British Herald | JAN-FEB 2020

BRITISH HERALD

ISSN 2632-8836

WHERE BRITAIN MEETS THE WORLD

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Decade in Review: What the smartphone has wrought

Drug developers take fresh aim at 'guided-missile' cancer drugs

BORIS JOHNSON

UNSTOPPABLE

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BRITISH HERALD

EDITOR'S NOTE

The U.S.- Iran Conflict Are we at the threshold of a U.S.-Iran War? Weeks of rising tensions have led to speculations regarding whether a war will break out between the United States and Iran. Even though U.S. and U.K. warships are deployed to the Gulf, the reactions are below the armed conflict conventional threshold. We’re not just at the threshold OF a war- the war is ongoing- just that it is a ‘threshold war’.

The hostile attacks are conducted remotely, away from sovereign territory using air assets. Lower costs, both in terms of money and casualties; both the involved parties are driven to keep up their hostility while reaping political benefits in their home countries.

The important thing to note here is we’re talking hostility- but it isn’t a full-blown war yet. There’s an essence of defiance and resistance. But there is a problem.

It isn’t well-defined and that means that the outcome could turn out to be problematic politically and militarily.

But it is wise to note that, historically, this is exactly how wars begin- aggressive measures and reckless responses coupled with escalating grievances between political leaders with immense power.

This entire situation has the potential of becoming one of the worst conflicts in history.

How were things between the U.S. and Iran before the conflict began?

To put it simply, not great. U.S. and Iran have been in a standoff for quite a few months and the killing of Qassem Soleimani just aggravated events. It began with U.S. imposing sanctions on Iran’s economy saying that the Middle-Eastern country supported terrorism and a missile program, given their withdrawal last year from the 2015 nuclear deal. Iran stood its ground by violating sections of the agreement, bombing oil tankers and downing an American military drone.

The acute exacerbation since we began this decade set the ball rolling for events that both countries were leading up to but did not expect at the time. It is a well-established fact that both countries do not want a full-blown conflict. Even the rather looselipped Trump says he prefers “peace” when it comes to Iran.

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This was, as one may expect, not taken well from Iran and was considered to be an act of international terrorism on the US’ part. Qassem Soleimani was described to be one of Iran’s most powerful personalities, second only to the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

All Is Well!

And Iran did retaliate. They did not shy away from showing off their capabilities and resorted to “proportionate measures in selfdefence”. To bring the situation full circle, they launched a series of missiles onto two Iraq bases housing U.S. troops. Trump took to his Twitter not long after the attack saying ‘All is well!’ and after assessments of casualty and damage were done the situation looked ‘So far, so good!’.

We’re unsure though, will all really be well? Is it really so far, so good?

Let’s wait and watch.

Best,

The Assassination of Qassem Soleimani On 3rd January 2020, the longbrewing animosities between U.S. and Iran were escalated with the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ foreign wing, in a U.S. airstrike at Baghdad airport. The airstrike was authorised

by U.S. President Donald Trump

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as a “decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad”.

ANSIF ASHRAF Managing Editor, British Herald ansif@britishherald.com

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BRITISH HERALD

CONTENTS

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 | VOLUME 02 | ISSUE 01

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34

6 | BORIS JOHNSON: An Unstoppable Force

34 | The case for Trump's impeachment - and the case against it

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48

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40 | What North Korea could gain from new weapons development

48 | U.S., Iran both appear to signal desire to avoid further conflict

51 | Australia urges quarter of a million to flee as winds fan huge bushfires

28 | Saudi Aramco shares hit new low on U.S.-Iran tensions; debt markets steady

31 | World welcomes 2020, but wildfires, protests, cast a pall over some celebrations

66 | 'Little Miss Period' tackles Japan's menstruation taboos with a punch

WHERE BRITAIN MEETS THE WORLD

ISSN 2632-8836

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BORIS JOHNSON

COVER STORY

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Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson Prime Minister of the U.K., One-nation Conservative, Writer, Former Journalist January-February 2020

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Boris Johnson: An Unstoppable Force “The dreadful truth is that when people come to see their MP they have run out of better ideas.”

COVER STORY

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or the life of him, Boris Johnson cannot seem to get away from controversy.

In British politics and in the field of journalism, Johnson is much-talked about. He has been called entertaining, he has been labelled humorous and his popularity is no secret. His appeal extends way beyond his traditional Conservatives and it’s no secret why he is where he is right now. And with popularity, comes criticism. Johnson’s critics accuse him of elitism, dishonesty, cronyism and being a little too foul-mouthed.

Gambled Everything On An Election- And Won Boris Johnson has never been one to shy away from proving his critics wrong and defying the odds. When everyone told him he couldn’t get a new Brexit deal, that’s exactly what he did.

This is a mammothian deallesser than four years ago, Boris Johnson was the Mayor of London and was unsure of his position on whether to Leave or Remain in the referendum. At the time, Cameron was still Prime Minister and the British economy was stellar.

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Brexit timeline

Main developments in 2019

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COVER STORY

Jan 15, Mar 12, Mar 29 UK MPs reject Prime Minister Theresa May's deal 3 times

Mar 29 Original Brexit deadline (delayed)

Apr 12 Second Brexit deadline (delayed)

May 23 UK votes in European Parliament election

Jun 7 May steps down as Conservative Party leader

Jul 24 Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister

Sept 3 UK parliament reconvenes

Oct 17-18 EU summit

Oct 31 New UK deadline to leave EU (extended)

Jan 31 UK finally leaves EU

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The Conservatives were concerned that they might just win by a narrow lead, which would mean that it would lead them down the rabbit-hole of internal party politics to settle and finalise a deal on the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union.

There is one extremely important thing that Boris Johnson must do- getting the Brexit deal to take Britain out of the EU without further delay through the Parliament by the end of January 2020.

The Brexit vote is heralding in a whole new period of political drama for Britain. Johnson identified the crisis, built on it and eventually benefited from it with the December 12th general elections. Being the spectacular author that he is, Johnson has written a new story for political change in the country.

Is Johnson Painting a Panglossian Picture of Brexit?

Over the last three years, the Brexit decision has plagued British politics. It began with the June 2016 referendum putting the UK on the road to exiting the European Union. Theresa May failed to pass the deal during her tenure, leading to a push for a second referendum with legal wrangling and increased political tensions kept Brexit from happening so far. Getting Brexit done has been Johnson’s campaign promise and it probably was the reason for his win.

Brexit is not a single act, it is an entire process. The first stage of this process is what happens by the end of January 2020 when Britain formally divorces

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COVER STORY

If we get outside the EU, if we leave the EU system, we will be relieved of a huge amount of unnecessary regulation that is holding this country back. We will be able to set our own priorities, make our own laws and set our own tax policies to suit the needs of this country. We have a huge opportunity also to make people's votes count for more.

the European Union. Once withdrawn, then ensues the transition period, wherein Britain must accept all of the EU’s rules and regulations. It keeps the economic status quo till as such time until when a new trade deal will be agreed upon. So essentially, nothing changes as of January 31st.

This transition period lasts till

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the end of the year and this is just not enough time to agree on everything. Which means, U.K. might need an extension period.

Boris Johnson does not agree though, he refuses to take up an extension period. This means that both sides have no more than a year to agree on all the parameters of a trade deal. His stern refusal at this point makes analysts believe that Johnson

might just give into the EU’s demands, signing on to maintain trade terms while binding the country to its EU’s economic and regulatory order.

Johnson’s guiding principle when it comes to a Brexit decision is sovereignty. His approach is about democratic control and self-governance- where Britain can do things differently from EU

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COVER STORY

If we judged everybody by the stupid, unguarded things they blurt out to their nearest and dearest, then we wouldn't ever get anywhere.

and he must be able to speak up while being answerable to the British people about these decisions. He intends to diverge from Europe and that has been Johnson’s whole point of Brexit and has been a stance which has been relatively consistent. The only time when Johnson was on the fence about Brexit was when he was Mayor of London.

Johnson’s Journey from Journalism to Politics Johnson began his career as a journalist with The Times, but was eventually dismissed from the newspaper for falsifying a quotation. After that, he worked a stint with The Daily Telegraph in position of a Brussels correspondent. His articles

during the time had an effect in influencing the growing British right on Eurosceptic sentiment.

In 1994, Johnson was then promoted to the position of Assistant Editor which he held for five year after which he moved on to edit The Spectator magazine from 1999 to 2005.

In 2001, Johnson began his political career with the Conservatives when was elected as Henley’s Member of Parliament shadowing as a junior minister under Micheal Howard and David Cameron.

While he did largely adhere to the thought processes that the Conservatives have, Johnson took a liberal stance on social issues, especially those pertaining to LGBT rights for votes in Parliament.

Johnson eventually resigned from his MP position and in 2008, was elected as the London Mayor. Winning the mayoral election against Ken Livingstone, overcoming the public’s perceptions of him being an insubstantial politician, to shift his focus towards transportation

Johnson’s Early Life Boris Johnson, the son of a diplomat and an artist, was born in New York and spent his childhood in Brussels. Having lived in New York, London and Brussels, Johnson is truly a global citizen. After his mother’s health deteriorated, Johnson was sent off to boarding school. His love for reading Classics and uppermiddle class British upbringing set him onto a path of stellar educational institutions to pursue his education. He studied at Eton College on scholarship followed by the Balliol College in Oxford.

Leadership roles came early on as part of his college life with being elected, in 1986, as the President of the Oxford Union.

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It is easy to make promises - it is hard work to keep them.

PMQs session in the House of Commons in London

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COVER STORY

and crime. He was re-elected for another tenure in 2012.

During this period, he was responsible for overseeing the 2012 Summer Olympics, improving the city’s public transport systems with the introduction of new Routemaster buses, cycle hire scheme, cable car along the Thames along with banning consumption of alcohol onboard most of London’s public transport. In 2015, he was elected as Uxbridge and South’s MP, backing down from his mayorship in the year that followed.

Things began ramping up for Johnson in 2016, when

“I want London to be a competitive, dynamic place to come to work.”

Johnson played an instrumental role in the successful Brexit Vote Leave campaign. Under Theresa May, he served as the

Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and after being on the receiving end of criticism regarding how May approached Brexit and the Chequers Agreement. In 2019, after May’s resignation, Johnson earned his position as the leader of the Conservative party and went on to become the country’s Prime Minister.

During his time working with the Conservatives, Johnson appeared on quite a few TV shows, the most popular being the BBC talk show ‘Have I Got News For You’.

Boris’ talkative demeanor along with the witty yet contemptuous remarks made him a talk show favourite country-wide.

Britain's PM Johnson meets European Commission President von der Leyen in London

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COVER STORY

U.S. President Trump meets with British Prime Minister Johnson on sidelines of U.N. General Assembly in New York City

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Johnson- the waters in British political scene are choppy and his rise has been threatened on several occasions. After Johnson published an insensitive editorial in the Spectator, he was forced to apologise to the city of Liverpool. He was dismissed from the shadow arts minister position after alleged reports of an affair between a journalist and him. However, in spite of these rebukes, in 2005, Boris Johnson was re-elected to his parliamentary seat.

During his recent campaigns too, he has been accused of being a liar, hiding from the media and even treating

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The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest, and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two. the people and other politicians with contempt. Fingers were also pointed towards him for running a one-note campaign which is unambitious and lacks a complete manifesto.

Even when Johnson’s political career in full gear, Johnson

refused to put down his pen.

He authored Lend Me Your Ears, Seventy-two Virgins, The Dream of Rome and The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History.

With Johnson’s recent election victory, he has guaranteed one more thinghe’s the one who governs his own image. The elections also proved one more thingBoris Johnson is the most powerful Prime Minister in office since Tony Blair’s landslide election victory back in 1997. He’s kept changing the face of British politics and this is just the beginning.

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BUSINESS

Airbus beats goal with 863 jet deliveries in 2019, ousts Boeing from top spot

Airbus's tally, which included around 640 single-aisle aircraft, broke industry records after it diverted thousands of workers and cancelled holidays to complete a buffer stock of semifinished aircraft waiting to have their cabins adjusted.

Airbus has been hit by delays in fitting the complex new layouts on A321neo jets assembled in Hamburg, Germany, resulting in dozens of these and other models being stored in hangars to await last-minute configurations and the arrival of more labour.

Such out-of-sequence work drives up costs and could have a modest impact on Airbus profit margins, but the impact will be largely blunted by the high volume of planes and already solid profitability for such singleaisle aircraft, analysts say.

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irbus has become the world's largest planemaker for the first time since 2011 after delivering a forecast-beating 863 aircraft in 2019, seizing the crown from embattled U.S. rival Boeing, airport and tracking sources said.

to cut its 2019 delivery goal by 2-3% in October, deployed extra resources until hours before midnight to reach 863 aircraft for the year, compared with its revised target of 860 jets.

A reversal in the pecking order between the two giants had been expected as a crisis over Boeing's grounded 737 MAX drags into 2020. But the record European data further underscores the distance Boeing must travel to recoup its market position.

Airbus declined to comment on the figures, which must be audited before they can be finalised and published.

Airbus, which had been forced by its own industrial problems

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Deliveries rose 7.9 % from 800 aircraft in 2018.

Planemakers receive most of their revenues when aircraft are delivered - minus accumulated progress payments - so the end-year delivery performance is closely monitored by investors.

Still, the problems in fitting complex cabins have curtailed Airbus's ability to take advantage of the market turmoil surrounding Boeing's 737 MAX - grounded since March following two fatal accidents.

Boeing delivered 345 mainly long-haul jets between January and November, less than half the number of 704 achieved in the same period of 2018, when the MAX was being delivered normally.

For the whole of 2018, Boeing had delivered 806 aircraft.

Airbus production plants traditionally halt over Christmas and New Year. But the company's delivery centres and completion facilities were humming well into the afternoon of New Year's Eve to allow Asian and other airlines to fly away new jets.

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BUSINESS

Forget store traffic and bag count: Gauging retail performance in an online world

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arshal Cohen has religiously visited the same stores every holiday season since 1999.

research firm NPD Group, and other retail analysts to approach their jobs very differently than two decades ago.

But rather than snapping up bargains and favorite gifts for friends and family, the chief retail industry adviser is there to scrutinize the purchasing habits of others as online shopping upends the retail business.

