Virus Outbreak: Trump fires his campaign manager

COMMANDING LEAD: Joe Biden leads 9 percentage points in national polling and he is ahead in at least five of the major swing states that could decide the election

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday fired his campaign manager, just four months ahead of the US presidential election, in a bid to transform a campaign that has seen his popularity sinking over his management of a surging COVID-19 pandemic. With two more polls on Wednesday adding to several that have shown Trump’s support tanking, he took to Twitter to announce that Brad Parscale would be replaced by Bill Stepien, his former deputy campaign manager. Praising both for their efforts, Trump struck a hopeful note as he looked ahead to November, saying the election “should be a lot easier” than 2016 “as our poll numbers are rising fast, the economy is getting better, vaccines and therapeutics will soon ... be on the way, and Americans want safe streets and communities!” However, the reality is stubborn and sobering: More than 137,000 Americans have been killed by COVID-19; confirmed new cases are on the rise in 40 out of 50 states; California announced it was locking down parts of its massive economy for a second time; and Trump is clashing with health experts tasked with fighting the pandemic. With infection rates that have taken radically different trajectories than those in Europe, the US is in bad shape — and the president appears to be dodging the subject. Trump on Wednesday traveled to Atlanta, Georgia — not to visit the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for an update on the pandemic response as cases spike in the south and west, but to deliver a speech on modernizing the nation’s infrastructure. One day earlier, he held a news conference at the White House in which he touched on multiple subjects and vilified his presumptive Democratic rival for the White House, former US vice president Joe Biden, but barely mentioned the pandemic. His attempt to discredit respected infectious disease specialist

Police detain 142 people at protest against Putin poll

RIGGED RESULTS? Anatoly Naidyonov, 38, compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to a ‘pharaoh who is completely detached from reality’ at the Moscow event

Russian police on Wednesday detained 142 people, including a high-profile Moscow politician, after Kremlin critics protested against changes to the constitution, said the OVD-Info monitor, which tracks arrests at political protests. Many people, including journalists, were put in police vehicles, Agence France-Presse correspondents said from the scene. An AFP journalist was also briefly detained. Prominent Moscow City Councilor Yulia Galyamina, who has spearheaded a campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s controversial changes to the constitution, was among those detained, together with her daughter, she wrote on Facebook. The constitutional changes could see Putin stay in power for another 16 years. Earlier on Wednesday, Galyamina and her allies gathered in Moscow’s central Pushkin Square despite rainy weather to collect signatures from hundreds of supporters against this month’s constitutional reforms, to contest them in court. “We are lodging a class action lawsuit,” Andrei Pivovarov said as he gathered signatures on the steps of a statue of national poet Alexander Pushkin. “We are collecting signatures from across the country.” Writing later on Twitter, Galyamina said they had gathered 5,000 signatures. “This is an excellent result,” she wrote. At one point the campaigners had to pause because they ran out of paper, they said. Some protesters brandished placards, while others chanted “Russia without Putin” and “Russia will be free.” Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot also attended the gathering, calling the amendments a “constitutional coup.” Putin earlier this month oversaw a controversial seven-day vote that amended the constitution and allows him to serve two more six-year terms after his mandate expires in 2024. The amendments also included populist measures such as an effective ban on same-sex marriage. Leading opposition politician Alexei Navalny has said that the poll set “a record in faking votes” and the result had “nothing in common with people’s views.” Many in Pushkin Square said that they had turned up to protest the changes championed by Putin. “I

Trump-Kim summit unlikely, Pompeo says

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo downplayed the possibility of another summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un before the US presidential election in November, saying that Trump would only want to engage if there were real prospects of progress. Pompeo’s comments at a forum in Washington on Wednesday followed repeated North Korean statements saying that Pyongyang would no longer gift Trump high-profile meetings he could boast as foreign policy achievements when it is not being substantially rewarded in return. “The North Koreans have given mixed signals, but the truth is President Trump only wants to engage in a summit if we believe there’s a sufficient likelihood that we can make real progress in achieving the outcomes that were set forth in Singapore,” Pompeo said at the event hosted by The Hill, referring to the first Trump-Kim summit in June 2018. “You need to have a willing partner and the North Koreans have chosen at this point in time not to engage in a way that can lead to a potential solution. We hope they’ll change their mind,” Pompeo added. Trump and Kim have met three times since embarking on high-stakes nuclear diplomacy in 2018, beginning with their meeting in Singapore, where they issued vague vows for a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing when and how it would occur. However, negotiations have faltered since their second summit in Vietnam in February last year, where the US rejected North Korean demands for major sanctions relief in exchange for a partial surrender of its nuclear capability. Some analysts believe North Korea would avoid serious talks with the US, before attempting an eventual return to negotiations after the November election. They say North Korea likely does not want to make any commitments or concessions when there is a chance US leadership could change, but others

