Going by the Greek alphabet, the next names should have been "Nu" and "Xi" but the WHO skipped them and went on to call the latest coronavirus variant "Omicron". But why? Was it to avoid similarities with Chinese President Xi Jinping's name? Before the World Health Organization named Omicron as a variant "of concern" on Friday, the last identified variant was the Mu variant, named after the 12th out of 24 letters in the Greek alphabet. Nu and Xi, the 13th and 14th letters, were next in line. But in a statement to Associated Press on Saturday, the WHO said: "'Nu' is too easily confounded with 'new', and 'Xi' was not used because it is a common last name." It said its "best practices for naming disease suggest avoiding causing offence to any cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups".
The naming of the virus has been controversial in the past, with former US president Donald Trump and his allies repeatedly referring to the coronavirus as the "China virus" or "Wuhan virus" despite protests from Beijing that the name would "stigmatize" the country and contribute to anti-Asian sentiment. On Saturday, Trump's son Donald Trump Jnr tweeted: "As far as I'm concerned the original [name] will always be the Xi variant." Republican Senator Ted Cruz also suggested in a tweet that Omicron's name showed that the WHO was "scared of the Chinese Communist Party". The WHO has faced various accusations that it gave in to pressure from China over the coronavirus, which was first reported from the Chinese city of Wuhan in late December, 2019. Controversies ranged from whether the WHO pushed China enough to provide data, to the exclusion of Taiwan, which Beijing sees as a breakaway province, from key meetings related to pandemic control. The health body announced its adoption of the Greek alphabet system to describe variants of coronavirus strains in May this year, saying these labels were simple and easy to say and remember. It also noted that associating variants with places was "stigmatizing and discriminatory". In China, a number of Chinese characters which would be pronounced as "Xi" in different tones are used as surnames. According to data from the Ministry of Public Security in February, the Chinese president's surname is the 296th most common family name in the country. Two other surnames that would also be read as "Xi" but read in different tones were more common, ranking 169 and 228 out of the top 300 surnames in China.
0 Comments
Dutch authorities scrambled on Saturday to see if 61 passengers from South Africa who tested positive for Covid-19 have the new Omicron strain, as the shutters came down around the world to contain the new variant. Germany became the second European country after Belgium to find a suspected case of the highly infectious new variant, which has sparked fears of a major setback in the global effort to end the coronavirus pandemic. Alarm grew after the World Health Organization said the new type, originally known as B.1.1.529 and subsequently renamed Omicron, was a “variant of concern” and more transmissible than the dominant Delta strain. Australia and Thailand joined the United States, Brazil, Canada and a host of other countries around the world restricting travel from southern Africa where the strain was first discovered. Anxious travellers thronged Johannesburg international airport, desperate to squeeze onto the last flights to countries that had imposed sudden travel bans. Many had cut back holidays and rushed back from South African safaris and vineyards. “It’s ridiculous, we will always be having new variants,” British tourist David Good told AFP, passports in hand. “South Africa found it but it’s probably all over the world already.” “I think we got the last two seats,” said Briton Toby Reid, 24, who had been watching the sunrise on Cape Town’s Table Mountain with his girlfriend when the ban was announced.
