China’s $55 Million Harbor Project in Sierra Leone Meets Strong Resistance
The government of Sierra Leone has signed a controversial $55 million deal with the Chinese communist regime to allow it to build an industrial fishing harbor on 250 acres of its beach and protected rainforest. The West African country had previously signed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) with China, which has been criticized by the international community as a “debt trap” set up by the regime.
China’s BRI (also known as “One Belt, One Road”) is Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s grand foreign policy project launched in 2013. It aims to extend the regime’s economic and political influence to countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa by recreating ancient China’s silk road and maritime silk road for trading in the 21st century. The BRI invests Chinese capital in the construction of various high-cost infrastructure projects in more than 60 participating countries.
A Misleading C.D.C. Number
We have a special edition of the newsletter on a misleading C.D.C. statistic.
A Miami Beach officer confronting a man without a mask last year.Credit.Saul Martinez for The New York Times
May 11, 2021
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that “less than 10 percent” of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Mediaorganizationsrepeatedthe statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.
But the number is almost certainly misleading.
It appears to be based partly on a misclassification of some Covid transmission that actually took place in enclosed spaces (as I explain below). An even bigger issue is the extreme caution of C.D.C. officials, who picked a benchmark 10 percent so high that nobody could reasonably dispute it.
What the Leaked Zarif Interview Says About the Power Dynamic of Iranian Leadership
Plus, what to make of the Iranian foreign minister’s claim that John Kerry told him of Israeli covert operations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. (Photograph by How Hwee Young/Getty Images.)
A three-hour interview containing Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s seemingly unfettered commentary on his political colleagues and superiors circulated Sunday, offering a unique look into the inner-workings of the regime. “I sacrificed diplomacy for the battlefield,” Zarif, Tehran’s “friendly face” to the West, said in the audio obtained by Iran International. “In the Islamic Republic, the battlefield rules.”
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