Pompeo denies Pooh-poohing China’s Xi

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo assails China almost every day, but he says his dog is not part of his campaign. Pompeo raised eyebrows among students of the social media tea leaves when he posted a photograph of his dog looking ready to tear into a Winnie the Pooh toy. “Mercer and all of her favorite toys!” dog-loving Pompeo wrote on his personal Twitter account. Chinese social media users have frequently used the bear as a meme for Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), although Beijing’s thorough censors have little sense of humor about it. Asked in a radio interview on Wednesday whether this was “Winnie the Pooh-gate,” Pompeo appeared oblivious. “No, I imagine there were a series of stuffed animals and they were equally distributed for Mercer’s benefit,” Pompeo told radio host Simon Conway in Iowa. When told that the BBC had run a story musing about a deeper meaning, Pompeo laughed and said: “I hadn’t seen that.” A.A. Milne’s loveable, but slow-witted bear with a weakness for honey was picked up as a meme after pictures were published of Xi alongside more slender former US president Barack Obama, who drew comparisons to Pooh’s friend Tigger. China has since sought to scrub the meme from Internet accessible inside the nation. Beijing in 2018 rejected the release of the Disney film Christopher Robin, which stars the bear.

Siberian heat wave clear evidence of climate change

Nearly impossible without global warming of human origin, this year’s freak Siberian heat wave is producing climate change’s most flagrant footprint of extreme weather, a study said. International scientists on Wednesday released a study that found the greenhouse effect multiplied the chance of the region’s prolonged heat by at least 600 times, and maybe tens of thousands of times. In the study, which has not yet undergone peer review, the team looked at Siberia from January to last month, including a day that hit 38°C, a new Arctic record. Scientists from the UK, Russia, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands used 70 climate models running thousands of complex simulations comparing current conditions to a world without warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas. They found that without climate change the type of prolonged heat that hit Siberia would happen once in 80,000 years, “effectively impossible without human influence,” said study lead author Andrew Ciavarella, a scientist at the UK Met Office. World Weather Attribution’s past work has found some weather extremes were not triggered by climate change, but this year’s Siberian heat wave stood out among the many studied, said attribution team colead Friederike Otto, acting director of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute. “Definitely from everything we have done it’s the strongest signal that we have seen,” Otto said. The team looked at both the average temperature in Siberia over the first six months of the year when temperatures averaged 5°C above normal and the heat spike of 38°C which occurred in the Russian town of Verkhoyansk last month. Both just really could not happen in a world without the additional heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels, Ciavarella said. The scientists said that the heat added to problems with widespread wildfires, pest outbreaks and the thawing of permafrost. Thawing permafrost also has the potential to release huge amounts

Depp’s ex-wife ‘stole’ sex abuse story, court told

Johnny Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard “stole” her personal assistant’s story of being a victim of sexual assault, the former employee told a UK court on Wednesday on the seventh day of the Hollywood star’s libel trial. “Much to my utter shock and dismay, I discovered that Ms Heard had in fact stolen my sexual violence conversation with her and twisted it into her own story to benefit herself,” Kate James, who worked for the 34-year-old actress from 2012 to 2015, told the High Court of Justice in London via videoconference from Los Angeles. “This of course caused me extreme distress and outrage that she would dare to attempt to use the most harrowing experience of my life as her own narrative.” Pirates of the Caribbean star Depp is suing the publisher and executive editor of the Sun over a 2018 story that branded him a “wife beater.” Depp, 57, denies abusing Heard during a two-year marriage that ended in a messy 2017 divorce and several lawsuits. She claims that he was violent toward her on at least 14 occasions. James told the court that Heard was prone to drinking and sending insulting messages in the middle of the night. Ben King, who worked for the Hollywood star for three separate periods between 2014 and 2016, said Heard was often the “antagonizer” in the relationship. “The way they argued could make them seem like schoolchildren,” he said. King once had to recover the actor’s fingertip, which Depp claims was cut off by Heard with a broken vodka bottle. The actress, who is due to testify today, maintains that he sustained the injury while using a telephone. Depp’s former estate manager Kevin Murphy also accused Heard of asking him to lie to an Australian court during the couple’s infamous 2016 run-in with the law for flouting quarantine rules after taking two