The main countries targeted by the shutdown include South Africa, Botswana, Eswatini (Swaziland), Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. But in a sign of the how difficult it is to contain the virus, the Netherlands found that almost one in ten — 61 out of 539 — people who had arrived on Friday from South Africa were positive for Covid-19. The infected people, who flew in on two KLM flights from Johannesburg, were being kept quarantined in a hotel near Schiphol airport, one of Europe’s biggest international air hubs. “The positive test results will be examined as soon as possible to determine whether this concerns the new worrisome variant,” the Dutch Health Authority said in a statement. Europe is already struggling with a coronavirus surge that has forced several countries including the Netherlands to tighten restrictions, and a new variant threatens to worsen the situation. A German regional official said on Saturday that health authorities have identified the first suspected case in the country, in a person who returned from South Africa. “The Omicron variant has with strong likelihood already arrived in Germany,” tweeted Kai Klose, social affairs minister in the western state of Hesse. Belgium on Friday became the first country on the continent to identify a case, a young woman who had returned from Egypt via Turkey on Nov 11. Scientists are now racing to determine the threat posed by the heavily mutated strain, and whether the current coronavirus vaccines should be adjusted. Markets and oil prices around the world plunged on Friday as news of the latest setback in the fight against the pandemic sank in. US President Joe Biden said countries should donate more Covid vaccines and give up intellectual property protections to manufacture more doses worldwide to stem the spread of the virus. “The news about this new variant should make clearer than ever why this pandemic will not end until we have global vaccinations,” he said. The WHO said it could take several weeks to understand the variant and cautioned against imposing travel curbs while scientific evidence was still scant. South Africa’s health ministry called the global rush to impose travel bans “draconian” and the foreign ministry said it was “akin to punishing South Africa for its advanced genomic sequencing and the ability to detect new variants quicker”. But with memories still fresh of the way global air travel helped the spread of Covid after it first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, countries clamped down on the new variant. Australia became the latest to act, banning all flights from nine southern African countries. Thailand restricted flights from eight countries, as did the United States, Brazil, Canada and Saudi Arabia. EU officials agreed in an emergency meeting to urge all 27 nations in the bloc to restrict travel from southern Africa, with many members having already done so. The new strain was already having an effect, though. Next week’s World Trade Organization ministerial conference, the global trade body’s biggest gathering in four years, was called off at the last minute on Friday due to concerns about the new variant. Vaccine manufacturers have however held out hope that they can modify current vaccines to target the Omicron variant. Germany’s BioNTech and US drugmaker Pfizer said they expect data “in two weeks at the latest” to show if their jab can be adjusted. Moderna said it will develop a booster specific to the new variant. From human rights to coronavirus and now tennis star Peng Shuai, preparations for February's Beijing Olympics have been overshadowed by several controversies. China's ruling Communist Party is however determined to frame the Winter Games as a chance for the country to showcase its prowess and help the world unite in the face of the pandemic. The International Olympic Committee has lauded Beijing for making history in becoming the first host of a Summer Games, in 2008, and now a Winter one. With just over 70 days to go, what are these issues hanging over the Olympics:
Tibet, Hong Kong
Human rights campaigners and exiles have accused Beijing of religious repression and massively curtailing rights in Tibet. Activists unfurled a Tibetan flag at the Olympic flame-lighting ceremony in Greece. Tibet has alternated over the centuries between independence and control by China, which says it "peacefully liberated" the rugged plateau in 1951 and brought infrastructure and education to the previously underdeveloped region. But many exiled Tibetans accuse the Beijing government of religious repression, torture and eroding their culture ― part of broader fears for human rights in China. There has also been international concern about a clampdown in Hong Kong, which China is remoulding in its own authoritarian image after huge and often violent democracy protests in the city two years ago. Coronavirus The coronavirus has loomed large over the build-up to the Beijing Olympics, which take place just six months after the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Summer Games. China has managed to restrict domestic infections to small clusters through aggressive lockdowns and mass testing, but Beijing organizers have admitted that protecting the Games from the coronavirus is their "biggest challenge". The Winter Olympics will be held in a "closed loop" ― a strict bubble insulating athletes from the outside world for the whole Games. Only people living in China will be allowed to attend as spectators. The estimated 2,900 athletes must be fully vaccinated or face 21 days in quarantine upon arrival. They, along with media and others in the bubble, will also be tested daily. Asked about Chen’s case, China’s National Health Commission said it stood by comments made by Liang Wannian, the leader of the Chinese side of the WHO-China investigation who led the interview with the Hubei Xinhua Hospital doctors. Liang told a news conference in February of this year that the earliest Covid case showed symptoms on Dec 8 and was “not connected” to the Huanan market.