"If you were to try and replicate research methodology, or even store observation, in today's world, you've got a problem," Cohen told Reuters. "It's no longer good enough to just look at store traffic or parking lot counts."

Major shifts in consumer behavior and preferences have forced Cohen, who works for market

Cohen and his peers need to get it right because their insights, reported to investors and retail

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clients, influence marketing, move share prices and guide investment decisions.

A record number of U.S. consumers spending more online, coupled with a condensed holiday shopping season and year-round discount wars among retailers, has forced analysts to get creative, with many shifting away from oldschool tactics to measure a company's overall performance.

Instead of simply asking shoppers why they left a store

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BRITISH HERALD empty-handed, analysts are probing the effect of online giant Amazon.com Inc, asking whether customers started Christmas shopping in July on Prime Day, now a major event in the annual retail calendar to rival Thanksgiving weekend's Black Friday.

Calculation of sales per square foot is giving way to a tally of how many Instagram-native, exclusive and private fashion brands are offered on a retailer's sales floor and website, and analysts -rather than simply seeing how many bags a shopper leaves with -- are now counting how many younger millennial and Gen Z shoppers frequent a store and whether they make a purchase.

BUSINESS "I think what it really boils down to is the customer journey has changed - it can start anywhere, in-store, online and end anywhere."

Suspicions When Marie Driscoll, Coresight Research's managing director of luxury and fashion, received an email from Saks Fifth Avenue less than a week before Black Friday alerting her that several small leather designer goods such as wallets were on sale, she took note. The department store, she thought, might have been struggling to sell such items, which are often given as gifts.

Craig Johnson of Consumer Growth Partners says that traditional metrics such as foot traffic, average selling price, and average basket size can often still be highly indicative of what's happening in stores.

But other retail analysts said online shopping and a slew of services like "buy online, pick up in-store" can hinder the ability to estimate a retailer's conversion rate - a traditional measure of the proportion of visitors who make purchases.

Brian Field, senior director of global retail consulting for ShopperTrak, part of retail data firm Sensormatic Solutions, said it was particularly difficult to figure out if traffic reported by retailers came from people buying items in-store or shoppers picking up online orders. "It is kind of synonymous with the fact that retailers are reporting blended sales, which include sales online and sales in-store together," Field said.

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A source with knowledge of the matter said Nordstrom looks for opportunities to launch new brands and expand existing partnerships with limited distribution and emerging brands to differentiate their product line.

Flying Blind U.S holiday retail sales during November and December are expected to increase by around 4% from 2018 to as much as $730.7 billion, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF) - a percentage rise dwarfed by the 13.6% annual jump Adobe Analytics has already seen in online sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 19, to $125.6 billion.

Smartphones accounted for 35.3% of that revenue.

But analysts say retail companies are providing too little information too late, forcing them to draw conclusions from very limited data.

Saks, owned by Hudson's Bay Company, disagreed.

"It would be flawed to gauge category performance based on customer emails, as the majority include personalized recommendations derived from a client's shopping preferences," a company spokesperson said.

Consumer Growth Partners' Johnson keeps close tabs on how many fashion brands born on Instagram are on the sales floor when he visits Nordstrom Inc these days. That tells him whether the retailer is catering to young shoppers who search for labels on their smartphones.

"You don't get the full holiday picture until months later...Until (the retailers) actually report, you're flying blind," said Charlie O'Shea, who has worked as a retail analyst for Moody's for 17 years covering Walmart Inc, Target Corp, and Best Buy Co Inc among others.

"All the retailers talk about is sales...we need to know how much money you made," he added.

O'Shea says he sometimes uses third party sales data and Adobe Insights data for online numbers.

"You're looking at a stew here... with a bunch of different ingredients, and then you just try and frame a picture."

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BUSINESS

Factbox: Sizing up retailers' performance as online sales surge As online shopping upends the retail business, many Wall Street analysts say traditional measures such as counting the number of people who visit stores on major shopping days are no longer a reliable gauge of a company's performance.

Below are some of the newer methods that retail analysts are employing on the job, as well as some traditional ones.

NEWER TACTICS Subscribing to retailers' emails to closely monitor promotions, flash sales and doorbuster deals Counting the number of Instagram-led fashion brands in retailers' stores and online Examining e-receipt data provided by consumers, recording when a customer was at a store and what they bought.

Forming partnerships with third-party data analytics firms measuring things such as website visits and social media sentiment for a more holistic view Counting the number of "off-price" stores in a retailer's fleet Counting the proportion or number of millennials and Gen Z customers shopping at the store TRADITIONAL MEASURES Same store sales Sales per square foot of retail space Counting cars at malls and in retailers' lots Foot traffic Average selling price, calculated by dividing net sales by the number of products sold Average basket size, or the average number of items sold in a single purchase, calculated by dividing total number of units sold by the number of invoices Transaction velocity, or the rate at which transactions occur at a store or online Conversion, or the proportion of people who visit a store or browse a website and ultimately purchase a product.

Field teams typically make estimates by observing traffic in stores.

Analyzing credit card data, compiled by companies such as MasterCard

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BUSINESS

Spotify to suspend political advertising in 2020

"We will reassess this decision as we continue to evolve our capabilities." Spotify, which was only accepting political advertising in the United States, did not answer a Reuters question on how much revenue the company generates from political ads.

"Spotify wasn't a widely used online advertising platform for campaigns before," said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist. "But as other online platforms restricted their political ad inventory, advertisers were on the hunt for new options."

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potify Technology SA said it would pause selling political advertisements on its music streaming platform in early 2020.

The world's most popular paid music streaming service, with nearly 141 million users tuning into its ad-supported platform in October, said the pause would extend to Spotify original and exclusive podcasts as well.

would stop giving advertisers the ability to target election ads using data such as public voter records and general political affiliations.

"At this point in time, we do not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our processes, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content," a Spotify spokeswoman said in a statement.

The new policy will cover political groups such as candidates for office, elected and appointed officials, political parties, political action committees (PACs) and SuperPACS, as well as content that advocates for or against those entities. Spotify will also not sell ads that advocate for legislative and judicial outcomes.

The move only applies to Spotify’s ad sales, not advertisements embedded in third-party content, though those will still be subject to Spotify’s broader content policies.

The move, which was first reported by Ad Age, comes as campaigns for the U.S. presidential election in November 2020 heat up.

Online platforms including Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google are under growing pressure to police misinformation on their platforms and stop carrying political ads that contain false or misleading claims.

Twitter Inc banned political ads in October and, Google said it

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BUSINESS

U.S. to probe Fitbit, Garmin, other wearable devices after Philips complains

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.S. trade regulators said they will investigate wearable monitoring devices, including those made

by Fitbit Inc and Garmin Ltd, following allegations of patent violations by rival Koninklijke Philips and its North America unit.

The U.S. International Trade Commission, in a statement, said the probe would also look at devices by made by Californiabased Ingram Micro Inc as well as China-based Maintek Computer Co Ltd and Inventec Appliances.

Netherlands-based Philips and Philips North America LLC, in their complaint, are calling for tariffs or an import ban and allege the other companies have infringed on Philips' patents or otherwise misappropriated its intellectual property.

"We believe these claims are without merit and a result of Philips' failure to succeed in the wearables market," Fitbit said in response to a request for comment, adding that it would defend itself vigorously against all allegations made in the complaint to the ITC. Wearable activity trackers have gained popularity among consumers seeking to track their physical activity and other health metrics. The January announcement also comes at a time when a number of people set new year resolutions.

Representatives for Garmin,

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Ingram Micro, Maintek and Inventec Appliances could not be immediately reached for comment.

Although the USITC agreed to launch an investigation, it said it "has not yet made any decision on the merits of the case" and would make its determination "at the earliest practicable time."

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BUSINESS

Impossible Foods has stopped McDonald's burger talks, shares of Beyond Meat jump Impossible Foods and its rivals are duking it out over partnerships with fast-food chains to cash in on the roughly $3,500 per person average that Americans spend each year on food away from home.

The privately held, Silicon Valleybased Impossible Foods teamed up with Burger King last year to launch its soy-based Impossible Whopper in the United States.

Impossible Foods is now working to more than double production instead of trying to win a deal the size of McDonald's, Brown said.

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mpossible Foods is no longer trying to win a coveted deal to supply McDonald's Corp with plant-based burgers, telling Reuters it cannot produce enough of its imitation meat to partner with the world's No. 1 fast-food chain.

It is the latest twist in the battle of imitation-meat makers hoping to convince more restaurants to offer their patties. But it was unclear how far talks had progressed with McDonald's, which declined to comment on the discussions.

Shares of Impossible rival Beyond Meat surged, closing 12.5%

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higher, after Reuters reported that Impossible was no longer in talks with McDonald's.

"I wish we had vastly more capacity than we do right now because the demand is high," he said. Impossible Foods said it had previously met with McDonald's but declined to disclose details about when it decided it would be unable to support a potential deal.

The stock had risen earlier in the day on Impossible's unveiling of its plant-based pork products at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, spurring further optimism about the sector.

In late September, McDonald's launched a 12-week test of a P.L.T. burger in Canada, using patties made by Beyond Meat.

But McDonald's has yet to offer a plant-based burger as a regular feature on its menu at any of its roughly 14,000 U.S. outlets.

Referring to McDonald's, Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown told Reuters in an interview that "it would be stupid for us to be vying for them right now ... Having more big customers right now doesn't do us any good until we scale up production."

"The P.L.T. is a craveable plantbased burger with a patty recipe that is made by McDonald's, for McDonald's," the fast-food chain said in a statement. It declined to provide any specifics on the results of the Canada test.

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BUSINESS

Beyond Meat told Reuters that talks with McDonald's are going "very well" and that its new and upcoming facilities around the world are guaranteed to help it keep up with demand - not just in the United States, but globally.

"We would have to work with them (McDonald's) on timing but, yes, we would be able to meet their demand globally," Beyond Meat’s chief growth officer, Chuck Muth, said in an interview at the Los Angeles-based company's office.

weathered supply issues in 2017 and 2018, when hamburger chain A&W Canada ran out of Beyond Burgers soon after launching nationwide. But Muth said recently announced facilities in Canada and the Netherlands would prevent future snafus.

Beyond Meat, whose products are made with pea protein, told Reuters in November that it aims to have production up and running in Asia by the end of next year.

Capacity Issues Beyond Meat, which is valued at about $5 billion after its IPO in May,

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"Beyond Meat doesn't want to drop the ball while there is amazing awareness building in the market, and they need to balance that with not overcommitting themselves," said Dan Altschuler Malek, managing partner at Beyond Meat investor Unovis Partners. "The industry will continue to talk about pressure on supply for years – not because output hasn't increased but because consumer

demand continues to exceed expectations." McDonald's typically works with multiple suppliers to provide components for major menu items like burgers and French fries. Other fast-food companies - including Yum! Brands’ <YUM.N> KFC and Dunkin Brands – have tested and rolled out plant-based versions of items on their menus, made by dominant suppliers Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods.

Impossible Foods declined to comment on when it believes it might have enough supply or manufacturing capacity to partner with McDonald's.

"When we are ready to do it, we would certainly like them to be a customer," Impossible's CEO, Brown, said. "Right now, if McDonald's said they wanted us to be in all the restaurants, we'd have to say 'Sorry, we can't do it.'"

Impossible Foods has had capacity issues that have hurt customers in the past. In June, hamburger chain White Castle suffered a month-long shortage of Impossible Slider patties, for instance.

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BUSINESS

The Netflix decade: How one company changed the way we watch TV season of “Orange is the New Black.”

Viewers were hooked, and the cultural shift accelerated.

“Binge-watch” was a runner-up to “selfie” for the Oxford Dictionary's 2013 word of the year. Netflix championed this new kind of consumption, commissioning a survey to determine how many people binge-watch, and why.

“Our viewing data shows that the majority of streamers would actually prefer to have a whole season of a show available to watch at their own pace,” said Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos at the time.

I

n the not-so-distant past, TV viewers were forced to wait a week for the next installment of their favorite shows, parceled out by networks in half-hour or hour-long increments.

that needed to be watched sequentially.

Fast forward to 2019, when media and tech companies are subverting that schedule and the majority of viewers using U.S. TV streaming services watch an average of four hours of content in one sitting, according to Deloitte.

In November 2010, Hulu, which debuted in 2008 as an adsupported streaming video site, launched its subscription service, including full seasons of certain shows.

To understand how we got here, look at Netflix.

At the start of the decade, binge watching involved VHS tapes, DVD box sets or long nights glued to a DVR. TV cable hits included “Homeland” and “The Wire” - hour-long dramas with complicated plot lines

22 January-February 2020

Watching "Saturday Night Live" on a Sunday became normal, and viewers started to lose track of the broadcast schedule.

Around the same time that the broadcast TV schedule was losing its hold on viewers, Netflix was beginning to invest in original content.

In 2011, it struck a deal for its first original show, the political thriller “House of Cards." It released all 13 episodes of the show's first season on Feb. 1, 2013. That July it followed with the entire first

While some say the decade technically ends a year from now, the end of this year will be marked by many as the conclusion of the second decade of the 21st century. And as the new decade begins, the trend may start to reverse.

AT&T's forthcoming HBO Max streaming service will debut one new episode of its original series per week. Walt Disney Co's Disney+ is releasing episodes weekly for new series including the Star Wars-related “The Mandalorian.” Apple released three episodes at the same time for dramas “The Morning Show” and “See” - and is doing so for most other Apple series - followed by one episode per week.

Media companies are hoping a longer release schedule will generate buzz and create more of a shared experience among viewers. Just like the old days.

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FINANCE

Facebook's Libra has failed in current form: Swiss president

F

acebook's Libra project has failed in its current form and needs reworking to be approved, said the president of Switzerland where the cryptocurrency is seeking regulatory consent.

"I don't think (Libra has a chance in its current form), because central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it," Ueli Maurer, who is Switzerland's finance minister and outgoing president, told Swiss broadcaster SRF.

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"The project, in this form, has thus failed," he added in an interview.

Libra did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Plans for the Facebook-led digital currency, which is to be issued and governed by the Geneva-based Libra Association, have raised concerns among regulators and politicians ranging from privacy to its potential to influence monetary policy and change the global financial landscape.

Officials running the project, including co-creator David Marcus of Facebook, have said regulatory hurdles could see the launch delayed beyond the planned June date.