Virus Outbreak: Moderna vaccine ready for final trial

NATIONWIDE TRIAL: Higher levels of antibodies than in most COVID-19 patients were found in trial participants, allowing the US vaccine candidate to advance to stage three

US biotech company Moderna on Tuesday said it would enter the third and final stage of human trials for its COVID-19 vaccine on July 27, after promising early results were published in an influential journal. It would recruit 30,000 participants in the US, with half to receive its RNA-based vaccine candidate, and the other half to receive a placebo. The trial is designed to show whether the vaccine is safe and can prevent COVID-19 infections, or -— if people still get infected — whether it can prevent the infection progressing toward symptoms or at least lead to lighter symptoms. The study is set to run until Oct. 27, 2022, according to US government data. The announcement came after the New England Journal of Medicine on Tuesday published results from the first stage of Moderna’s vaccine trial, which showed that the first 45 participants developed antibodies to the virus. Moderna, currently at the second stage with its vaccine candidate, is considered to be in a leading position in the global race to find a vaccine against COVID-19. Chinese pharma company SinoVac’s candidate is also at stage two. Russian news agency TASS on Sunday announced that Russian researchers have completed clinical trials for a vaccine, though they have not shared their data. Scientists caution that the first vaccines to come to market might not be the most effective or safest. Moderna had previously published “interim results” from the first stage of its trial in a press release on its Web site in May. These showed that the vaccine had generated immune responses in eight patients, a result called “encouraging” by Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is codeveloping the vaccine. However, some in the scientific community said they would reserve judgment until they saw the full results in peer-reviewed form. According to the new paper,

Virus Outbreak: Tokyo on ‘red alert’ after spike in cases, governor says

LOCAL OUTBREAK: Many of the new cases come from nightlife districts, and those infected are mostly younger people who are at lower risk of getting seriously ill

Tokyo is on its highest COVID-19 alert level after a spike in new cases, the city’s governor said yesterday, as experts said the rising number of infections were a clear “red flag.” However, the move to “red” alert does not mean the city would ask businesses to close or events to be postponed. Even during a national state of emergency in April, there was no “lockdown” in Japan as seen in many other nations. “The experts just told us that the situation of infections is at the fourth level of the four-level system, which means ‘the infections seem to be spreading,’” Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike said at a meeting on the COVID-19 pandemic. Her comments came after a panel of experts said that the city was seeing a spike in younger people infected with the virus, with cases in nightlife areas, but also workplaces and in families. “Our assessment is that we cannot but say this is the red flag, the highest level, if we simply look at numbers,” said Norio Ohmagari, an expert on the panel. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lifted a nationwide state of emergency in late May and appears to have little appetite to reintroduce it, with the economy suffering its first recession since 2015, but new daily cases have climbed after the state of emergency was removed, reaching a fresh record last week of 243 in Tokyo, the epicenter of the fresh outbreak. Authorities say many of the new cases come from nightlife entertainment districts in the capital, and those infected appear to be mostly people in their 20s and 30s, who are less likely to become seriously ill. As of yesterday, there were only seven people requiring intensive care for COVID-19 and authorities said that the medical system is in better shape than at the height of the previous wave in

Virus Outbreak: Chilean dogs trained to sniff COVID-19

Police in Chile are training dogs to detect people that might be infected with COVID-19 by sniffing their sweat. The dogs — three golden retrievers and a labrador — are between the ages of four and five. Until now they have been used to sniff out illicit drugs, explosives and lost people, police said. The training program is a joint effort by the national police and specialists at the Universidad Catolica de Chile. It follows in the footsteps of similar efforts taking place in France and the UK, said Julio Santelices, head of the police school of specialties. Dogs have 330 million olfactory receptors and an ability to detect smells 50 times better than humans. They can also smell 250 people per hour. “The virus has no smell, but rather the infection generates metabolic changes,” which in turn leads to the release of a particular type of sweat, “which is what the dog would detect,” said Fernando Mardones, a professor of veterinary epidemology at the university. Tests in Europe and Dubai shown a 95 percent efficiency rate in canine detection of COVID-19 cases, Santelices said. The importance of this scientific study is that it would allow dogs to become biodetectors, and detect this type of illness at an early stage,” Santelices said. Mardones said that there evidence that dogs can detect diseases such as tuberculosis, parasite infections and early stages of cancer. Canines can detect subtle changes in skin temperature, potentially making them useful in determining if a person has a fever. The experts hope to have the dogs trained and working in the field by next month. The plan is to deploy them with an officer in pedestrian-heavy areas, such as train stations and airports, and at health control stations.