Errors and Inconsistencies In their report, the WHO experts concluded that the virus most likely spread to people from an animal spillover, but they could not confirm that the Huanan market was the source. By contrast, they said that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely". In May, two months after the report by the WHO and China was published, 18 prominent scientists, including Worobey, responded with a letter in Science complaining that the WHO team had given the lab-leak theory short shrift. Far more research was required, they argued, to determine whether one explanation was more likely than the other. An expert on the origins of influenza and HIV, Worobey has tried to piece together the early days of the Covid pandemic. Reading a May 2020 study of early cases written by local doctors and health officials in Wuhan, he was puzzled to see a description that seemed like Chen: a 41-year-old man with no contact with the Huanan market. But the study’s authors dated his symptoms to Dec 16, not Dec 8. Then Worobey found what appeared to be a second, independent source for the later date: Chen himself. “I got a fever on the 16th, during the day,” a man identified as Chen said in a March 2020 video interview with The Paper, a publication based in Shanghai. The video indicates that Chen is a 41-year-old who worked in a company’s finance office and never went to the Huanan market. Official reports said that he lived in the Wuchang district in Wuhan, miles from the market. The New York Times was not able to independently confirm the identity of the man in the video. Along with his fever on Dec 16, Chen said he felt a tightness in his chest and went to the hospital that day. “Even without any strenuous exercise, with just a tiny bit of effort, like the way I’m speaking with you now, I’d feel short of breath,” he said. Worobey said that the medical records shown in the video might hold clues to how the WHO-China report wound up with the wrong date. One page described surgery Chen needed to have teeth removed. Another was a Dec 9 prescription for antibiotics referring to a fever from the day before — possibly the day of the dental surgery. On the video, Chen speculated that he might have gotten Covid “when I went to the hospital” — possibly a reference to his earlier dental surgery. Murky Links In Worobey’s revised chronology, the earliest case is not Chen but the seafood vendor, a woman named Wei Guixian, who developed symptoms around Dec 11. (Wei said in the same video published by The Paper that her serious symptoms began Dec 11, and she told The Wall Street Journal that she began feeling sick on Dec 10. The WHO-China report listed a Dec 11 case linked to the market.) Worobey found that hospitals reported more than a dozen likely cases before Dec 30, the day Wuhan authorities alerted doctors to be on the lookout for ties to the market. He determined that Wuhan Central Hospital and Hubei Xinhua Hospital each recognised seven cases of unexplained pneumonia before Dec 30 that would be confirmed as Covid-19. At each hospital, four out of seven cases were linked to the market. By focusing on just these cases, Worobey argued, he could rule out the possibility that ascertainment bias skewed the results in favour of the market. Still, other scientists said it’s far from certain that the pandemic began at the market. “He has done an excellent job of reconstructing what he can from the available data, and it’s as reasonable a hypothesis as any,” said Dr Ian Lipkin, a virus expert at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. “But I don’t think we’re ever going to know what’s going on, because it’s two years ago and it’s still murky.” Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the most vocal proponents of investigating a lab leak, said that only new details about earlier cases — going back to November — would help scientists trace the origin. “The main issue this points out,” she said, “is that there’s a lack of access to data, and there are errors in the WHO-China report.” A scientist who has pored over public accounts of early Covid-19 cases in China says that an influential World Health Organization inquiry had likely got the early chronology of the pandemic wrong. The new analysis suggests that the first known patient sickened with the coronavirus was a vendor in a large Wuhan animal market, not an accountant who lived many kilometres away from it.
