. And in fact, it was the former premier of China, Li Keqiang, who said, 'Oh, don't worry about the GDP figures'. He said, 'They're man-made.' And he himself proposed an alternative formula for trying to measure... growth in the Chinese economy while ignoring the official statistics. And he became the premier. So this is a well-established pattern in autocratic societies. It's not in the US. That's why it's a big story, because it's part of the tendency of the Trump administration to drive the US into an autocratic mindset and political system, depriving the country of objective reality and objective facts so that everything can then be subject to manipulation and redefinition by the leader, who in an autocratic system becomes the only source of reality. He's not there yet. He's a long way from that. But that's the course he's on. This is a real marking point, I think. And he still has nearly three and a half years to go.
The Age
5 hours ago
- The Age
A telling moment has revealed the path Trump is on, and it's scary
If you heard the news last week that Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the United States' Bureau of Labor Statistics, and responded with a shrug, you probably weren't alone. Wasn't this just another instance of the United States president attacking someone whose findings he didn't like? Not according to experts from across the political aisle, who have raised the alarm that this move represents a different threat altogether. Even from Trump. Speaking with host Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, our international and political editor Peter Hartcher talks about what history tells us happens once a country's leader starts controlling facts. Click the player or watch the video below to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation. Selinger-Morris: We know, certainly I know now more than I did before, after reading your column, that reliable statistics are absolutely crucial to democracy, right? So walk us through this. Why so? Hartcher: Well, there are the specifics, like what should interest rates be set at, but the much bigger picture and why this is such a telling moment, I think, is that if you have agreed points of reality, if you can agree on some official data, then you have a starting point and perhaps even an ending point for debate and policy. Loading But if nothing is fixed, nothing is agreed and everything is subject to political manipulation, which presumably everybody will now suspect the numbers in future will be because Trump will no doubt appoint eventually a politically reliable, trustworthy figure to run this bureau… so even if that person does the job honestly and punctiliously, there will forever now be a suspicion over the numbers produced by that bureau. Now there will be compensating. Things will happen. Private sector outfits will try to produce their own estimates, that's exactly what happened in China when the Chinese government was plainly fudging their figures to make growth look better than it was. And in fact, it was the former premier of China, Li Keqiang, who said, 'Oh, don't worry about the GDP figures'. He said, 'They're man-made.' And he himself proposed an alternative formula for trying to measure... growth in the Chinese economy while ignoring the official statistics. And he became the premier. So this is a well-established pattern in autocratic societies. It's not in the US. That's why it's a big story, because it's part of the tendency of the Trump administration to drive the US into an autocratic mindset and political system, depriving the country of objective reality and objective facts so that everything can then be subject to manipulation and redefinition by the leader, who in an autocratic system becomes the only source of reality. He's not there yet. He's a long way from that. But that's the course he's on. This is a real marking point, I think. And he still has nearly three and a half years to go.
Sydney Morning Herald
5 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Trump's tariff strike on India plays into China's hands
Singapore: When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi travels to Shanghai later this month, as leaked reports suggest he will, it will mark the first time in seven years he has met Chinese President Xi Jinping on his home turf. It will also send an unmistakable signal of the growing détente between Asia's two heavyweight nuclear powers after a period of escalating tensions and border conflict. If US President Donald Trump makes good on Wednesday's vow to double tariffs on Indian exports into America, Modi would arrive in China for the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation on August 31 with his relationship with Beijing's chief rival under newfound strain. At 50 per cent, the tariff would be among the highest the Trump administration has imposed on its trading partners. Half of that figure is in retaliation for India's purchases of Russian oil. Notably, China, the world's largest buyer of Russia's fossil fuels, has so far escaped a similarly punitive measure. Tightening the screws on Russia by strangling its wartime economy has been a key tool of the United States and its allies to try to force Vladimir Putin to abandon his ambitions to annex Ukraine. But Trump's surprise decision to single out India for punishment – and his confrontational approach to trade negotiations, including disparaging India's economy as 'dead' – is a high-risk gamble that undermines years of US-led efforts to build trust with India. Loading On the world stage, India plays a careful hand, wary of being pulled too closely into either China's or America's orbit. It is a member of both the Chinese-dominated BRICS forum, which was set up as an alternative to US-led institutions, and the Quad security dialogue with the United States, Australia, and Japan. For more than two decades, the US has courted India as a strategic ally, efforts that have escalated in recent years as America and its allies have increasingly seen India as a counterweight to China's growing assertiveness in the region. 'China would be pleased to see this going on,' says Dr Lavina Lee, director of foreign policy and defence at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney.
