Bhinneka News Online: Tuesday Morning Briefing: Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam says she never discussed resigning with Beijing

Tuesday, 3 September 2019

Tuesday Morning Briefing: Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam says she never discussed resigning with Beijing

Hong Kong

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said she had never asked the Chinese government to let her resign to end the Chinese-ruled city’s political crisis, responding to a Reuters report about a recording of her saying she would step down if she could. Here is a transcript of a talk given last week by Lam to a group of business people in the city. The transcript is taken from an audio recording of Lam’s remarks.

Singapore’s hotel occupancy rates have climbed to their highest in over a decade as travelers and business events switched from Hong Kong. Data released by Singapore’s tourism board showed average occupancy rates in the city-state’s hotels hit 93.8% in July, the highest in records going back to 2005, and up from 92.5% a year ago.

Spanish fashion brand Zara, seeking to avoid becoming embroiled in controversy over protests in Hong Kong, issued a statement on Chinese social media. Zara said on China’s Weibo platform that it supported the “one country, two systems” policy under which China rules Hong Kong and said it had not supported strikes. The brand became a top trending topic on Weibo, with one hashtag “Zara statement” viewed more than 170 million times as of Tuesday morning.

U.S.

Hurricane Dorian, one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes on record, weakened slightly early as it remained stalled over Grand Bahama Island, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center said. Dorian has been pounding the Bahamas for days, killing at least five people in the Abaco Islands and inundating homes with floodwater ahead of its expected advance on the U.S. coast, where more than a million people have been ordered evacuated.

Divers searched for more bodies around the wreck of a boat destroyed by a blaze off the coast of southern California, as authorities launched an investigation into one of the area’s worst maritime disasters. Flames ripped through the scuba diving vessel Conception, as it was moored off Santa Cruz Island, trapping the passengers below deck. Five of the six-strong crew managed to escape in an inflatable boat, but no one else has been found. There were a total of 33 passengers and six crew members onboard the Conception when the fire started at about 3:15 a.m. on Monday, officials said.

A 14-year-old American boy shot and killed five family members at their home in Alabama, before throwing away the pistol and calling police, officials said, in the latest high-profile gun crime. The sheriff’s office said five people were shot, with three dying at the scene and two later in hospital. “The 14-year old caller was interviewed and confessed to shooting all five members of his family in the residence,” it said on Twitter.

Environment

On the front lines of climate change: Thawing permafrost has caused problems for residents in Longyearbyen, the main town of Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Houses there are built on wooden stilts instead of deep foundations, leaving them vulnerable to softening ground. The dead are also at risk as graveyards shift.

Slave to sachets: Armed with gloves, rubber boots and a rake, “Mangrove Warrior” Willer Gualva, 68, comes to Freedom Island in the Philippines almost every day to stop it being engulfed by trash. No one lives on the island, yet each morning its shores are covered in garbage, much of it single-use sachets of shampoo, toothpaste, detergent and coffee that are carried out to sea by the rivers of overcrowded Manila.

World

British lawmakers begin no-deal Brexit showdown. British lawmakers will try to stop Prime Minister Boris Johnson from pursuing what they cast as a calamitous no-deal Brexit, a challenge a senior government source said would prompt him to call for a snap election on Oct. 14. That sets up an historic Brexit showdown between prime minister and parliament in a country once touted as a confident pillar of Western economic and political stability.

The United States, Britain and France may be complicit in war crimes in Yemen by arming and providing intelligence and logistics support to a Saudi-led coalition that starves civilians as a war tactic, the United Nations said. Investigators found potential crimes on both sides, while also highlighting the role Western countries play as key backers of the Arab states and Iran plays in support of the Houthis.