The cryptocurrency is to be backed by a reserve of assets such as bank deposits and government debt held by a network of custodians. That structure is meant to foster trust and avoid the price swings that plague other cryptocurrencies.

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FINANCE

Tesla's market value zooms past that of GM and Ford - combined “It’s clear that Tesla is back to being a story stock and there’s a lot of good news out there,” said David Kudla, chief investment strategist at MainStay Capital Management. “But there are still some problematic issues out there, chief among them is what will its sustained profitability look like, and when will it start to be valued like a car company and not a tech company.”

The progress made by Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has defied short sellers and other traders expecting the automaker to be overtaken by long-established car companies, including GM and Ford.

F

or the first time, Tesla Inc's stock market value has eclipsed the combined values of General Motors Co and Ford Motor Co. The Silicon Valley electric car maker's stock jumped nearly 5%, closing at a record $492.14 per share and elevating its market capitalization to almost $89 billion, or $2 billion larger than the sum of General Motors' and Ford's respective market caps of $50 billion and $37 billion.

Fueled by a surprise third-quarter profit, progress at a new factory in China and better-than-expected car deliveries in the fourth quarter, Tesla's stock has more than doubled in the past three months.

24 January-February 2020

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BRITISH HERALD

FINANCE financial regulators and shareholders of Tesla.

However, most mainstream automakers are still ramping up new generations of electric vehicles designed to compete with Tesla's combination of style, technology and performance.

German automakers Volkswagen AG, Daimler AG and BMW AG all have promised to launch fully electric premium models.

GM’s Cadillac luxury brand is gearing up to launch a series of electric SUVs and cars, while Ford’s Mustang Mach-E electric SUV, unveiled in November, will launch later this year and could compete with Tesla’s Model X or soonto-launch Model Y SUVs. Ford, GM and other manufacturers have electric pickups in the works to take on Musk’s futuristic Cybertruck.

Rival electric vehicle models from Audi, Jaguar and Porsche have fallen short of Tesla’s driving range between charges and failed to match Tesla’s brand cachet.

Underscoring investors' confidence in Musk and his company's future growth, its market capitalization has outpaced its U.S. rivals, even as their businesses dwarf Tesla's.

GM and Ford each delivered more than 2 million vehicles in the United States last year, compared with Tesla's worldwide deliveries of 367,500 vehicles.

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While Tesla's recent progress has cheered supporters, many analysts and investors remain pessimistic about the company's ability to consistently deliver profit and cash flow. The company has repeatedly missed targets in recent years and Musk's mercurial behavior has come under close scrutiny from

More analysts rate Tesla "sell" than "buy," which is extremely unusual for companies on Wall Street. Eleven analysts recommend buying Tesla shares, while 13 recommend selling and another nine are neutral, according to Refinitiv data.

Shares of GM are about unchanged over the past 12 months, while Ford has risen 10%, both drastically underperforming the broader market, with a slump in China car sales hurting investor sentiment in both of those companies.

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FINANCE

Oil price rise muted in 2019 despite sanctions, supply cuts, attack in Saudi Arabia

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il prices rose more than 20% this year but there were no sharp spikes and crude futures barely sniffed $70 a barrel despite attacks on the world's biggest oil producer, sanctions that crippled crude exports of two OPEC members and gigantic supply cuts from big oil producing countries.

The price gains in crude oil

26 January-February 2020

benchmarks were all in the first quarter of 2019, even as the next several months featured supply shocks that in the past would probably have propelled crude past the $100 mark.

Prices are likely to remain rangebound in 2020 as swelling supplies, particularly from the United States, offset cuts from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

and weakening worldwide demand, brokers and analysts said.

U.S. crude oil is on track to end 2019 roughly 35% higher.

Since the end of March, it is up just 3%, after rallying early in the year after the United States introduced sanctions on Venezuela. Brent has gained 26%, but is off by 1% since the first quarter.

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BRITISH HERALD

Investors and analysts say U.S. production and weak demand kept prices under control. The United States is on track to be a net petroleum exporter on an annual basis for the first time in 2020. Output is expected to average 13.2 million bpd, an increase of nearly a million bpd from 2019.

"Demand growth cratered while U.S. production continued to barrel along at high rates and geopolitical risk eased," Bob McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group.

"And now, at the end of the year, weary investors are looking to next year and seeing a tsunami of oil."

Investor concern over peak oil demand is expected to weigh on prices next year, particularly as the urgency around action against climate change has increased.

Also, a long-term resolution of the U.S.-China trade war seems elusive, keeping market watchers wary of predicting energy demand growth in the world's

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FINANCE

two largest economies.

"There is growing concern around the long-term sustainability of U.S. oil and gas companies for investors in an ESG (environmental, social and governance) driven world," said Greg Sharenow, portfolio manager at PIMCO, who comanages more than $15 billion in commodity assets.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects average crude oil prices will be lower in 2020 than in 2019 because of rising inventories. Outside the United States, production is expected to continue to grow in Brazil, Norway, and Guyana.

Prices did spike, but only briefly after drone attacks on Saudi Arabia's biggest oil facility and U.S. sanctions on Venezuela and Iran. September attacks on Aramco facilities briefly pushed Brent above $72 a barrel, but within 10 days, oil prices sank back as Aramco brought production back online.

Notably, the market barely

wavered in its view of where prices would end up. Implied volatility, a sign of how the market prices future gyrations in WTI and Brent futures, was largely muted in 2019 after a seesaw 2018, a sign that investors focused on broader supply trends.

Both Brent and U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures were locked in a $22-$23 a barrel range during the year, well below last year's levels.

While the rate of annual U.S. production growth is expected to slow, the country should still account for about 85% of the increase in global oil production to 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

PIMCO's Sharenow said U.S. crude supply would need to slow for the price outlook to brighten.

"If we can move down to supply growth in a much more sustainable way of about 500,000-600,000 bpd, then all of a sudden the world is much better in 12 months," Sharenow said.

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FINANCE

Saudi Aramco shares hit new low on U.S.-Iran tensions; debt markets steady

S

audi Aramco shares hit a new low after Iran launched missiles against U.S. bases in Iraq, but Gulf debt markets were stable as some had feared stronger action in retaliation for the killing of an Iranian military commander.

Saudi Aramco shares fell to as little as 34 riyals (6.9 pounds) at the market open, the lowest since they began trading on Dec. 11, putting the market value of the

28 January-February 2020

company at around $1.8 trillion from a peak of $2.06 trillion on Dec 12. They ended 0.4% lower at 34.2 riyals.

Jason Tuvey, a senior emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, said the geopolitical tensions were causing the latest weakness in Aramco's shares, although they had already been falling as investors took a harder look at the firm’s prospects with initial IPO fervour dissipating.

Aramco shares are down almost 12% from their Dec. 12 high of 38.70 riyals, but still above their IPO price of 32 riyals, which valued the company at $1.7 trillion.

Aramco's performance was in line with the wider market, with all regional Gulf indexes closing lower after Iran's retaliation for a U.S. drone strike which killed Qassem Soleiman. Analysts said Aramco shares may get a lift after U.S. President Donald Trump

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BRITISH HERALD

FINANCE Aramco said again that Goldman Sachs may act to stabilise the price of its shares, but no such transactions have taken place since the stock began trading and the stabilisation period ends.

Aramco raised $25.6 billion in its IPO, exceeding Alibaba Group's <BABA.N> $25 billion deal in 2014 to become the biggest flotation to date, but foreign investors were wary because of concerns over the valuation.

"The tensions between the United States and Iran are one of the risks people saw with concentrated operations in the Middle East," said Oswald Clint, senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.

said the United States did not necessarily have to use its military power against Iran, an apparent attempt to defuse the crisis.

in the region," said Zeina Rizk, director of fixed income asset management at Dubai's Arqaam Capital.

"It will certainly remove the panic in the market," Nirgunan Tiruchelvam, head of consumer sector equity research at Tellimer.

Bonds issued by Saudi Arabia - Iran's regional foe - were only marginally weaker, particularly at the long end of the curve. Fiveyear CDS conventional spreads were up a negligible 1 basis point, according to IHS Markit.

"Irrespective of the volatile situation, the case for Aramco is robust. We may be entering a commodity bull after over five years of under investment."

Aramco's facilities were attacked in September in a strike that temporarily shut down 5.7 million barrels per day of output - more than 5% of global oil supply. The U.S. blamed Iran for the attack, something Iran has denied.

Morningstar, which initiated its coverage of Aramco, said its fair value for Aramco was $1.4 trillion.

Signs Of Stability Debt markets showed signs of stability after a volatile start to the week, with bonds issued by Gulf governments fairly stable and credit default swaps used to insure against the risk of a sovereign debt default unchanged.

"The Iran retaliation seems to be a non-escalation, which is why the markets are not widening.

I think once this is confirmed, we might see a small relief rally

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January-February 2020 29

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FINANCE

Profit-taking, firm pound hit FTSE 100 at decade-end

hopes of concrete progress on the trade front were bolstered when White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said the countries would likely sign a deal early next year.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's election victory and prospects of a clear process towards leaving the European Union on Jan. 31 have been cheered, as has the stance of the U.S. Federal Reserve and its peers to hold interest rates steady for the time being.

L

ondon's FTSE 100 declined for the second straight session, as traders booked year-end profits after the index's best run in three years and as a stronger pound hit shares of exporter firms.

This cocktail helped the FTSE post its best month since June and a 12% annual gain - its biggest since 2016. The mid-caps enjoyed their best month since January and surged 25% for the year, their best performance since 2013. swings in sentiment around the U.S.-China trade dispute, global central bank policy, British politics and Brexit, receding worries on all fronts have fuelled sharp gains for UK markets.

Tensions between the United States and China have eased and

Investors will now shift focus to 2020, looking for the finer details of a Phase 1 U.S.-China trade deal, as well as Britain's negotiation of a free trade agreement with the European Union. UK markets will remain closed for New Year's Day.

The FTSE 100, which rose for 11 consecutive days earlier this month, fell 0.6% as a stronger sterling dragged exporter stocks such as BAT and AstraZeneca lower.

The mid-cap FTSE 250 edged 0.2% lower in thin trading, as most investors were away during another holiday-shortened week.

"As the New Year holiday is falling mid-week, I suspect we will have to wait to see which way financial markets wish to throw the kitchen sink as the new budget year begins," OANDA analyst Jeffrey Halley said.

After a year of topsy-turvy

30 January-February 2020

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WORLD

World welcomes 2020, but wildfires, protests, cast a pall over some celebrations

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he world celebrated the New Year with fireworks displays from Sydney to London, although celebrations were clouded by deadly wildfires in Australia, protests in Hong Kong and India and nuclear tensions with North Korea.

skies over landmarks like Big Ben in London, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the Parthenon in Athens and the Kremlin in Moscow.

Large crowds gathered in European capitals for spectacular firework displays that lit up the

Intermittent rain did little to dampen the festivities as hundreds of thousands of people

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The traditional drop of a Waterford crystal ball on Times Square in New York capped a sixhour New Year's Eve show.

were treated to performances by pop star Post Malone, the Korea-pop band BTS, and singer song writer Alanis Morissette.

In Australia, a million revellers thronged Sydney harbour and nearby districts to watch more than 100,000 fireworks explode above the city, even as thousands of people along the country's eastern seaboard sought refuge from the bushfires on beaches.

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WORLD

Thousands in Hong Kong welcomed 2020 on neon-lit promenades in the picturesque Victoria Harbour, breaking into pro-democracy chants shortly after the countdown to midnight. Hong Kong authorities cancelled the main midnight fireworks display for the first time in a decade, citing security concerns. A "Symphony of Lights" took place instead, involving projections on the city's tallest skyscrapers, while smaller-scale pyrotechnics were launched from waterfront rooftops.

In Japan, people took turns striking Buddhist temple bells, in accordance with tradition.

SYDNEY CONTROVERSY Sydney decided to press ahead with its fireworks despite calls by some members of the public for the display to be cancelled in solidarity with fire-hit areas in New South Wales, of which the city is the capital.

Sydney Mayor Clover Moore said planning had begun 15 months ago and that the event also gave a boost to the economy.

Some towns in eastern Australia cancelled their New Year's celebrations as naval vessels and military helicopters helped firefighters rescue people fleeing the fires, which have turned swathes of New South Wales into a raging furnace.

The fires have killed at least 11 people since October, two of them overnight, destroyed more than 4 million hectares (10 million acres) and left many towns and rural areas without electricity or mobile coverage.

Elsewhere, celebrations from

32 January-February 2020

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BRITISH HERALD Auckland, New Zealand, to Pyongyang, the capital of isolated North Korea, welcomed in the New Year with fireworks displays.

Fireworks exploded and confetti rained on revellers after the ball dropped in New York. High school science teachers and students pressed the button that started the ball on its 60-second descent to count down to the New Year in a gesture to highlight efforts to combat climate change.

The ball has changed form several times since it first dropped at One Times Square in 1907 as an iron-and-wood sphere and has now become a global symbol of the New Year.

But amid the celebrations of a New Year and decade, old tensions threatened to flare up.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would keep developing nuclear programmes and introduce a "new strategic weapon" in the near future, after the United States ignored a year-end deadline to restart denuclearization talks.

WORLD to a now-withdrawn bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China, where courts are controlled by the Communist Party, and have evolved into a broader pro-democracy movement.

and his wife by his side. He said he had been participating in the protest every day.

Thousands of Indians ushered in the year by demonstrating against a citizenship law they say will discriminate against Muslims and chip away at India's secular constitution.

More than three years after the UK voted to leave the European Union, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, fresh from winning a parliamentary majority in election, promised in his New Year's message to "get Brexit done before the end of this month."

The demonstrations came despite Prime Minister Narendra Modi's attempts to dampen protests that have run for nearly three weeks.

Irshad Alam, a 25-year-old resident of the Shaheen Bagh area of New Delhi, stood with his 1-year-old child in his arms

"It’s freezing here," he said. "But we are still here because we care about this movement."

"As we say goodbye to 2019, we can also turn the page on the division, rancour and uncertainty which has dominated public life and held us back for far too long," Johnson added.