The report, published on Thursday in the prestigious journal Science, will revive, although certainly not settle, the debate over whether the pandemic started with a spill over from wildlife sold at the market, a leak from a Wuhan virology laboratory, or some other way. The search for the origins of the greatest public health catastrophe in a century has fuelled geopolitical battles, with few new facts emerging in recent months to resolve the question. The scientist, Michael Worobey, an expert in tracing the evolution of viruses at the University of Arizona, came upon timeline discrepancies by combing through what had already been made public in medical journals, as well as video interviews in a Chinese news outlet with people believed to have the first two documented infections. Worobey argues that the vendor’s ties to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as well as a new analysis of the earliest hospitalised patients’ connections to the market, strongly suggest that the pandemic began there. “In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that’s the size of a soccer field,” Worobey said. “It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn’t start at the market.” Several experts, including one of the pandemic investigators chosen by the WHO, said Worobey’s detective work was sound and that the first known case of Covid was most likely a seafood vendor. But some of them also said the evidence was still insufficient to decisively settle the larger question of how the pandemic began. They suggested that the virus probably infected a “patient zero” sometime before the vendor’s case and then reached critical mass to spread widely at the market. Studies of changes in the virus’s genome — including one done by Worobey himself — have suggested that the first infection happened in roughly mid-November 2019, weeks before the vendor got sick. “I don’t disagree with the analysis,” said Jesse Bloom, a virus expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “But I don’t agree that any of the data are strong enough or complete enough to say anything very confidently, other than that the Huanan Seafood Market was clearly a superspreading event.” Bloom also noted that this was not the first time the WHO report, done in collaboration with Chinese researchers, was found to contain mistakes, including errors involving early patients’ potential links to the market. “It’s just kind of mind-boggling that in all of these cases, there keep being inconsistencies about when this happened,” he said. ’The Mistake Lies There’ Toward the end of December 2019, doctors at several Wuhan hospitals noticed mysterious cases of pneumonia arising in people who worked at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a dank and poorly ventilated space where seafood, poultry, meat and wild animals were sold. On Dec 30, public health officials told hospitals to report any new cases linked to the market. Fearing a replay of severe acute respiratory syndrome, which emerged from Chinese animal markets in 2002, Chinese officials ordered the Huanan market closed, and Wuhan police officers shut it down on Jan 1, 2020. Despite those measures, new cases multiplied through Wuhan. Wuhan authorities said on Jan 11, 2020, that cases had begun on Dec 8. In February, they identified the earliest patient as a Wuhan resident with the surname Chen, who fell sick on Dec 8 and had no link to the market. Chinese officials and some outside experts suspected that the initially high percentage of cases linked to the market might have been a statistical fluke known as ascertainment bias. They reasoned that the Dec 30 call from officials to report market-linked illnesses may have led doctors to overlook other cases with no such ties. “At the beginning, we presumed that the seafood market may have the novel coronavirus,” Gao Fu, director of China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in May 2020, according to China Global Television Network. “But it now turns out that the market is one of the victims.” By the spring of 2020, senior members of the Trump administration were promoting another scenario for the origin of the pandemic: that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has a campus roughly 8 miles away from the Huanan market, across the Yangtze River. In January of this year, researchers chosen by the WHO visited China and interviewed an accountant who had reportedly developed symptoms on Dec 8. Their influential March 2021 report described him as the first known case. But Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at EcoHealth Alliance who was part of the WHO team, said that he was convinced by Worobey’s analysis that they had been wrong. “That December the 8th date was a mistake,” Daszak said. The WHO team never asked the accountant the date his symptoms began, he said. Instead, they were given the Dec 8 date by doctors from Hubei Xinhua Hospital, who handled other early cases but did not care for Chen. “So the mistake lies there,” Daszak said. For the WHO experts, Daszak said, the interview was a dead end: The accountant had no apparent links to an animal market, lab or a mass gathering. He told them he liked spending time on the internet and jogging, and he did not travel much. “He was as vanilla as you could get,” Daszak said. Had the team identified the seafood vendor as the first known case, Daszak said, it would have more aggressively pursued questions like what stall she worked in and where her products came from. While the doctors at Hubei Xinhua Hospital said the onset of the accountant’s illness had been Dec 8, a senior doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, where Chen was treated, had told a Chinese news outlet that he developed symptoms around Dec 16. Asked about Chen’s case, China’s National Health Commission said it stood by comments made by Liang Wannian, the leader of the Chinese side of the WHO-China investigation who led the interview with the Hubei Xinhua Hospital doctors. Liang told a news conference in February of this year that the earliest Covid case showed symptoms on Dec 8 and was “not connected” to the Huanan market.