Virus Outbreak: US rescinds foreign student visa curbs

PRESSURE: Trump has insisted that schools must open this fall, but Harvard said that its classes for the next academic year would be mostly conducted online

The US government rescinded its controversial decision to revoke foreign student visas whose courses move online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a federal judge said on Tuesday. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — with the support of a number of other institutions, teachers’ unions and at least 18 US states — had taken legal action against the move that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced on July 6. “The government has agreed to rescind” the decision as well as any implementation of the directive, Judge Allison Burroughs said in a brief hearing. Harvard and MIT earlier this month had asked the court to block the order announced by ICE that students must leave the country if their classes are only online, or transfer to a school offering in-person tuition. The measure was seen as a move by US President Donald Trump’s administration to put pressure on educational institutions that are adopting a cautious approach to reopening amid the pandemic. The universities say in their lawsuit that the order would harm students “immensely” — personally and financially. It describes the order as “arbitrary and capricious” and says it threw US higher education “into chaos.” There were more than 1 million international students in the US for the 2018-2019 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education. The court gave no reason for the administration’s flip. “We are thrilled that the government backed down,” the University of Southern California (USC) said in a statement. “Our international students are a vital part of the USC community, and they deserve the right to continue their education without risk of deportation.” Most US colleges and universities have not yet announced their plans for the fall semester, but Harvard has said that all its classes for the 2020-2021 academic year would be conducted online “with rare exceptions.” About 40 percent of

Virus Outbreak: Egypt’s doctors targeted for highlighting conditions

Overwhelmed and ill-equipped medical staff in Egypt are being threatened for speaking out about poor working conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic, with increasing numbers detained by a domestic security agency. Doctors recounted threats delivered via WhatsApp, official letters or in person. They said hospital managers and government officials told them that failing to attend shifts, posting on social media or voicing objections would result in complaints to the National Security Agency (NSA), Egypt’s primary internal security body, which rights groups have said has arrested multiple healthcare workers. A doctor in the outlying Cairo district of 6th October said that hospital management regularly threatened staff with referral to the NSA, after they voiced concerns about a doctor who died, but was not permitted to have a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. “They told us our social media will be monitored to the extent I deleted all my colleagues, since I can’t trust any of them,” she said. Another doctor at a hospital in Alexandria said when a group of medics gathered to demand a coronavirus test for a colleague showing symptoms, people from hospital security and plainclothes police showed up. “When I got home, I posted [on social media] about the incident,” the Alexandria doctor said. “Later I found out I’d been referred to investigation, and the hospital manager told me the National Security Agency wanted to talk to me.” Egypt has recorded more than 80,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, although one government minister has repeatedly said that true case numbers could be five or even 10 times higher than official figures. The Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research, known as Baseera, has estimated that at least 616,000 Egyptians were infected with COVID-19. At least 131 doctors have died from the coronavirus. Doctors have described a medical system overwhelmed by the virus, with few hospital beds or medications

Jeff Sessions loses bid for US Senate

REPUBLICAN RIVALRY: Sessions’ showdown in Alabama against a newcomer who Trump supported was seen as a test of the president’s influence over his core supporters