PROTESTS, BREXIT In Hong Kong, rocked by months of sometimes violent prodemocracy demonstrations, protesters were urged to wear masks at a New Year rally called "Don't forget 2019 - Persist in 2020," according to social media posts.

Some 6,000 police were deployed and Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, appealed for calm and reconciliation in her New Year's Eve video message and Chinese leader Xi Jinping hoped "harmony" would return to the territory.

The protests began in response

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WORLD

The case for Trump's impeachment - and the case against it

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he Democraticcontrolled U.S. House of Representatives voted on Dec. 19 to formally charge President Donald Trump, a Republican, with "high crimes and misdemeanours," making him only the third U.S. president in history to be impeached.

That sets up a trial in January in the Republican-run Senate, where he is expected to be acquitted.

34 January-February 2020

Here is the Democrats' case for removing Trump from office, and the Republican counterargument.

ABUSE OF POWER In the impeachment context, abuse of power is generally defined as using the vast powers of the presidency for personal benefit.

Abuse of power is not specifically referred to as an impeachable

offence in the U.S. Constitution, which states that a president can be removed from office for "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."

But the founders of the United States intended the phrase "other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" to broadly encompass abuses of power, legal scholars said.

American statesman Alexander Hamilton wrote in1788 that impeachment proceedings

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BRITISH HERALD were for "those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust."

Louis Michael Seidman, a professor at Georgetown Law, said the core allegation against Trump - that he withheld security aid to Ukraine to pressure Kiev to announce investigations that would benefit him politically - was the sort of conduct the founders considered impeachable.

"The U.S. has a national security interest in Ukraine, and it does appear that what the president was doing was putting that national security interest at risk in exchange for political benefits," said Seidman. "If that is what happened, that is the core of what impeachment is about."

Abuse of power was one of the articles of impeachment advanced against President Richard Nixon, who resigned before a full House vote on the charges. In approving the charge of abuse of power against Nixon, a House committee accused

WORLD him of authorizing tax audits of political opponents on his "enemies list."

25 in a dispute over a subpoena issued to former White House counsel Don McGahn.

Abuse of power was advanced as an article of impeachment against President Bill Clinton relating to his affair with a White House intern, but a majority of House members voted against including that charge. Clinton was eventually impeached on two other charges - perjury and obstruction of justice - but was not convicted by the Senate.

Trump's lawyers have also argued his refusal to cooperate with the impeachment investigation is justified because the process has been unfair to him.

OBSTRUCTION OF CONGRESS Democrats have also charged Trump with obstruction of Congress based on his stonewalling of the House's impeachment inquiry. The White House has refused to provide documents to congressional investigators and has instructed top advisers and government officials to defy subpoenas and refuse to testify.

A similar charge, contempt of Congress, was one of the articles of impeachment against Nixon, who had defied subpoenas for incriminating tape recordings.

Contempt of Congress is a misdemeanour crime under U.S. law, which defines the offence as willfully failing to provide testimony or documents to Congress. A different crime, obstruction of justice, more broadly prohibits "interference with the orderly administration of law and justice."

The White House has argued that the Constitution does not require senior presidential advisers to appear for compelled testimony before Congress. A judge rejected that argument onNov.

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REPUBLICANS CRY FOUL Trump says he has done nothing wrong, and his Republican allies in the House agree with him -- not a single one voted for either of the two articles of impeachment.

Republicans have coalesced around the argument that the Democrats' case amounts to hearsay because it relies mostly on the testimony of officials who did not deal directly with Trump.

They say Democrats should have gone to court to force the testimony of senior officials who were directly involved in the matter after Trump ordered them not to cooperate -- a process that could take months to resolve.

Republicans say no actual exchange of favours took place, because Zelenskiy ultimately did get the delayed aid and the meeting with Trump that he sought - albeit on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly - even though the Ukrainian president did not agree to the investigations Trump wanted.

They argue that Democrats are subverting the will of voters who elected Trump president in 2016 simply because they do not like his policies or his personality, turning the impeachment process into a partisan tool.

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WORLD

Hong Kongers support protester demands; minority wants independence from China

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ong Kong's protest movement is supported by 59% of city residents polled in a survey conducted for Reuters by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute, with more than a third of respondents saying they had attended an antigovernment demonstration.

Supporters of the protests outnumbered opponents by a ratio of nearly two to one, with 30% percent saying they were opposed. Of those polled, 57% said they favoured the resignation of Carrie Lam, the city's leader. Lam was a particular target of the anti-government demonstrations that gripped Hong Kong for most of 2019 after she attempted to push through a deeply unpopular extradition bill.

Nevertheless, only 17% expressed support for seeking independence from China, and 20% were opposed to "the current path of one country, two systems" - the arrangement under which Hong Kong is governed by Beijing.

Many protesters say Beijing has used its authority under the system to gradually undermine certain freedoms - such as an independent judiciary and freedom of speech - that are supposed to be guaranteed at least until 2047 under the arrangement.

the poll results that Lam and her team would "continue to engage the people through dialogue".

The results of the survey, involving 1,021 people and conducted from Dec. 17-20, also showed a large plurality of respondents mainly blamed the Hong Kong government for the crisis, the worst civil unrest to hit the city in decades, rather than the central government in Beijing.

The protests erupted following an attempt by the Hong Kong government to introduce a bill that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China for trial in courts that are controlled by the Communist Party.

"The figures are consistent with Carrie Lam's low popularity rate, which shows her ability to lead the government is very low," said Ma Ngok, a professor of government and public administration at Chinese University of Hong Kong.

"Resistance and protests will continue next year."

A Hong Kong government spokesman said in a response to

China's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office under the State Council, or cabinet, did not respond to a request for comment.

The bill was later withdrawn, but the protests have escalated into a broader call for greater democratic representation in the city and an inquiry into alleged police brutality in dealing with the protests.

The results of the poll reinforce claims by protesters that their key demands are broadly backed by the general public, according to Samson Yuen, a political science professor at Lingnan University. They also counter Beijing's characterisation of the protests as a movement aimed at undermining its sovereignty over the city.

The poll conducted for Reuters also shows little public support for the denunciations of China by hardline protesters, some of whom have called for independence for Hong Kong or scrapping the "one country, two systems" model.

36 January-February 2020

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BRITISH HERALD "People go on the street due to their dissatisfaction with police and the political system, not asking for independence," Yuen said.

The survey was the first in a series commissioned by Reuters to gauge public sentiment in Hong Kong amid its worst political crisis in decades. The Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute is an independent polling firm.

Among the key findings - 57% of respondents said they wanted Lam to resign.

- 37% of respondents said they had taken part in protests in 2019, versus 63% who had not.

- 47% said the Hong Kong government deserved most of the blame for the unrest in the city, 14% blamed the prodemocracy camp the most, and 12% mainly blamed the central government in Beijing.

- 41% of respondents said they "strongly oppose" Hong Kong independence, and 26% said they "somewhat oppose" it.

Only 8% said they "strongly support" independence, and 9% "somewhat support" it.

- 74% said they wanted an independent inquiry into alleged police brutality in handling the protests. Only 9% said the police deserved most of the blame for the unrest.

The Hong Kong government has rejected calls by protesters and opposition politicians to set up an independent inquiry into police actions, saying that its oversight of the force is adequate.

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WORLD "strongly support" the model, and 29% said they "somewhat support" it.

Many protesters say Beijing has used its authority under the system to gradually undermine certain freedoms

SUPPORT FOR INQUIRY The people of Hong Kong "are not seeking a quick fix", said Yuen, the Lingnan University professor.

"They think Carrie Lam should be held accountable but it's not the most important thing. They want an independent inquiry to improve the relationship between police and people."

The Hong Kong police did not respond to a request for comment.

Many protesters say they are incensed by what they see as an abuse of power by the police in dealing with the unrest.

The police say they have used reasonable and appropriate force against illegal acts including vandalism and rioting.

Since Hong Kong reverted from British to Chinese rule in 1997, many people in the city of 7.5 million have become increasingly angered by what they see as efforts by China to undermine the city's autonomy and roll back freedoms.

When asked whether Hong Kong should keep on its "current path" of one country, two systems, 39% of respondents said they

China has denounced acts of violence in the protests, which it sees as being aimed at undermining Chinese sovereignty.

The large number of respondents saying they had participated in a protest chime with the huge demonstrations the city saw in 2019. On June 9, an anti-extradition march drew an estimated one million people; that was followed a week later by an even larger demonstration.

Widespread discontent was also reflected in city-wide elections for district council seats on Nov. 24, in which pro-democracy candidates won nearly 90% of the 450 seats. While voter participation is usually low in elections for the councils, which oversee things like garbage collection, nearly three million people in the city voted in the November election, or 71% of registered voters. It was the highest turnout in Hong Kong electoral history.

The degree of support for the protests varied sharply by age, education and whether respondents were born in Hong Kong. Younger, better-educated people born in Hong Kong, for example, were far more likely to support or take part in the protests, the poll showed.

For the poll, which had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points, respondents were randomly polled by telephone in Cantonese, which is spoken by the vast majority of people in Hong Kong. The results were weighted according to the latest population figures in Hong Kong.

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WORLD

India approves Third moon mission, months after landing failure

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ndia has approved its third lunar mission months after its last one failed to successfully land on the moon, its space agency said, the latest effort in its ambitions to become a lowcost space power.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission will have a lander and a rover, but not an orbiter, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K. Sivan told reporters at its headquarters in Bengaluru, according to an official telecast.

The Chandrayaan-2 mission in September successfully deployed a lunar orbiter that relays scientific data back to earth, but was unable to place a rover on the lunar surface after a "hard" landing.

That mission had aimed to land on the south pole of the moon, where no other lunar mission had gone before. The region is believed to contain water as craters in the region are largely unaffected by the high temperatures of the sun.

ISRO had hoped to confirm the presence of water in the form of ice, first detected on its mission in 2008.

Chandrayaan-3 will have a "similar configuration" as the previous mission, Sivan said.

Chandrayaan-3 will have a "similar configuration" as the previous mission, Sivan said.

38 January-February 2020

Only the United States, Russia and China have landed on the moon. Beijing's Chang'e-4 probe touched down on the far side of the moon last year, while Israel made an unsuccessful attempt to land its Beresheet spacecraft on the moon in April 2019.

India's third lunar mission will likely launch in 2020 and will cost less than its previous mission,

the PTI news agency reported on Tuesday, citing Jitendra Singh, junior minister for the department of space.

Sivan also said ISRO was making "good progress" for its human space-flight mission slated for late 2021, adding that four astronauts had been picked for training, which will be planned later this month. The project, called Gaganyaan, would cost less than 100 billion rupees (1.06 billion pounds), the government said in 2018.

India has developed a reputation for pioneering affordable satellite launches and space missions. Its unmanned Mars mission in 2014 cost just $74 million, less than the budget of the Hollywood space blockbuster "Gravity".

Sivan also announced that ISRO had begun the land acquisition process for a second spaceport in the southern port city of Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu state.

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Ex-Guinea Bissau PM Embalo wins presidency; opponent disputes vote Guinea Bissau has seen nine coups or attempted coups since independence from Portugal in 1974.

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ormer prime minister and ex-army general Umaro Cissoko Embalo has won Guinea-Bissau's presidential vote, the electoral commission said, but his opponent complained of fraud and vowed to contest the result in court.

Embalo, 47, won with 54% vote, the commission said, versus 46% for another ex-prime minister and ruling party candidate Domingos Simoes Pereira in the poll to succeed incumbent President Jose Mario Vaz. Vaz's tenure was marred by political infighting, an illfunctioning parliament and corruption.

If Pereira's challenge fails, Embalo, who served as prime minister under Vaz from 2016-18, faces the difficult task of overcoming a longrunning political impasse and modernising the West African nation of 1.6 million people.

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"I call for union, reconciliation and concord for a peaceful life in Guinea Bissau," Embalo told a press conference he also promised to revive the education and energy sectors. "We must believe in ourselves and put ourselves to work to create wealth and develop the country."

However, Pereira's complaint looks set to extend the political chaos that has dogged the tiny ocean-side country in recent years and made voters weary of the political class.

The 56-year-old, who easily won a November first round, told supporters that in some polling stations votes surpassed the number of enrolled voters and he would file a complaint to the Supreme Court. "There has been an infringement of the electoral truth and the most legitimate rights of the people of Guinea Bissau," he said.

an alleged coup attempt and the emergence of two competing prime ministers.

"We voted for Embalo for change," said Kady Gassama, a 38-year-old cleaner. "We voted to bring the country out of the economic, political and social crisis." The next president also faces widespread poverty and an unstable political system in which the majority party appoints the government but the president can dismiss it.

There have been seven prime ministers since Vaz took over in 2014 and instability has hurt the economy, which depends heavily on volatile prices for cashew nuts, the main income source for more than two thirds of households.

Traffickers also exploit GuineaBissau's unpoliced waters and maze of picturesque forested islands to ship South American cocaine destined for Europe.

The loser in Guinea Bissau's presidential election, Domingos Simoes Pereira, will contest the result with the Supreme Court, he told supporters.

Former Prime Minister Umaro Cissoko Embalo was declared winner of the run-off vote by the electoral commission.

Embalo's candidacy gained support from the main contenders who failed to reach the run-off, including Vaz. The announcement of his victory sparked celebrations in the capital Bissau, which has remained calm and optimistic during an election many hoped would draw a line under weeks of turmoil including violent protests,

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Faster rockets, more warheads: What North Korea could gain from new weapons development

research associate at CNS.

Rocket Engines North Korea said it had carried out two important tests at its Sohae satellite launch site, aimed at developing "another strategic weapon" to counter nuclear threats from the United States.

Although North Korean state media did not say exactly what was tested or what the new weapon might be, officials in Washington and Seoul said it appeared likely the North had tested rocket engines, possibly for ICBMs.

I

f North Korea returns to long-range missile launches or other weapons tests in 2020, its military could make valuable technical advances and gain experience alongside whatever political message is sent to Washington.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that the world would soon see his country's "new strategic weapon" and that there was no longer reason for Pyongyang to be bound by a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests.

Kim's comments were the strongest indication that the North could resume some of the major tests it had suspended more than two years ago in the run-up to summit diplomacy with the United States.

After years of development, the weapons programmes of North

40 January-February 2020

Korea are now advanced enough that it is hard to predict what it might test, said Jeffrey Lewis, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS).

