News Headlines - 29 June 2020
▽Hebei: China locks down 400,000 people after virus spike near Beijing - BBC News
China has reinstated a strict lockdown near Beijing, affecting around 400,000 people, after a small surge in cases.
The restrictions have come into force in Anxin county in Hebei province near the capital.
After the pandemic emerged in China at the end of last year, the country has managed to get new infections to a consistently low level.
To avoid a second wave, even small surges are taken very seriously by the country's health authorities.
▽China forcing birth control on Uighurs to suppress population, report says - BBC News
China is forcing women to be sterilised or fitted with contraceptive devices in Xinjiang in an apparent attempt to limit the population of Muslim Uighurs, according to new research.
The report, by China scholar Adrian Zenz, has prompted international calls for the United Nations to investigate... The state is already facing widespread criticism for holding Uighurs in detention camps.
▽Radioactivity hike seen in northern Europe; source unknown
Nordic authorities say they detected slightly increased levels of radioactivity in northern Europe this month that Dutch officials said may be from a source in western Russia and may “indicate damage to a fuel element in a nuclear power plant.”
But Russian news agency TASS, citing a spokesman with the state nuclear power operator Rosenergoatom., reported that the two nuclear power plans in northwestern Russia haven’t reported any problems.
▽Donald Trump warns Hitachi not to sell Anglesey nuclear site to China | The Sunday Times
Donald Trump’s government has warned Hitachi against selling a nuclear power project to China as tensions between Washington and Beijing escalate... Hitachi last year put Horizon on hold and wrote off £2bn after repeated delays by Westminster in signing off a support package. Hitachi’s board is set to make a decision in September on what to do with the £16bn project, which it hopes will power about five million homes. In the absence of support from ministers for new nuclear power stations, it may sell.
▽Japan tunnel dispute delays world’s fastest railway | Financial Times
It is meant to be the fastest, most sophisticated railway ever built, whisking passengers from Tokyo to Osaka in just 67 minutes. But the world’s first magnetic levitation mainline has one big problem: a 9km gap in the middle.
Although construction on the $84bn maglev project began in 2014, the governor of Shizuoka prefecture is refusing to allow work on one short stretch - entirely in a tunnel - that will pass beneath the mountains of Japan’s southern Alps.
With the dispute now threatening to delay the entire project at a cost of billions of yen to the JR Central railway, the company’s chief executive Shin Kaneko begged governor Heita Kawakatsu to let work begin at an unusual summit on Friday that was streamed live to the public.