The political comeback of former US attorney general Jeff Sessions on Tuesday screeched to a halt in Alabama where he lost his bid to reclaim his old US Senate seat to a political novice who earned US President Donald Trump’s endorsement. The humiliating defeat is almost certainly a career-ender for Sessions, who emerged as a critical Trump ally after becoming the first US senator to endorse the brash billionaire in 2015, when he donned a red “Make America Great Again” cap and embraced the unlikely candidate on a campaign stage. After being appointed to the cabinet as attorney general, he was sacked in late 2018 and won Trump’s everlasting disdain. With 91 percent of Alabama precincts counted, former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville was leading the Republican runoff with 61 percent of the vote. The New York Times, CNN and other US media called the race for Tuberville. Sessions conceded defeat late on Tuesday and called on supporters to back Tuberville come November. “We must not cede our nation to the mob or globalist forces. We have borders, laws, and history that must be defended,” he wrote on Twitter. He added that the Republican party must “not be co-opted by special interests on Trade, Immigration, and China.” The showdown in the deep-red southern state was seen as a test of Trump’s influence over his core supporters amid broad frustration with his bungled response to the COVID-19 pandemic and his handling of protests against racial injustice. Both candidates claimed to be fervent allies of Trump, but while Sessions adhered to conservative principles, the president never forgave him for recusing himself in 2017 from the probe into Russia’s election meddling. With Alabama passionately pro-Trump, the president inserted himself squarely into the race, badgering Sessions in recent weeks as a “disaster” of an attorney general who was unwelcome back in

Tintin and the mystery of the dueling mummies

The mummified corpse of Rascar Capac thrilled and terrified generations of young fans of the Tintin comic book story The Seven Crystal Balls. Now, Herge’s fictional Inca has sparked a row between rival Belgian tourist attractions, each of which displays a mummy they say inspired Tintin’s creator. The very serious Art and History Museum is in Brussels’ Jubilee Park, near where Herge used to live, and he was known to frequent its collections. The museum’s Andean mummy, squatting upright with knees bent, appears similar to the haunting effigy in the author’s illustrated tale of Tintin’s adventure. Curators thought that they had established the link beyond doubt 10 years ago, but the Pairi Daiza animal park in southern Belgium is touting a rival mummy. Last week, the popular zoo began marketing an exhibit of the “authentic mummy nicknamed Rascar Capac.” The royal museum is not taking this well and has all but accused the park of false advertising. “We don’t attract visitors by promising them pandas,” museum director-general Alexandra de Poorter said. The zoo has expressed regret over an “argument started by the royal museums,” but said that “no one can say for sure which mummy inspired Herge.” If there is confusion, it dates back until at least 1979, when the 2,000-year-old preserved corpse now on display at the zoo appeared in Brussels at an exhibit titled “Tintin’s museum of the imagination.” The collection was assembled to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1929 release of the boy reporter’s first book-length adventure, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. Author and illustrator Georges Remi — better known under his pen name Herge — attended the show, adding some credibility to the mummy’s significance. However, that was a mistake, the Art and History Museum’s curator of Latin American relics Serge Lemaitre said. The mummy in question was bought by a Belgian collector in

Population could be 2bn below UN count in 2100

Earth is expected to be home to 8.8 billion people in 2100, 2 billion fewer than UN projections, according to a major study published yesterday that foresees new global power alignments shaped by declining fertility rates and graying populations. By century’s end, 183 of 195 countries — barring an influx of immigrants — would have fallen below the replacement threshold needed to maintain population levels, an international team of researchers reported in The Lancet. More than 20 countries — including Japan, Spain, Italy, Thailand, Portugal, South Korea and Poland — would see their numbers diminish by at least half. China’s numbers would fall nearly that much, from 1.4 billion people today to 730 million in 80 years. Yet sub-Saharan Africa would triple in size to about 3 billion people, with Nigeria alone expanding to almost 800 million in 2100, second only to India’s 1.1 billion. “These forecasts suggest good news for the environment, with less stress on food production systems and lower carbon emissions, as well as significant economic opportunity for parts of sub-Saharan Africa,” said lead author Christopher Murray, lead author and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. “However, most countries outside of Africa will see shrinking workforces and inverting population pyramids, which will have profound negative consequences for the economy,” he said. For high-income countries in this category, the best solutions for sustaining population levels and economic growth would be flexible immigration policies and social support for families who want children, the study said. “However, in the face of declining population there is a very real danger that some countries might consider policies that restrict access to reproductive health services, with potentially devastating consequences,” Murray said. “It is imperative that women’s freedom and rights are at the top of every government’s development agenda.” Social services and