U.S. military officials have said they see a long-range missile launch as one of the most likely possibilities.

Other experts said North Korea could launch a satellite, deploy the new ballistic missile submarine it says it is developing, or field new domestically produced "transporter erector launcher" (TEL) vehicles for its largest missiles.

"Any tests or drills they run will not only allow them to develop weapons that are faster, longerrange, or more reliable, but they also give the people operating these systems more exposure to and practice using and deploying the weapons," said Grace Liu, a

"They might work toward developing better liquidpropellant engines or revisit older engines that they've had trouble with in the past," said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

Analysts also speculated that North Korea could be developing better solid rocket motors (SRMs), which can offer some benefits like easier storage and transportation.

SRMs would also be important for North Korea's efforts to field an operational submarinelaunched ballistic missile (SLBM), similar to what was test-fired from a submerged barge in October.

"Every missile they've flighttested in 2019 to date has used a solid rocket motor and they're clearly becoming more adept at casting these motors in different diameters," Panda said. "There are challenges associated with moving to ICBM-sized SRMs, but perhaps North Korea will demonstrate a breakthrough on that front."

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WORLD missiles like the Hwasong-15, Panda said.

"Adding more nuclear warheads to a single missile can better assure them of an ability to penetrate American missile defence and, if they're worried that their warheads might have reliability issues, more warheads increases the odds that one warhead will successfully detonate," he said.

Reentry Vehicles And Nuclear Warheads A warhead launched by an ICBM needs a protective reentry vehicle to help it survive the fiery descent through the atmosphere to hit its target.

After the November 2017 launch of its largest ICBM to date, the Hwasong-15, state media said the test confirmed "the safety of a warhead in the atmospheric reentry environment."

U.S. military officials later said North Korea had not demonstrated a survivable reentry vehicle, though they did not discount the possibility.

During North Korea's last ICBM tests in 2017, its scientists may have gleaned useful data on how their reentry vehicles worked, Panda said.

However, the tests were conducted on a "lofted trajectory" high into space, potentially limiting the usefulness of some of the data, as the missile would take a much different trajectory during a war, he added.

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A final card North Korea could play is an atmospheric test of a nuclear warhead, though many analysts say that is unlikely, as it could anger Pyongyang's backers in Beijing and Moscow.

But North Korea is believed to have continued producing material for nuclear weapons, and analysts said it is likely to continue stockpiling additional warheads while seeking to make them even smaller.

Korea National Defense University's Jeong Han-beom said North Korea could use computer simulations to develop smaller and lighter warheads without new nuclear tests.

Evading Missile Defences In 2019, North Korea conducted several tests of new short-range missiles such as the KN-23, which experts said are designed to better evade missile defences.

This year, North Korea could seek to develop multiple reentry vehicles for large-diameter

North Korea often seems more focussed on making a splash with new weapons rather than pragmatically building more of the weapons it already has, said Markus Schiller, a missile expert based in Europe who focuses on the way North Korea has used outside help for its technology.

"This new stuff will again be something they have procured from somewhere else, or some publicity event that our political scientists will interpret as a huge leap toward new technology," he said.

Schiller said one technology that could generate the buzz North Korea is looking for could be a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), which the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance defines as weapons that travel faster than Mach 5 (3,800mph/6,174kmh) and have the capability to manoeuvre during the entire flight.

"Perhaps they will display a design model of a HGV, or launch a KN-23 on top of a bigger missile and have it do some manoeuvring at reentry while claiming to have launched a HGV," Schiller said.

"This way, they can save their limited resources, and play the same game they had over the past years."

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At U.N., U.S. justifies killing Iranian commander as self-defence

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he United States told the United Nations that the killing of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani was self-defence and vowed to take additional action "as necessary" in the Middle East to protect U.S. personnel and interests.

Iran retaliated for Soleimani's death by firing missiles at military facilities housing U.S. troops in Iraq. U.S. President Donald Trump said no Americans were hurt, soothing fears that Soleimani's death and the Iranian response could spark a wider conflict in the Middle East. In a letter to the U.N. Security Council, U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft said the United States also stands "ready to engage without preconditions in serious negotiations with Iran, with the goal of preventing further endangerment of international peace and security or escalation by the Iranian regime."

The killing of Soleimani in Baghdad was justified under

Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, wrote Craft in the letter seen

by Reuters, adding "the United States is prepared to take additional actions in the region as necessary to continue to protect U.S. personnel and interests."

Under Article 51, countries are required to "immediately report" to the 15-member Security Council any measures taken in exercising the right of selfdefence. The United States used Article 51 to justify taking action in Syria against Islamic State militants in 2014.

Craft said Soleimani's death and U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria on Dec. 29 against an Iran-backed militia group were "in response to an escalating series of armed attacks in recent months by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iransupported militias on U.S. forces and interests in the Middle East."

She said the aim was to deter Iran from conducting or supporting attacks and degrade its ability to conduct attacks. Iran also justified

its action under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter in a letter to the U.N. Security Council. The U.S. letter to the U.N. Security Council arrived after Iran's letter, diplomats said.

Iran's U.N. Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi wrote that Tehran "does not seek escalation or war" after exercising its right to selfdefence by taking a "measured and proportionate military response targeting an American air base in Iraq."

"The operation was precise and targeted military objectives thus leaving no collateral damage to civilians and civilian assets in the area," Ravanchi wrote.

"Seriously warning about any further military adventurism against it, Iran declares that it is determined to continue to, vigorously and in accordance with applicable international law, defend its people, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity against any aggression," he said.

Iran had full respect for the sovereignty of Iraq, he added.

Pro-democracy Iranians in U.S. say death of Soleimani could open a window for dissidents

T

he death of a top Iranian general in an American missile strike was long overdue, the leaders of a U.S.-based pro-democracy group said, and might "open a window" for dissidents to challenge a weakened government in Tehran.

General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's elite foreign paramilitary and espionage service, known as the Quds Force, was killed on Friday when

42 January-February 2020

missiles fired by a U.S. drone struck his vehicle as he left Baghdad airport.

The surprise attack on Soleimani, who built up Tehran's network of proxy armies across the Middle

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WORLD "This might open a window for Iranian protesters to come out into the streets again," Sharif said.

The general would be hard for Tehran to replace, he said.

"Our organization doesn't want war," Sharif added. "It wants change by the Iranian people."

In November, protests initially sparked by an abrupt hike in gasoline spread across Iran as demonstrators called for more political freedom. Reuters has reported that some 1,500 people were killed in the resulting crackdown ordered by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the bloodiest since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

East and was a pivotal figure in orchestrating its campaign to drive U.S. forces out of Iraq, has plunged the region into a new crisis and raised fears of a wider war.

"This was long overdue," Nasser Sharif, president of the California Society for Democracy in Iran, told Reuters in an interview.

Sharif said Soleimani had used repressive tactics against the Iranian people, spread fear via the Quds Force, and supported the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

"Soleimani was pushing an agenda of expanding terror across the Middle East. He is responsible for the death of thousands of people. When our community here heard this news it was thrilled," Sharif said.

Southern California is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside that country and hundreds of prodemocracy Iranian-Americans are set to meet in a long-planned convention at which the death of Soleimani is likely to be a major

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topic of discussion, Sharif said.

Soleimani was a national hero to many Iranians, whether supporters of the clerical leadership or not, but viewed as a dangerous villain by Western governments opposed to Iran's arc of influence running across the Levant and into the Gulf region.

On Tuesday at least 56 people were killed in a stampede in Tehran as tens of thousands packed streets to mourn the military commander. Iran pledged revenge for his death and, hours after the funeral, it launched a missile attack on U.S.-led forces in Iraq.

Out In The Streets Sharif said dissidents inside and outside Iran see the country's leadership as vulnerable, weakened financially, and exposed to the world as repressive, and believe the death of Soleimani comes at an opportune time for those seeking a democratic uprising.

Sharif said he had not heard of any heightened security concerns in the United States affecting Iranians. But the Washington DC-based National Iranian American Council expressed concern in a statement about "alarming reports" that over 60 Iranians and Iranian-Americans had been detained and questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials at Canada's border with Washington State.

Reuters has not verified those reports and the CBP has not responded to requests for comment.

Friction between Iran and the United States has risen since Trump withdrew in 2018 from a nuclear deal between Iran and world powers and reimposed sanctions on Tehran, slashing its vital oil exports.

U.S. officials have said Soleimani was killed because of solid intelligence indicating forces under his command planned attacks on U.S. targets in the region, although they have as yet provided no evidence.

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Satellite photos show damage to air base in Iraq hit by Iranian missiles

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ranian missiles damaged or destroyed seven buildings in the part of Ain al-Asad air base in Iraq that houses U.S. military personnel, satellite photographs appear to show.

Two images provided by commercial satellite company Planet Labs Inc., and reviewed by Reuters, show five missile impact points in that part of the base.

44 January-February 2020

The extent of the damage can be gauged by comparing the photographs, taken after attack, with images from Dec. 25 last year.

At least three of the structures appear to be aircraft maintenance hangers. Some of the buildings or structures have completely disappeared. Only parts of the others remain.

"They targeted the American portion of the base. They meant to hit it and they did hit it," said Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

U.S. President Donald Trump said no Americans were harmed in the strikes, which Iranian said it launched in retaliation for the killing in Iraq of an Iranian general.

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Iran intended to kill U.S. personnel in missile attack - U.S. general

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ran's missile attack had been intended to kill U.S. personnel at Iraq's al-Asad airbase, the top U.S. military officer said, in remarks that suggested that Tehran was, and perhaps still is, willing to risk major U.S. retaliation.

Milley said he and others in the military "fully expect" Shia militia groups in Iraq, backed by Iran, to carry out attacks against U.S. and U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Syria: "That's a very real possibility."

His remarks came hours after President Donald Trump suggested Iran was "standing down" after it fired missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq overnight, as both sides appeared to be looking to defuse a crisis over the U.S. killing of an Iranian general.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had said the strikes "concluded" Tehran's response to the U.S. killing of

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At least 11 of them hit al-Asad, while at least one other missile hit a facility in Erbil, Iraq. The others failed in flight. Esper said targets hit included tents, a helicopter and a parking lot and there was no major damage.

Missiles With Significant Power Milley noted the missiles had 1,000 to 2,000-pound warheads on them, each with significant explosive power and "kill radius."

"I believe, based on what I saw and what I know, is that (the strikes) were intended to cause structural damage, destroy vehicles and equipment and aircraft and to kill personnel.

That's my own personal assessment," Milley told reporters.

Army General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was not ready to say whether Iran was done after its unprecedented attack on two Iraqi bases that host troops from the United States, Canada, Denmark, the United Kingdom and other nations.

Asked if perhaps Iran would see this as an incomplete mission, given the lack of U.S. fatalities, Milley said: "I think it's perhaps too early to tell."

missiles from at least three locations inside Iran.

Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressing a gathering of Iranians chanting "Death to America," said the missile attacks were a "slap on the face" of the United States and said U.S. troops should leave the region.

Trump said the United States did not necessarily have to respond militarily to Iran's attack.

U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, standing alongside Milley, cautioned that the U.S. military remained "poised and ready."

Milley and Esper offered the most detail to date about the Iranian missile attack overnight, telling reporters at the Pentagon that Iran fired 16 short-range ballistic

"But the analytics is in the hands of professional intelligence analysts. So they're looking at that."

Milley and Esper said actions taken by military personnel safeguarded lives, as well as early warning from U.S. military systems that detect such missile activity.

Milley noted that bases like alAsad have scatter plans, bunkers and protective gear to help protect forces that come under attack. Esper and Milley said they were unaware of any headsup from Iraq about the coming attack, after Baghdad said it was notified by Tehran of the strike.

"We tried to give them a quick heads-up from here," Esper told reporters.

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'World cannot afford war': U.S. Democrats respond to Iran missile strike

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emocrats in the U.S. Congress and some of the party's presidential contenders warned about escalating conflict in the Middle East after Iran launched a retaliatory missile strike against U.S. forces in Iraq.

The news that Tehran had fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles against at least two Iraqi military bases hosting U.S.led coalition personnel broke during a meeting of Democratic lawmakers in the House of Representatives.

The attack was in retaliation for U.S. drone strike killing elite Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, according to a statement from Iran's Revolutionary Guards on state TV.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was handed a note about the attack during the meeting and left soon thereafter, according to people present.

"Closely monitoring the situation following bombings targeting U.S. troops in Iraq. We must ensure the safety of our service members, including ending needless provocations from the Administration and demanding that Iran cease its violence.

America & world cannot afford war," Pelosi said on Twitter.

U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the attack on Soleimani on the grounds that the Iranian general was planning to attack Americans, without providing evidence.

Democrats have been critical of the decision, saying it would

46 January-February 2020

escalate tensions with Iran. They have called for Trump to seek approval from Congress before taking further military action, although the Republican-led Senate is unlikely to support any measure that would tie the president's hands.

"At this moment, my heart and my prayers are with our military and their families in Iraq and around the world," Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren said at an event in New York.

"But this is a reminder why we need to de-escalate tension in the Middle East. The American people do not want a war with Iran," she added.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, another candidate for the Democratic nomination to take on Trump in November's presidential election, said at an event outside Philadelphia that the attack was predictable and faulted Trump's handling of the

situation. "I just pray to God as he goes through what’s happening, as we speak, that he’s listening to his military commanders for the first time because so far that has not been the case," he added.

On news of the attack, "there was not surprise in the room," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who attended the meeting with Pelosi. "Nobody laments the loss of Soleimani, he was a vicious terrorist that caused a lot of loss of life. But no one ought to be surprised that when you do that, there's a response," he said.

Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio called for unity, saying in a Twitter post that Iran wanted Americans to turn against one another. "The time will come to debate U.S. policy. Tonight American & allied troops have come under direct attack by a nation-state & Americans must come together to support & protect them & respond appropriately," he said.

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Highlights: Trump addresses Iran situation

U

.S. President Donald Trump gave a national address on the escalating tensions with Iran, hours after Iranian forces fired missiles at military bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq. The attack was in retaliation for the American killing of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani.

ATTACK ON MILITARY BASES "I'm pleased to inform you the American people should be extremely grateful and happy. No Americans were harmed in last night's attack by the Iranian regime. We suffered no casualties. All of our soldiers are safe and only minimal damage was sustained at our military bases.