2021 Formula 1 World Championship Drivers' Standings
Regardless of the result in the Grand Prix of Qatar, one thing is clear: the breath taking titanic duel between World Cup leader Max Verstappen and world champion Lewis Hamilton has hardened and has been given an extra charge. While the drivers still do their best to show respect for each other's performance, their team bosses Wolff and Horner slide further and further towards provocations and innuendo. The level drops and the protagonists are constantly adding fuel to the fire. "We do not have dinner together and we also celebrate Christmas without each other. Unless he performs a play. Then I will take the children with me," said Verstappen's team boss Christian Horner during a spirited press conference on the Losail circuit.
"It seems logical to me: we are not friends and we should not pretend that we are. The battle is extremely intense. Toto gets nervous. That's why he swears so much lately. He's under pressure. Great, isn't it?" The object sat next to Horner, neatly within the prescribed two meters: Toto Wolff, the team principal of Mercedes, who already loudly announced after the last grand prix in Brazil that he will now put salt on every Red Bull snail. "The time of diplomacy is over," said the Austrian. "From now on, we will enlarge every suspicious thing on their car and raise it with the race management." It appeared to be so. Mercedes caused unrest in the run-up to the Qatar Grand Prix with a "modest file of new evidence" according to Wolff. The attack on Verstappen's defensive moves against Hamilton in the Brazilian GP was repulsed. The FIA motorsport federation saw no reason in the cockpit video images provided to open an investigation and reconsider a penalty, but the affair sets the tone for the season's denouement. Wolff's response was sobering after the FIA brushed off his request. "We were just doing this to provoke a discussion. We didn't think there was anything to gain." The spotlight is of course on Verstappen and Hamilton in Qatar. Especially on race day, the focus is on the thin gap between the two ruffs: fourteen points separate the reigning champion and the challenger. One steering error, a collision or a technical defect can cost Hamilton or Verstappen the title. "It's about the details. That has been the case all year and it will also be the case here and in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi," predicts Verstappen. In the shadow of the individual titan duel, the battle Red Bull versus Mercedes is at least as relevant. If only because it revolves around prestige, envy and millions of dollars in income. Wolff and Horner are like boxers in the ring. Everything seems allowed to touch and shake each other. Media and even the competition management are brought into position to hand out a knockout. The atmosphere is grim and will remain so until mid-December - two more races to follow after Qatar. Red Bull Racing and Mercedes will target each other non-stop in the coming weeks. The preliminary shelling is already in full swing in Qatar. Main target: the rear wings. Horner and his men never miss an opportunity to suspect Mercedes' swaying wing. Subtly, Horner already threatens with a protest because an illegal wing can generate extra speed. "We have footage. They will look at that," explains Verstappen. Mercedes, in turn, has an army of aerodynamics experts meticulously examine every 'flappy' movement of Red Bull's wings. In the heat of battle, both top teams are pushing the limits on the hunt for every millisecond, but Mercedes boss Wolff is not worried. "There's nothing wrong. We follow the rules. Red Bull sees ghosts. Nobody intentionally comes on the circuit with an illegal wing. Then you are crazy. You can't get away with that. The world is much too transparent there in front of." And provocatively: "We would like to send a copy to their headquarters in Milton Keynes. Our wing has already been checked by the FIA about fourteen times. They have all the drawings. There is so much charade that responding to all the rumors for us is almost is a full-time job." "We've all seen how fast Lewis Hamilton was suddenly in Brazil," Horner parries. "The difference in top speed was huge and the question is whether that is only due to a fresh engine. We want to know if they are following the rules and have our reservations about their flexible rear wing." For example, Formula 1 is turning into a game of Big Brother in the Middle East. "Mercedes keeps an eye on our car and we keep an eye on their car," Horner confirms. "If we think they are cheating, we protest. There is so much at stake. We want a level playing field, trust the FIA and make sure they check more closely. Their role is crucial. The rules are very complex, but the decision has to fall on the track."
