Today's news: consumer prices in China rise for the first time in six months, driven by the New Year; Punjab, blasphemy: 22-year-old student sentenced to death for Whatsapp messages, a 17-year-old to life imprisonment; UN enquiry: Iran responsible for 'physical violence' that killed Mahsa Amini; Settlement and settler attacks in the West Bank reacheshttps://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/china-economy-consumer-prices-february-chinese-new-year-4183161 record levels.
Patriarch Bartholomew has welcomed into his clergy Fr. Aleksej Uminskij, reduced to the lay state by Patriarch Kirill for refusing to recite war prayers. He had already done so with Russian Orthodox priests who refused to support the war. Moscow does not recognise Constantinople's right to rehabilitate expelled priests, which the Ecumenical Patriarchate instead claims as a tradition of ecclesiastical 'last resort' from the earliest times.
Defence Minister Šojgu - lashing out against those who oppose Moscow's presence "in countries traditionally our friends" - equates Isis terrorists and large pro-Western NGOs. While Kyrgyzstan approves a law "on non-commercial organisations" that is a photocopy of the Russian one and puts foreign financing in the crosshairs.
One only has to look at the extremely harsh measures of detention, the lack of medical care, and the increasingly frequent and unjustified measures of punishment and solitary confinement to understand how the health and very lives of the condemned are now at risk. The fears for the fate of Vladimir Kara-Murza and Ilya Yasin.
Medvedev would like to send the Zhduny to Siberian concentration camps for re-education. In Russia, attacks on "traitors" are not only attempts to instil terror in the population, which has long been accustomed to passive consent, but are also calls to "come forward", out of the restless need to identify the internal enemy, whoever they may be because, without enemies, power has no identity.
Today's news: Tokyo sends mini-drones and robot-snakes to one of the Fukushima reactors to prepare for the removal of highly radioactive waste; Israel aims to build new settlements in the West Bank, nearly 15 thousand housing units; Burmese junta hits a market in Rakhine State, at least 12 dead; In Russia, controls on mobile phones and apps increase.