"Our great American forces are prepared for anything.

Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world."

U.S. STRENGTH "Our missiles are big, powerful, accurate, lethal and fast. Under construction are many hypersonic missiles. The fact that we have this great military and equipment, however, does not mean we have to use it. We do not want to use it. American strength, both military and economic, is the best deterrent."

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CREATING A NEW IRAN DEAL "Iran must abandon its nuclear ambitions and end its support for terrorism. The time has come for the United Kingdom, Greece, France, Russia and China to recognise this reality. They must now break away from the remnants of the Iran deal, or JCPOA. And we must all work together towards making a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer and more peaceful place."

SANCTIONS "As we continue to evaluate options in response to Iranian aggression, the United States will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime. These powerful sanctions will remain until Iran changes its behaviour."

NATO "The civilized world must send a clear and unified message to the Iranian regime: Your campaign of terror, murder, mayhem will not be tolerated any longer. It will not be allowed to go forward. Today I am going to ask NATO to become much more involved in the Middle East process."

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U.S., Iran both appear to signal desire to avoid further conflict Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had said the strikes "concluded" Tehran's response to the killing of Soleimani, who built up Iran's network of proxy armies across the Middle East. He was buried in his hometown, Kerman, after days of national mourning.

"We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression," Zarif wrote on Twitter.

P

resident Donald Trump tempered days of angry rhetoric and suggested Iran was "standing down" after it fired missiles at U.S. forces in Iraq, as both sides looked to defuse a crisis over the U.S. killing of an Iranian general.

Trump said the United States did not necessarily have to hit back after Iran's attack on military bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq, itself an act of retaliation for the Jan. 3 U.S. strike that killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.

Trump said no Americans were hurt in the overnight attacks. The Pentagon said Iran had launched 16 short-range ballistic missiles, at least 11 of which hit Iraq's al-Asad air base and one that hit a facility in Erbil but caused no major damage. "The fact that we have this great military and equipment, however, does not mean we have to use it. We do

48 January-February 2020

Influential Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who casts himself as a nationalist rejecting both U.S. and Iranian interference in Iraq, also said the crisis Iraq was experiencing was over and he urged militia groups not to carry out attacks. not want to use it. American strength, both military and economic, is the best deterrent," Trump said.

"Our great American forces are prepared for anything. Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world," he said.

Trump said the United States "will immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions on the Iranian regime" in response to what he called "Iranian aggression." He offered no specifics.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, addressing a gathering of Iranians chanting "Death to America," said the missile attacks were a "slap on the face" of the United States and said U.S. troops should leave the region.

"I call on the Iraqi factions to be deliberate, patient, and not to start military actions,," said Sadr, whom Washington has long regarded as an Iranian ally.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence told CBS News in an interview the United States was receiving "encouraging intelligence that Iran is sending messages" to its allied militias not to attack U.S. targets.

But Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he and others in the military "fully expect" Shi'ite militia groups in Iraq, backed by Iran, to carry out attacks against U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Syria.

Two rockets fell in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, causing no casualties, the Iraqi military said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

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In a letter to the United Nations Security Council, U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft said the killing of Soleimani was self-defense and vowed to take additional action "as necessary" in the Middle East to protect U.S. personnel and interests.

before paring their gains, while world oil prices, after an early spike, fell about 4%.

[MKTS/GLOB] U.S. and European government sources said they believed Iran had deliberately sought to avoid U.S. military casualties in its missile strikes to prevent an escalation.

The United States also stood "ready to engage without preconditions in serious negotiations with Iran," to maintain peace and security, she said.

U.S. Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans said administration officials had not provided evidence in classified briefings to back up Trump's assertion that Soleimani had posed an "imminent" threat to the United States.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the Democratic-led chamber would vote on a resolution intended to limit his military actions against Iran.

Nuclear Deal Trump's address contrasted with his recent harsh rhetoric. The Republican, who was impeached in December and faces an election in November, had vowed to respond "disproportionately" if Iran retaliated strongly against Soleimani's killing.

Trump again vowed he would

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But an Iranian army spokesman denied "foreign media reports" suggesting there was some kind of coordination between Iran and the United States before the attack to evacuate bases.

not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon and urged world powers to quit a 2015 nuclear accord with Iran that Washington abandoned in 2018 and work for a new deal, an issue at the heart of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran. Iran has rejected new talks.

There was no immediate reaction from Iranian officials to Trump's comments. The semi-official Fars news agency described the U.S. president's remarks as a "big retreat from threats."

Soon after attacks, Trump had said on Twitter that "All is well!" and Washington was assessing damage. That tweet and the comment by Iran's foreign minister eased some concerns about a wider war and calmed jittery financial markets. U.S. stock prices hit record highs

Iranian television reported an official in the supreme leader's office as saying the attacks were the "weakest" of several retaliation scenarios. It quoted another source saying Iran had lined up 100 other potential targets.

After the Iranian missile attack, state television showed footage of the Soleimani burial, with hundreds of people chanting: "God is greatest" when the strikes were announced over loudspeakers. "His revenge was taken and now he can rest in peace," Iranian television said.

Hours after the Iranian missile strike, a Ukrainian airliner crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran killing all 176 people on board.

A Canadian security source said Western intelligence agencies' initial assessment was that the plane was not brought down by a missile.

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Canada wants big role in Iran crash probe despite lack of diplomatic ties - Trudeau Italy normally acts as a proxy for communication between Canada and Iran, and the Ukrainian ambassador told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp that his government was willing to help.

The disaster marked one of the greatest losses of Canadian life in a single day in recent years. Trudeau would not comment on possible causes for the tragedy.

"Obviously we are very, very early days on the investigation.

It's dangerous to speculate on possible causes," he said.

C

anada expects to play a big role in Iran's probe of an airliner crash that killed 63 Canadians even though the two nations do not have diplomatic ties, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.

Trudeau said 138 of the 176 people on board the Ukraine International Airlines Boeing 737 from Tehran to Kiev had onward connections to Canada.

All aboard died when the plane crashed shortly after takeoff.

Canada broke off diplomatic relations with Iran in 2012.

Trudeau said Canadian Foreign

50 January-February 2020

Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne would call his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif later to underline the need for a proper probe of the crash.

"Canada is one of a handful of countries with a high degree of expertise when it comes to these sorts of accidents and therefore we have much to contribute," Trudeau said.

"I am confident that in our engagement both through our allies and directly, we are going to make sure that we are a substantive contributor to this investigation," he told a news conference in Ottawa.

Most of the victims came from Canada's Iranian community.

Among the dead were a newlywed couple that had travelled to Iran to get married as well as two professors at the University of Alberta.

"Your loss is indescribable and this is a heartbreaking tragedy.

While no words will erase your pain, I want you to know that an entire country is with you.

We share your grief," Trudeau said to those affected by the crash.

Trudeau said he had spoken to a number of world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump, who expressed his condolences.

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WORLD

Australia urges quarter of a million to flee as winds fan huge bushfires

but officials did not say how many.

Since October, 27 people have been killed and thousands subjected to repeat evacuations as huge and unpredictable fires scorched more than 10.3 million hectares (25.5 million acres) of land, an area roughly the size of South Korea.

In the coastal town of Eden in New South Wales, where the alert status was upgraded to 'watch and act', smoke filled the horizon as winds blew smoke and ash.

Shereen and Kim Green, who live on a farm with three houses and 50 cattle just outside Eden, were racing to fill two 1,000-litre tanks of water.

"This is to put out the spot fires and we'll be staying up all night to defend our property," said Shereen, as the wind shook her utility vehicle. "We're taking the opportunity while we can."

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ustralia urged nearly a quarter of a million people to evacuate their homes on Friday and prepared military backup as authorities said the next few hours could be "very, very challenging" even as rain poured down in some parts.

an unprecedented fire event... and, of course, we know that we have many weeks of the fire season to run," Daniel Andrews, the premier of Victoria, told a televised briefing.

Defence personnel stood ready to move to bushfire grounds if conditions became extreme, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told reporters, as soaring temperatures and erratic winds create dangerous conditions.

While the winds are expected to move through, Andrews urged residents to stay on high alert and leave the community "if you are told to".

"Even with rain in Melbourne, even with forecast better conditions next week, there is a long way to go in what has been

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"The next few hours are going to be very, very challenging."

Authorities sent emergency texts to 240,000 people in Victoria, telling them to leave. People in high-risk regions in New South Wales and South Australia were also urged to think about leaving,

Sitting under the town's watchtower, another resident Robyn Malcolm said: "If it all goes wrong, we'll dash down to the wharf and get on a tugboat."

Here are key events in the crisis: * Of 160 fires ablaze across New South Wales (NSW), about 46 were uncontained. Two were burning at an 'emergency level', eight blazes were in the "watch and act" category, with the rest at the "advice" level, the lowest alert rating. * Neighbouring Victoria had 36 fires, with more than 1.3 million hectares burnt. Nine fires were at an emergency level.

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WORLD he was considering holding a wide-ranging national inquiry into the bushfires after the immediate crisis passed. * Just shy of 2,000 homes have been destroyed in New South Wales, state authorities said, half during the past 10 days. * The Commonwealth Bank of Australia is to donate cricketer Shane Warne's prized "baggy green" cap to a museum after paying more than A$1 million for it at an auction for bushfire relief.

* In the alpine region on the border of the southeastern states of Victoria and New South Wales, two fires were poised to merge and create a blaze over almost 600,000 hectares (1.5 million acres). * Victoria emergency services minister Lisa Neville said some communities had been provided with large containers of satellite phones, baby formula, food, nappies, and torches in case they are cut off. * Campaigners protested in Sydney and Melbourne as part of a wave of demonstrations planned in major world cities, to spotlight concerns about Australia's climate change policies. * Westpac estimated total bushfire losses to date at about A$5 billion ($3.4 billion), higher than the 2009 bushfires in Victoria but smaller than the Queensland floods in 2010/11. It forecast a hit of 0.2% to 0.5% on gross domestic product. * Australia's alpine resorts have dusted off winter snowmaking

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machines to blast ice-cold water onto dry ski slopes as fires threaten the Snowy Mountains region. * The Insurance Council of Australia increased its estimate of damages claims from the fires to more than A$900 million, with claims expected to jump further. * Health officials in New South Wales urged extra precautions to avoid heat-related illnesses. * Australia's wildfires have dwarfed other catastrophic blazes, with its burnt terrain more than twice the extent of that ravaged this year by fires in Brazil, California and Indonesia combined. * Of nine fires in the state of South Australia, one was categorised as an emergency. * Climate protests were also planned in cities such as Canberra, targeting the government's handling of the crisis and its position on climate change. * Prime Minister Morrison said

* Authorities have warned that the huge fires, spurred by high temperatures, wind and a three-year drought, will persist until there is substantial rainfall.

The weather agency said there was no sign of that for months. * Ecologists at the University of Sydney have estimated 1 billion animals have been killed or injured in the bushfires, potentially destroying ecosystems. * Morrison has pledged A$2 billion ($1.4 billion) to a newly created National Bushfire Recovery Agency. * About 100 firefighters from the United States and Canada are helping, with another 140 expected in coming weeks. * The fires have emitted 400 megatonnes of carbon dioxide and produced harmful pollutants, the European Union's Copernicus monitoring programme said. * Smoke has drifted across the Pacific, affecting cities in South America, and may have reached the Antarctic, the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization said.

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WORLD

F1 champion Hamilton donates $500,000 to Australian wildlife rescue defenceless animals thought to have died so far, pushing certain species closer to extinction."

The 35-year-old urged his 14 million followers on Instagram, and 5.6 million on Twitter, to "join me in thinking about the impact we are having on our planet".

"Let's work together to make small changes, and encourage our family and friends to do the same, so we can help shift the direction we’re going in," added Hamilton, who said he was donating to Wires Wildlife Rescue, WWF Australia and rural fire services.

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Hamilton, who has a home in Colorado and has posted pictures of himself snowboarding in the mountains, did not specify in the post whether he had made his donation in U.S. dollars or Australian but Mercedes confirmed it was the former.

The Briton, who has adopted a vegan lifestyle and become outspoken on the environment, posted a clip on social media of a scorched koala being tended to against a backdrop of smoke and flames.

Renault's Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo has also used social media to call for donations and saying he had contributed.

ix-times Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton said he was donating $500,000 (382,819 pounds) towards the rescue and care of wildlife caught in bushfires ravaging southeast Australia.

The bushfires have left 26 people dead and killed or injured an estimated one billion animals.

"It saddens me deeply to know that over 1 billion animals in Australia died a painful death, no way out, not their fault,"

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He said he would also be signing and raffling his racesuit from this year's Australian Grand Prix to raise more funds. commented the Mercedes driver, who will start his bid for a record-equalling seventh title in Melbourne in March.

"My love of animals is no secret and I can't help but grieve for the

Other Australian sports figures and international tennis players in the country for tournaments ahead of the Australian Open have also raised funds in support of relief and recovery efforts.

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MOBILE

Decade in Review: What the smartphone has wrought Tech uber alles Apple Inc, once a niche computer company, is now one of the world's most valuable companies thanks to the iPhone. The five largest Fortune 500 technology companies - Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook - currently boast a market cap of $4.7 trillion, compared with about $800 billion for the top five in 2010. Not all of that is due to the smartphone, of course, but the mobilerelated technologies and services accounted for nearly $4 trillion in economic activity in 2018, according to trade group GSMA.

There's an app for that

W

hen the first Apple iPhone hit the market in 2007, not everyone was convinced it would supplant the flip-phone. When Google's Android software system arrived a year later, the Blackberry still seemed to have bright future.

But with the iPhone 4 in 2010, featuring a highresolution display, sleek design and front-facing camera, our collective fate was sealed. Here are 10 ways the smartphone has made its mark over the decade.

Whether we're hailing a cab, ordering food, playing a game, finding a date, listening to music or shopping for just about anything, there's a good chance we'll be doing it with a smartphone app that didn't exist in 2010. Many of most popular apps are free, but consumers are still expected to spend more than $120 billion in app stores during 2019, according to App Annie, a mobile apps analytics firm.