Formula 1 Ooredoo Qatar Grand Prix 2021 Qualifying Results
The head of the Women's Tennis Association is questioning the authenticity of an email he received purporting to be from Chinese star player Peng Shuai, who hasn't been heard from since she made sexual assault allegations against a top Communist Party official two weeks ago. In a copy of the email, published by China's state-run CGTN, Peng purportedly tells WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon that the allegations attributed to her are "not true" and that "I'm not missing, nor am I unsafe. I've just been resting at home and everything is fine." Simon said in a statement Wednesday that the email he received "only raises my concerns" about Peng's "safety and whereabouts." "I have a hard time believing that Peng Shuai actually wrote the email we received or believes what is being attributed to her," he said. Peng is a former No. 1-ranked player in women's doubles who won titles at Wimbledon in 2013 and the French Open in 2014. In a lengthy social media post earlier this month on China's Weibo platform, she said former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli "forced" her into sexual relations. Zhang, 75, served in the post from 2013 and 2018. "I was so scared that afternoon," Peng wrote of the 2018 encounter. "I never gave consent, crying the entire time." She said she later willingly entered into an affair with Zhang, who is married. The post was quickly taken down and Peng's social media account disappeared hours after it appeared. However, screenshots of the post continued to circulate widely online in China even as censors scrambled to delete references to it.
Amnesty International on Thursday weighed in, citing what it said was China's efforts to "systematically" silence the country's #MeToo movement and its "zero-tolerance approach to criticism." "Peng's recent so-called statement that 'everything is fine' should not be taken at face value as China's state media has a track record of forcing statements out of individuals under duress, or else simply fabricating them," Amnesty's China researcher Doriane Lau said in a statement. "These concerns will not go away unless Peng's safety and whereabouts are confirmed." Earlier this month, Amnesty highlighted the detention of Chinese journalist Sophia Huang Xueqin on allegations of "inciting subversion of state power." Amnesty International's China campaigner Gwen Lee said the journalist had been "targeted by the authorities after helping women in China report cases of sexual harassment and becoming a key figure in the country's #MeToo movement." Japanese tennis pro Naomi Osaka has expressed her concern in a tweet, saying she hoped that Peng and her family "are safe and ok." "I'm in shock of the current situation and I'm sending love and light her way. #whereispengshuai," she wrote. World No. 1 tennis player Novak Djokovic showed his concern too, as has French player Nicolas Mahut. Pfizer said Thursday it will sell 10 million Covid-19 treatment courses to the United States government for US$5.3 billion, pending approval from regulators. The pharmaceutical giant asked the US Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday for emergency use authorisation for its Paxlovid antiviral pill which has been shown to cut hospitalisation or death by nearly 90 per cent among newly-infected high risk patients treated within three days of the onset of symptoms.
