We’re masking dashed hopes for Olympic spectators in Beijing and China’s beginning fee problem.
Olympics tickets is not going to be bought to the general public
China had already barred international spectators from attending the Winter Games that start in Beijing on Feb. 4. On Monday, it introduced that the majority Chinese individuals received’t be capable of attend both.
Citing the evolving risk from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the Beijing 2022 organizing committee introduced that it was ending public ticket gross sales “to ensure the safety of all participants and spectators.”
The resolution got here lower than two days after well being authorities reported Beijing’s first case of the Omicron variant and ordered a direct lockdown and mass testing in one of many capital’s neighborhoods. The outbreak, although to this point restricted, pierced the extraordinary efforts to isolate Beijing, together with a ban on journey into the town.
By final week, greater than 20 million individuals had been confined of their properties in cities round China, together with Tianjin, a port metropolis simply 70 miles east of Beijing.
The plan: Without providing many particulars, organizers stated that they had created an “adapted program” to permit some spectators.
Here are the most recent updates and maps of the pandemic.
In different developments:
Birth charges in China hit a historic low
China introduced on Monday that its birthrate plummeted for a fifth straight 12 months in 2021.
The falling birthrate, coupled with the elevated life expectancy in China over the past 4 a long time, means the variety of individuals of working age, relative to the rising variety of individuals too outdated to work, has continued to say no.
The inhabitants may quickly start to contract, one thing that will be exhausting to reverse and will end in labor shortages. The state of affairs is creating an enormous political downside for Beijing, which is already going through financial headwinds: Growth within the final quarter of the 12 months slowed to 4 p.c.
Context: The Chinese Communist Party has loosened its infamous “one child” coverage and supplied incentives to younger households. But the modifications got here as social and financial circumstances improved for girls, who’ve grow to be much less prone to need youngsters.
Details: Births fell to 10.6 million in 2021, in contrast with 12 million the 12 months earlier than. That was fewer even than the quantity in 1961, when Mao’s Great Leap Forward resulted in widespread famine and loss of life.
Investigating the Texas synagogue attacker
Investigators are wanting into whether or not the story of a lady jailed in Texas could have motivated the British attacker who stormed a synagogue on Saturday and took 4 individuals hostage.
Aafia Siddiqui, a neuroscientist educated at M.I.T., was convicted in 2010 for “terroristic events” in Afghanistan. She was accused of making an attempt to kill American troopers and plotting a mass casualty assault. Since then, her case has been used as a pretext for different terrorist assaults.
Malik Faisal Akram, 44, from Blackburn in northwestern England, was killed after an 11-hour standoff with regulation enforcement officers on the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, close to Fort Worth, in keeping with the F.B.I.
After one hostage was launched, the rabbi, Charlie Cytron-Walker, and two remaining hostages escaped by throwing a chair on the gunman after which fleeing, Rabbi Cytron-Walker instructed The Times. The rabbi additionally confirmed that Siddiqui was Akram’s sole focus.
Our reporters contacted Akram’s brother Gulbar Akram, who described him in a phone interview as a deeply troubled man.
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Asia Pacific
Namibia’s Skeleton Coast is also known as the tip of the Earth: An arid desert, the planet’s oldest, that dead-ends into the Atlantic Ocean. Its historical past — filled with shipwrecks and Twentieth-century diamond rushes — drew our author. The journey was “a strange and beautiful reminder that we humans are powerless against time, and that in a war between man and nature, nature always wins.”
ARTS AND IDEAS
An internet-famous library
Every 12 months or so, the library within the {photograph} above — with stacks of books piled excessive and buttery lamplight aglow — resurfaces on the web. It is commonly (erroneously) attributed to the writer Umberto Eco, or stated to be in Italy or Prague.
In reality, Kate Dwyer experiences for The Times, the library isn’t in Europe. It doesn’t even exist anymore. But when it did, it was the house library of the Johns Hopkins professor Dr. Richard Macksey — a e-book collector, polyglot and scholar of comparative literature who died in 2019. His e-book assortment clocked in at 51,000 titles, some 35,000 of which finally made their manner into the college’s libraries.
Why do individuals love this picture a lot? Ingrid Fetell Lee, the writer of the weblog the Aesthetics of Joy, pointed on the photograph’s sense of plenitude: “There’s something about the sensorial abundance of seeing lots of something that gives us a little thrill,” she stated.
And what would Dr. Macksey assume, if he knew his library had taken on a lifetime of its personal? “My dad liked nothing better than sharing his love of books and literature with others,” his son, Alan Macksey, stated. “He’d be delighted that his library lives on through this photo.”
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