Feed me The endless scroll on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media apps now consumes 34 minutes of every U.S. adult's day, according to Nielsen. Fewer people are sitting on the sofa

Access everywhere Today some 5 billion smartphones are in use around the world, according to Canalys Research. The total number of internet subscriptions has soared to 7.2 billion globally from 1.3 billion in 2010, the vast majority of them mobile subscriptions, International Telecommunications Union data shows. The explosion in connectivity has been especially dramatic in the developing world, where there are now more mobile connections than people.

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MOBILE

to watch live TV at set times, and advertisers are following.

Mobile ad spending surpassed TV for the first time in 2018 in terms of percentage share of the U.S. market, according to research firm eMarketer. We can also thank the smartphone for Instagram influencers, "sextortion," and fake news.

Smile for the (smartphone) camera Global shipments of digital cameras dropped from their 2010 peak of 121 million to just 19 million units in 2018, according to the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA). Meantime the latest phones pack as many four camera lenses and cutting edge software that makes it easier than ever to get that perfect shot. The front-facing camera might be the busiest: Google reports that its Android devices take 93 million selfies every day.

Where am I? The satellite tracking technology known as GPS, combined with information from cell towers and Wi-Fi networks, has made the smartphones incredibly powerful tracking devices. Google maps and its poorer cousins enable even the most directionally impaired find their way around unfamiliar locales with ease.

For the privacy-minded, though, it's a disaster: Phone companies and app makers routinely record the movements of subscribers and sell that data to advertisers, a $20 billion-a-year business.

The data is "anonymized," but as numerous studies and a recent New York Times investigation have revealed it is often a simple matter to identify who is behind the dot on the map. Nearly

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50% of companies surveyed

by Verizon this year used or planned to soon use smartphone management tools to track their employees.

You can look it up The 2010 edition of the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, all 32 volumes and 129 pounds of it, turned out to be the last. But untold barroom arguments or dining room debates can now be settled on the spot: Wikipedia is consulted more than 240 million times daily.

Distracting ourselves to death In 2018 alone in the United States, 2,628 fatal crashes involved a distracted driver, and of those deadly crashes, about 13% involved mobile phone use, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Forget your wallet Apple Pay and Google Pay are still afterthoughts for most U.S. consumers, but China may be

a harbinger. Alipay and WeChat pay, China's two big smartphone payment services, have reached a combined adoption rate of over 80% since they were launched around the beginning of the decade, according to a study by Bain. The QR code now peppers storefront windows. Even streetside beggars have adapted, sometimes rejecting cash and asking that payments be made via WeChat Pay or Alipay.

Say what?

Among the major casualties of the smartphone era is the conventional phone call itself: ubiquitous messaging apps have helped make video calls, GIFs, emojis and audio messaging preferred modes of communication. In the UK, for example, the total number of minutes spent on voice calls fell from 254 billion in 2013 to 206 billion in 2018, and the number of text messages dropped from 129 billion to 74 billion over the same period, according to Ofcom. Mobile data usage, meanwhile, jumped almost ninefold between 2013 and 2018. The number of available emojis has nearly tripled to almost 3,000 since 2010.

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TECHNOLOGY

Twitter to experiment with limiting replies in effort to combat online abuse

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witter Inc said it will test new features early this year that would allow users to control who can reply to their tweets, as it looks to limit abuse and harassment on the platform.

of public conversation. "We want to help people feel safe participating in the conversation on Twitter by giving them more control over the conversations they start," the San Franciscobased company said in a tweet.

Social media firms are under pressure to address harassment on their sites, which often occurs in unsolicited replies targeting women and minorities, and Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has promised since 2018 to increase the "health"

The company had launched a feature late last year allowing users to hide certain replies on their tweets as a part of its efforts to clean up abusive content and make the social media platform more user-friendly. In a presentation at the annual CES

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tech conference, the company laid out plans, according to reports by several tech media, including The Verge and TechCrunch.

According to the presentation, users will be able to choose four different settings for replies: Global, which would allow anyone to respond, Group, which would allow replies from people a user followed or mentioned; Panel, or people mentioned in a tweet, and Statement, or no replies at all.

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TECHNOLOGY

A decade on earth captured from space

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he biggest news events of the past decade have been chronicled from space.

The last 10 years have seen a boom in the use of satellite imagery for reporting, led by a growth in commercial satellites that has slashed the cost of such images, and advances in technology that have made highresolution images from many parts of the world accessible, almost instantly, even on a phone.

U.S. satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies Inc has released satellite images from

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some of the biggest news events of the past decade – from natural disasters to war to the construction of Apple's "Spaceship" headquarters in Cupertino, California.

The images range from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the launch of China's first domestically produced aircraft carrier, the Shandong, from a base on the shore of the disputed South China Sea. Headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, Maxar specializes in satellites for Earth imagery, geospatial data and analytics.

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TECHNOLOGY

Exhibition in China reflects on loss of anonymity to recognition technology being held at Shenzhen's Futian station, the first mainland stop on a high-speed rail link that opened in 2018 amid apprehension in Hong Kong about its deepening integration with mainland China.

"Stations have traditionally been a place of anonymity, but they're becoming places where actually everything is known," the show's chief curator, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Carlo Ratti told Reuters.

"This is one of the things we want to discuss."

The exhibition comes at a sensitive time in China. Protests against China's influence have rocked the former British colony of Hong Kong for months and the rapid spread of facial recognition technology has triggered debate about privacy.

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n art exhibition exploring the impact of facial recognition technology has opened in China, offering a rare public space for reflection on increasingly pervasive surveillance by tech companies and the government.

Hosted jointly by the southern mainland city of Shenzhen and its neighbour Hong Kong, the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture features more than 60 installations from Chinese and foreign artists exploring the loss of urban anonymity brought about by technological change.

The "Eyes of the City" exhibition is

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The New York Times reported in November that a Beijing arts centre cancelled ChineseAmerican artist Hung Liu's show of antiwar paintings for no clear reason though she believed it was related to Hong Kong.

Asked if he was surprised the exhibition had been allowed to open given the unrest in Hong Kong, Ratti said he "found an openness for discussion" in Shenzhen. "There’s probably not a better place to discuss these

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TECHNOLOGY

issues ... this is a global issue and the best way to deal with it is to open up these technologies and put them in the hands of the public," he said.

Reuters was unable to contact the event's organisers and foreign media were not invited to an opening news conference amid concern they would ask about Hong Kong, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The exhibition features a facial recognition system that

visitors can opt out of, to draw attention to the inability to opt out in public, Ratti said.

Other works include facial monitors that track visitors' emotional engagement with the exhibits and digitalized images of fishing boats in one of Shenzhen's older harbours using advanced sensing technologies developed by artists Ai Deng and Li Lipeng and by architects INTACT Studio.

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TECHNOLOGY

Satellite imagery company Maxar to sell Canadian unit for C$1 billion The acquisition of MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (MDA) will be financed through a combination of equity and debt.

MDA, which has helped construct part of the International Space Station, will operate as a stand-alone company within NPC's portfolio following the transaction.

Maxar was exploring sale of its space robotics business.

MDA, which started in the basement of a Vancouver home, makes defense and maritime systems, radar geospatial imagery, space robotics, satellite antennas, and communication subsystems.

U

.S. satellite imagery company Maxar Technologies Inc said it would sell its Canadian space robotics business to a consortium led by Northern Private Capital (NPC) for C$1 billion ($765 million), in a bid to ease its debt.

The company's shares were up 16.2% in premarket trading.

Maxar will retain its U.S.-based space robotics division, which is responsible for developing the robotic hardwares used in NASA's Mars 2020 rover.

"This transaction combined with the recently completed sale of real estate in Palo Alto reduces Maxar's overall debt by more than $1 billion," said Chief Financial Officer Biggs Porter. As of September, Maxar had a total debt of $3.1 billion.

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AUTOMOBILES

Mercedes-Benz to build smart brand cars with Geely in China's Xi'an: senior executive

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ercedes-Benz will build smart-branded electric cars with Zhejiang Geely Holding Group in the Chinese city of Xian from a base with annual capacity of around 150,000 vehicles, a senior official from its German parent Daimler AG said.

Daimler's Executive Vice President in China Leng Yan made the comments to Reuters on the sidelines of China's EV100 forum in Beijing, an annual event where senior auto industry executives meet to discuss policies and the market.

Geely and Mercedes-Benz said they would each invest 2.7 billion yuan ($388.8 million) in a China-based venture to build "premium and intelligent electrified" vehicles under the Smart brand. Like Mercedes-Benz, Smart is a Daimler marque. The firms said at the time that the venture, which will be based in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo, will have manufacturing capacity in China and sales operations in China and Germany.

Geely, which holds a 9.7% stake in Stuttgart-based Daimler, is building car plants in Xian, according to construction bidding documents on its website. Daimler, which partners with BAIC Group to make luxury Mercedes-Benz cars in Beijing, also builds trucks with BAIC's unit Beiqi Foton Motor.

Smart delivered about 116,800 vehicles worldwide in 2019, Daimler said in a Jan. 9 statement.

China's Geely in talks to take stake in Aston Martin

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hina’s Geely Automobile Holding is in talks with Aston Martin management and investors about taking a stake in the luxury carmaker, according to a source close to the discussions and a report by the Financial Times, sparking a sharp jump in the British company's share price. The Chinese group is conducting due diligence on the 107-year-old UK business, the cars of which are the drive of choice for fictional British secret agent James Bond, the FT reported, citing four people familiar with the discussions.

News of Geely's interest comes a month after Aston Martin confirmed it was in early talks with potential investors as it launched a review of its funding.

A stake sale could help to boost Aston's prospects after it reported a loss in the third quarter and warned this week that 2019 profit would be almost halved from the previous year because of weak European markets. Geely sees potential savings on technologies and vehicle platforms with integration between Aston Martin and its own Lotus brand, the source close to the discussions told Reuters. Geely also owns Volvo and a stake in Germany's Daimler.

An Aston Martin spokesman declined to comment on whether the company is in talks with Geely, saying only that talks with potential investors are ongoing. A spokesman for Geely Europe declined to comment. Daimler, which owns a 5% stake in Aston Martin and supplies the carmaker with

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Mercedes-AMG engines, supports efforts by the British carmaker to secure its long-term future, the source said. Daimler declined to comment.

Geely Chairman Li Shufu owns a 9.69% stake in Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler, which runs the Smart city car brand with Geely as a joint venture out of China.

Shares in Aston Martin jumped as much as 11% after the FT report and closed with a 15% gain at 4.78 pounds , well below the 19 pound price of its initial public offering in October 2018. Media reports in December said that Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll, owner of Formula One team Racing Point, was preparing a bid for a large stake in Aston Martin.

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AUTOMOBILES

Electric vehicle startup Rivian scores $1.3 billion investment from T.Rowe Price, others

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lectric vehicle startup Rivian said it closed a $1.3 billion investment round led by T. Rowe Price and including existing investors Amazon.com and Ford Motor Co. The investment round, which also included BlackRock Inc, is the fourth this year for Rivian and positions the Plymouth, Michigan-based company as one of the better-financed players in a crowded EV manufacturing market where Tesla Inc is the most established player.

"This investment demonstrates confidence in our team, products,

technology and strategy," Rivian Chief Executive R.J. Scaringe said in a statement.

Electric vehicles still make up only a small piece of the global automotive market. While Tesla is the best-known maker, China and Europe are pushing automakers to roll out EVs, and Ford, General Motors Co and others have announced plans to spend billions of dollars developing the vehicles.

Founded in 2009, Rivian plans to build an all-electric pickup truck, the R1T, and the companion R1S SUV, starting in late 2020. Both models are based on a Riviandesigned "skateboard," a chassis that bundles electric motor, batteries and controls and can accommodate a variety of body styles.

Prior to announcement, Rivian had raised $2.2 billion from investors, according to investor website PitchBook, and was valued at an estimated $5 billion to $7 billion.

The company's total valuation in the wake of the latest investment round was not immediately clear.

Rivian said no new board seats were added as a result of the latest investment.

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AUTOMOBILES Amazon, which has relationships and deals across the auto industry, led a $700 million investment round in Rivian in February. The e-commerce company also ordered 100,000 electric delivery vehicles from Rivian. The first Amazon vans will be built at a former Mitsubishi Motors Corp plant in Normal, Illinois, starting in 2021.

Ford invested $500 million in Rivian in April and plans to help it begin production in Normal in 2020.

"We want to maintain a meaningful value in the ownership and future of that company," Ford spokesman T.R. Reid said about Rivian.

A battery-powered Lincoln SUV, due in mid-2022, would be the first Ford vehicle to be built on the Rivian skateboard.

Cox Automotive Inc, owner of the Autotrader online automobile market and Kelley Blue Book car valuation service, invested $350 million in Rivian in September 2019.

T. Rowe Price has placed other bets in the auto sector. It is a large Tesla shareholder and also has invested in GM's majorityowned Cruise self-driving division. T. Rowe Price also invested, along with Amazon, in self-driving car software startup Aurora and British online food delivery company Deliveroo.

"T. Rowe Price is excited to invest in Rivian as it moves the innovation frontier forward with its compelling sustainable transport solutions for both consumers and businesses," T. Rowe Price Growth Stock Fund Portfolio Manager Joe Fath said in an emailed statement.

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AUTOMOBILES

Tesla delivers first Chinamade Model 3 sedans in just under a year

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esla has started delivering Model 3 electric cars built at its Shanghai factory in just under a year since it began work on the $2 billion plant, a record for global automakers in China, and said it would ramp up deliveries from next month.

new set of wheels.

The U.S. electric vehicle maker marked the start with an event where 15 Tesla employees received cars they had purchased, one of whom took the opportunity to propose marriage to his girlfriend after getting his

The Shanghai plant, up and running in just 357 days, is part of Tesla's plans to bolster its presence in the world's biggest car market and minimize the impact of the U.S.-China trade war.

The China-made Model 3 sedans are priced at 355,800 yuan ($50,000) before subsidies.

Imported Model 3 vehicles start at 439,000 yuan for the longerrange version, while the standard range plus model costs under $40,000 in the United States.

The automaker, which previously imported all the cars it sold in China, had said it wanted to start deliveries from the Shanghai plant before the Lunar New Year beginning on Jan. 25.

"From now onwards Chinamade Model 3 vehicles will start running on China's large streets and small lanes," Tesla Vice President Tao Lin said at the delivery ceremony which was attended by employees and Shanghai government officials.