"We were thrilled with the recent results of our Phase 2/3 interim analysis, which showed overwhelming efficacy of Paxlovid... and are pleased the US government recognises this potential," Pfizer chairman and chief executive Albert Bourla said in a statement. "It is encouraging to see a growing understanding of the valuable role that oral investigational therapies may play in combatting Covid-19, and we look forward to continuing discussions with governments around the world to help ensure broad access for people everywhere." Pfizer will start delivering the treatments to the US government later this year through the end of 2022, the statement said. The company has also entered into advance purchase agreements with several other countries and has initiated bilateral outreach to approximately 100 countries around the world, and is committed to working on "equitable access" for the treatment at an affordable price. On Tuesday it announced a deal with the UN-backed Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) to sub-license production for supply in 95 low- and middle-income nations covering around 53 per cent of the world's population. The move comes a few weeks after Merck also approached the FDA seeking a green light for its antiviral capsule against the coronavirus. Local private equity companies are increasing their investment in Southeast Asian venture capital businesses, as they see further growth potential in the region. Vietnam, in particular, is one of their favored areas. Korea-headquartered STIC Investments recently decided to participate in the Series E round investment for Tiki, one of Vietnam's largest e-commerce businesses.
The e-commerce company raised about $258 million in the Series E funding, boosting its corporate valuation to nearly $1 billion from the round. Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund also participated in the fund raising, alongside global insurance firm AIA, Taiwan Mobile and Yuanta Fund. STIC Investments, which has diverse investment portfolios in the Southeast Asian region, including Vietnam and Malaysia, also stepped up as one of major shareholders of Carousell ― a Singapore-based online market place start-up ― a couple of months ago. The Korean PEF led the latest $100 million round of investment, bringing the start-up's valuation to over $1 billion. STIC Investments was also one of many Korean private equity funds ― Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, LB Investment and LINE Ventures ― that together invested $33 million in Indonesia's online grocery delivery service, HappyFresh. As Indonesia boasts a large population and a fast-growing market, the country has been one of the favorite investment locations among Korean PEFs. Korea Investment Private Equity also injected $200 million into Vietnamese conglomerate Masan Group ― the country's major food and beverage company ― taking a 2 percent to 3 percent stake in the company. IMM Investment invested in Vietnam's Masan Group in 2018; and Vingroup in 2019, along with SK Group. According to Preqin's alternative investment research report, the private equity and venture capital market in 10 Southeast Asian countries has more than doubled over the past five years. The amount of private equity and venture capital invested in the region stood at $37 billion, a 117 percent jump from $17 billion in 2015. Some market insiders say one of reasons why Korean PEFs are actively placing bets in Southeast Asian regions is the growing uncertainty regarding regulatory policies in China. The Southeast Asian countries' large populations along with booming e-commerce platforms looks promising to Korean PEFs in generating solid returns on investment.
2021 Formula 1 World Championship Drivers' Standings
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has adopted a landmark resolution on the party's "major achievements and historic experiences," according to a communique published by the official Xinhua news agency, in a move expected to further strengthen President Xi Jinping's hold on power. It is only the third "history resolution" issued by the CCP in its 100-year existence; the other two, in 1945 and 1981, cemented the supremacy of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, respectively. This resolution is a way for Mr Xi to codify his authority in the present and project his long-lasting power and influence into the future.
The communique states that, under Xi, the Communist Party has "solved many tough problems that were long on the agenda but never resolved, and accomplished many things that were wanted but never got done." It pledged to "resolutely uphold Comrade Xi Jinping's core position on the Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and uphold the Central Committee' authority and its centralized, unified leadership to ensure that all Party members act in unison". The resolution was passed during the sixth plenum of the CCP's 19th Central Committee, a four-day meeting behind closed doors in Beijing which brings together the country's top leaders. In 2018, China's largely ceremonial parliament changed its rules to remove presidential term limits, paving the way for Xi to potentially rule for life. Mr Xi has already managed to establish his own eponymous political theory and have it written into the party's constitution, a measure previously only reserved for Mao and Deng. By issuing his own resolution, Mr Xi seeks to further entrench his status as a towering leader on the same level as the same two predecessors. Under Mr Xi, China has adopted more autocratic domestic policies while turning increasingly confrontational abroad. |
Thank you for choosing to make a difference through your donation. We appreciate your support.
This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesCategories
All
Archives
April 2024
|