World News Quick Take

INDIA Lockdowns reimposed The number of COVID-19 cases in the nation is approaching 1 million after a surge of 29,429 new cases yesterday, prompting authorities to reimpose lockdowns in high-risk areas in nearly a dozen states in the nation that now has a total of 936,181 cases. The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare also reported another 582 deaths for a total of 24,309. A lockdown was imposed in Bihar state, where nearly 2.5 million migrant workers have returned in the past few weeks. Technology hub Bengaluru was also put under a lockdown. SOUTH AFRICA President warns of ‘crisis’ The nation on Tuesday surpassed the UK in its number of confirmed COVID-19 cases as President Cyril Ramaphosa warned of “the gravest crisis in the history of our democracy.” The nation has the world’s eighth-highest number of cases at 298,292, which represents nearly half of all the confirmed cases on the African continent. AUSTRALIA Lockdown violatiors fined Pokemon Go enthusiasts and KFC guests are among hundreds fined since Melbourne entered a second COVID-19 lockdown, police said on Wednesday. About 5 million people in and around the nation’s second-largest city have been subjected to stay-at-home orders since last week after a surge in COVID-19 cases. Police in Victoria state have handed out more than 500 fines in six days, totalling A$902,000 (US$631,000). Among them were two men caught playing Pokemon Go in their car, a group who claimed to be “charging their phones” at a friend’s home, and a man who sat down with his meal at a KFC restaurant and refused to leave. INDONESIA Floods leave 16 dead Flash floods and landslides have killed at least 16 people and displaced hundreds in North Luwu district on Sulawesi, National Agency for Disaster Countermeasure officials said yesterday. Search and rescue officials were still looking for 23 people missing after the floods struck the district

Self-censorship on the rise in HK

‘UNLAWFUL’: Publishers are tweaking text and cutting passages to avoid being charged under the security law’s broadly defined crimes of secession or terrorism

In the past two weeks, Hong Kong publisher Raymond Yeung has hastily made changes to a draft paper copy of a book entitled To Freedom (致自由), replacing the word “revolution” with “protests,” tweaking a banned slogan and cutting passages that advocate independence for the Chinese territory. The changes were hard to make, he said, but impossible to avoid since China passed a National Security Law on June 30, making the broadly defined crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by up to life in prison. “This is really painful,” Yeung said, as he flipped through pages of the collection of essays by 50 protesters, lawyers, social workers and other participants in the pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Hong Kong last year. “This is history. This is the truth,” he said, holding up the book with blue sticky flags on many pages to mark changes made because of the new law. Just as demand for political books was surging in Hong Kong after a year of protests, the territory’s once unbridled and prolific independent publishers are now censoring themselves in the face of the new law. Hong Kong authorities say freedom of speech remains intact, but in the past two weeks public libraries have taken some books off the shelves, shops have removed protest-related decorations and the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times” has been declared illegal. To Freedom is the first political book Yeung has taken on as a part-time publisher. After Beijing introduced the security law, the book’s original printer bailed, and two other printers declined, he said. Another printer agreed to take it anonymously, but wants to get a better sense of how the law is implemented first. The Hong Kong Trade Development Council, which organizes the annual Hong Kong Book Fair, told exhibitors not to display what it called

Secret letters reveal queen was not told in advance of Australian PM’s sacking

Queen Elizabeth II was not informed in advance about the 1975 dismissal of Australia’s prime minister by her representative in the country, letters kept secret for decades and released yesterday revealed. The British monarch’s representative in Australia, then-governor-general John Kerr, sparked a constitutional crisis when he abruptly fired Gough Whitlam, the democratically elected leader of the center-left Labor party. The High Court in May ruled that more than 200 letters between the queen’s private secretary and Kerr — including many addressing the controversial affair — should be made public. Although the correspondence show the queen was not told immediately prior to Whitlam’s sacking, they confirm that Kerr had exchanged extensive letters with the palace for months about his powers to oust the prime minister. Suspicion the palace played a direct role in Whitlam’s ouster has long been cited by Australian Republicans arguing the country should break with the monarchy. The National Archives of Australia released the 1,200 pages known as the “Palace Letters” yesterday after a four-year court battle to keep them hidden that reportedly cost A$2 million (US$1.4 million). Historians are now combing through the documents to see if the British government tried to influence events in its former colony and what role the queen, Prince Charles and top royal advisers might have played. One key extract shows Kerr informed the queen he had fired Whitlam shortly after taking the action on Nov. 11, 1975. “I should say I decided to take the step I took without informing the Palace in advance because, under the Constitution, the responsibility is mine, and I was of the opinion it was better for Her Majesty not to know in advance, though it is of course my duty to tell her immediately,” he wrote. The decision capped a protracted political stalemate after the opposition-controlled senate refused to pass the government’s budget, severely