China General Manager for the Silicon Valley carmaker Wang

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AUTOMOBILES in the country that is quite unlike anywhere else.

The company and its flamboyant billionaire CEO Elon Musk openly disdain marketing, but in China Tesla has offered racing events and showroom parties.

It is also building service centers and charging stations across China to assure customers of standardized after-sales service, Tesla's senior executives said, confirming a Reuters report on the plans published.

The car maker will double the number of service centers and fast charging stations in China next year, and plans to more than double its after-sales workforce to 1,500 from about 600 currently, the executives added.

Wang also told reporters the plant had achieved a production target of 1,000 units a week, or around 280 cars a day, and that sales for the China-made sedan had so far been "very good".

Hao said Tesla plans to ramp up Model 3 deliveries in January.

The Chinese government has been supportive of the factory, the first wholly foreign-owned car plant and a reflection of Beijing's broader shift to open up its auto market.

CHINA PUSH Tesla has taken a different approach to the Chinese market, the world's biggest for electric vehicles with 1.3 million newenergy vehicles sold last year, as is evident from its marketing blitz

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ENTERTAINMENT

'Little Miss Period' tackles Japan's menstruation taboos with a punch

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er timing can be terrible and she can pack a mean punch.

But "Little Miss Period" - a pink blob with red lips and red pants who stars in a Japanese manga comic and movie of the same name - has a mission: breaking taboos in a society where talking about menstruation has been seen dirty or embarrassing.

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The character has generally been received positively as a step toward better understanding among the sexes. Some critics, though, worry about stereotypes and inattention to underlying gender discrimination that holds back Japanese women in many fields.

"Until now, menstruation has been something to hide and many people completely lack

correct understanding of it," said Kazue Muta, a sociology professor at Osaka University.

"I can't praise the manga 100% ... but it would be good if it were a step toward greater openness and education."

The movie "Little Miss Period" was released domestically by entertainment company Yoshimoto Kogyo Co. Ltd. It is

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BRITISH HERALD

based on a manga by male artist Ken Koyama that debuted in 2017 before being compiled into a book by publisher Kadokawa.

The film also opened in Taiwan this month and will debut in Hong Kong in January. Premieres in China and across Southeast Asia are also planned.

The topic of menstruation caught public attention in Japan recently when department store Daimaru suggested female employees wear a "period badge" to alert coworkers to their cycle.

The plan sparked accusations of harassment and the store is reconsidering.

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ENTERTAINMENT

In the manga series, Little Miss Period - "Seiri-chan" in Japanese - delivers a punch to the gut that lays some women out flat before drawing blood with a syringe.

When a woman's husband fails to sympathise, he gets a "period punch" of his own to help him understand.

History gets a nod, with the tale of a feudal era Japanese girl forced to stay in a secluded hut because of the belief that menstruating females are unclean.

The movie version focuses on Aoko, a publishing firm editor whose male boss shows little compassion for her monthly

pain. Aoko's widower boyfriend is raising a young daughter. "If only men could get periods, even just once a year," Aoko laments.

Feminist author Minori Kitahara welcomed efforts to break taboos but lamented that the representations were "treating the matter like a comedy talk show."

Nobuyoshi Yoshida, 33, said he found the movie instructive. "Men don't get how harsh menstruation can be for some women," he said as he exited a cinema. "This was easy to understand."

His girlfriend Kumiko Hanazawa, 32, was succinct: "I want men to watch this."

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ENTERTAINMENT

Adidas and Beyonce to launch gender-neutral collection The German sportswear brand announced it was teaming up with the singer in April to relaunch the Ivy Park brand Beyonce started in 2016 together with British fashion chain Topshop. The company did not give financial details.

The partnership comes as Adidas seeks to attract more female customers, an area where it has lagged bigger rival Nike and German competitor Puma, which saw its sales boosted by a collaboration with singer Rihanna that ended last year.

Adidas does not expect much of an immediate help to sales from the initial Beyonce collection, but it will ramp up over time, Chief Executive Kasper Rorsted told analysts in November.

"You're going to see several launches coming up, but they have no substantial revenue impact and this has been part of the plan all the time. You will see that change throughout next year," the CEO said.

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didas will start selling a new collection designed with singer Beyonce on Jan. 18 in a relaunch of her Ivy Park brand that includes shoes, clothes and accessories, mostly in maroon, orange and cream.

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Adidas described the collection, which features on the cover of January's Elle magazine, as gender neutral. It includes jumpsuits, cargo pants, hoodies and cycling shorts, mostly featuring signature Adidas triplestripes.

Adidas has eroded Nike's dominance of the U.S. market in recent years, helped by partnerships with celebrities like Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, but Nike has been growing faster in China and Europe, a trend that continued in the latest results.

Ivy Park said last year Beyonce had bought the fitness clothing brand from Topshop.

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ENTERTAINMENT

Kim Kardashian to Sting: 10 celebrities who used star power for good in 2019

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elebrities were out in force in 2019 to lend their names and star spotlights to causes ranging from homelessness to climate change and indigenous rights.

Here are 10 celebrities who took a stand during the year to make a positive impact: 1. Ellen Page - Hollywood actress and "Juno" Oscar nominee directed her first film in 2019 spotlighting "environmental racism" and the plight of

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2. Helen Mirren - Oscarwinning British actress hit out against the "exponential rise in

indigenous communities in her native Canada. The movie featured communities battling to stop the construction of a new dump and pushing for the cleanup of a contaminated waterway.

homelessness" across the globe as she took part in a charity

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BRITISH HERALD appeal to sleep outdoors for a night in winter. Known for playing "The Queen", Mirren said the global scourge of homelessness was "becoming much too big" and encouraged people to do more to support rough sleepers.

3. Kim Kardashian - The reality star and influential trend-setter used a trip to her native Armenia this year to support the global climate youth movement headed by activist Greta Thunberg.

The "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" star also made waves in 2019 for supporting reform of the U.S. criminal justice system and winning clemency for incarcerated women.

ENTERTAINMENT done to prevent the destruction of cultural property during war, from museums to libraries, in order to preserve communities.

The novelist said "turbulent" political times called for extra protection of physical property and cultural heritage during conflicts.

6. Jaden Smith - U.S rapper and actor Jaden Smith urged young people rallying to fight climate change to engage their parents.

social justice prize for her work to end LGBT+ youth homelessness.

Best known for her '80s-era pop hits, Lauper said LGBT+ rights were human rights.

9. Zoe Saldana - Hollywood actress, who starred in blockbuster movies "Avatar" and "Star Trek", spoke out in May in support of women's equal

4. Sting - The British rocker was awarded an international prize for his work to protect the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous The 21-year-old son of actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith joined mass youth-led protests that took place in cities around the world imploring world leaders to confront the climate crisis.

inhabitants, where the battle over land became more deadly this year. The musician, along with his wife, were recognised for their charitable foundation, the Rainforest Fund, which supports indigenous people.

8. Cyndi Lauper - The U.S. singer was awarded a United Nations'

7. Ken Loach - The British film director made headlines in 2019 when he released his film: "Sorry We Missed You", which warned of the "extreme exploitation" of

rights. The U.S. actress urged Hollywood to dismantle oldfashioned stereotypes to inspire global audiences.

10. Gareth Thomas - The former rugby international sports star's decision to come out as HIVpositive this year made him a role model for millions of people living with the virus. The former

5. Elif Shafak - The Turkish-British author called for more to be

workers by big tech firms. The 83-year-old said such business models could be called slavery and urged companies to look at the human impact of the gigeconomy.

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Wales captain said he hoped his decision to post a video on Twitter would lead to greater public understanding of the issue.

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ENTERTAINMENT

Justin Bieber to chronicle comeback in YouTube documentary series well as giving fans glimpses of his private life with new wife, model Hailey Baldwin, and other family members.

Bieber, who first found fame on YouTube as a baby-faced 13 year-old in 2007, abruptly pulled out of his "Purpose" world tour in 2017, citing the need for rest.

In the past year, he has written a series of Instagram postings to his 124 million followers talking about his struggles with depression, drug abuse and fame and crediting religion and childhood sweetheart Baldwin for his recovery.

Earlier in December, Bieber, 25, announced that in 2020 he would release his first album in four years, and embark on a North American tour. "Yummy," the first single from the as-yet untitled album, will land.

"Maybe by watching this, people will kind of get a glimpse into his world," Baldwin said in a trailer for the documentary series released on Tuesday.

Bieber said partnering with YouTube for the series felt like coming full circle.

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een heartthrob Justin Bieber is opening up about his creative and personal life through a 10-part documentary ahead of a career comeback after three years away from the spotlight.

YouTube announced that Bieber's first ever documentary series, "Justin Bieber: Seasons," will launch on the video platform on Jan. 27. It will chronicle the making of the Canadian singer's first album in four years, as

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"When I was getting started, YouTube provided me with a platform and a community where I could share music, experiences and moments with my fans," the Canadian singer said in a statement.

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HEALTH

Drug developers take fresh aim at 'guidedmissile' cancer drugs

payloads and antibodies and more precisely reach tumours. There is a growing understanding, too, of how to design ADCs to kill even surrounding cancer cells that previously evaded destruction.

"What we're seeing now are the benefits of the science becoming mature," said ADC pioneer Chris Martin, CEO of Switzerland's ADC Therapeutics. "It took at least a decade, probably more like 15 years, to really begin to turn the art into a science."

In 2019, U.S. regulators approved three ADCs, the most ever in a single year, as last-ditch treatments based on studies showing they helped patients whose survival outlook was bleak.

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ozens of drugmakers are conducting human trials for a record 89 therapies that pair antibodies with toxic agents to fight cancer, evidence of renewed confidence in an approach that has long fallen short of its promise, an analysis compiled for Reuters shows.

while minimizing damage to healthy tissue. The approach has for decades been a major biotech industry focus. Many experimental ADCs, however, failed due to the complexity of pairing the right antibody with the appropriate toxic agent. Some were abandoned as too weak; others were too harmful.

These antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs, from companies including AztraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, are described by researchers as "guided missiles" packing a powerful anticancer punch.

From 2000 to 2018, only five ADCs won approval. Just one, Roche's Kadcyla, approved in 2013 for breast cancer, has surpassed $1 billion in annual sales after data last year showed it boosted disease-free survival for some patients compared with the standard treatment, Roche's Herceptin.

They are engineered to zero in on tumours and then release cytotoxins that deliver up to 10,000 times the potency of standard chemotherapy,

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Over time, however, scientists devised better ways to connect

They include AstraZeneca's and Daiichi Sankyo's breast cancer drug, Enhertu, which was shown to help patients who had failed numerous previous treatments survive a median of more than 16 months before their disease worsened.

Astellas' and Seattle Genetics' bladder cancer drug, Padcev, also received expedited approval in December, based on evidence that 44% of patients who had failed immunotherapy showed improvement, and in some cases, no evidence of cancer, when they were assessed after treatment.

Roche's Polivy was green-lighted against lymphoma in June after producing complete response rates, with no signs of disease, in 40% of patients when combined with two other therapies.

New Record While all three drugs must prove their mettle in further studies, the

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HEALTH

industry is growing optimistic that ADCs' time may have arrived.

The number of ADC drug candidates is at unprecedented levels, according to data from consultancy Beacon Targeted Therapies compiled for Reuters, based on a review of companies' pipelines. Dozens more ADC prospects are in pre-clinical review.

London-based Beacon advises drugmakers on targeted therapies, helping them decide whether to pursue prospective drugs or redirect efforts, based on industry trends.

Current ADC projects include GlaxoSmithKline testing its belantamab mafodotin against multiple myeloma.

ADC Therapeutics, part-owned by private equity firm Auven Therapeutics, has several studies on experimental drugs, including with Danish partner Genmab, on blood cancers and solid tumours.

U.S. biotech Immunomedics' market capitalization gained more than 60% to $4.3 billion in the last six months, ahead of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's late-December decision to review its ADC against triple-negative breast cancer, which is hard to treat and has poor prognosis.

Massachusetts-based ImmunoGen, hit by past trial failures, got a lift in December for its ADC against ovarian cancer when the FDA indicated it may become a candidate for accelerated approval.

The surge in ADC investment has been fuelled, in part, by improvements in the so-called "linker" technology that binds

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is a good request for capacity," said Iwan Bertholjotti, Lonza's bioconjugate commercial development head. "That's a good sign that the market is booming."

Still, enthusiasm is not universal. the antibody to its cancer-killing toxins, keeping them stable in the circulatory system until the poison can be unleashed on the targeted tumour.

ADCs are generally delivered via repeated infusions, similar to chemotherapy.

"There is a revival again because there is a new generation of molecules in which the linker is more efficient," Giuseppe Curigliano, clinical director of early drug development at Milan's European Institute of Oncology.

AbbVie in August abandoned its ADC candidate Rova-T after flunking a lung cancer trial and wrote off most of the $5.8 billion it paid for the drug's developer, Stemcentrx, in 2016.

Roche, which helped pioneer ADCs with Kadcyla and Polivy, has also backed off. In 2013, the Basel-based company had about a dozen experimental ADCs. Today, only one remains, and it is being developed for Staph infections, not cancer.

"We have shifted our technology priorities," Roche CEO Severin Schwan told Reuters. "Maybe others will be luckier, but we failed to master the complexity."

Betting On Growth This optimism has contract manufacturers like Merck KGaA and Lonza ramping up facilities, in hopes drugmakers will farm out complex ADC production.

Merck expects the overall ADC market to grow by more than 20% in coming years, boosting its business, which includes manufacturing of monoclonal antibodies, linkers and cytotoxic agents.

Rival Lonza, which helps make Roche's two ADCs and sees annual 9% growth for the socalled bioconjugates market, is investing millions of dollars in its Swiss site, where it produces ADCs for other drugmakers.

"What we see over time at Lonza

AstraZeneca aims to do just that.

In March, the Cambridge, England-based drugmaker struck a $7 billion deal with Japan's Daiichi Sankyo for rights to Enhertu, getting $1.35 billion upfront, and more if it challenges Roche drugs' dominance in breast cancer.

Some industry analysts see Enhertu sales eventually reaching up to $7 billion annually.

"Our plan is to expand the number of studies in different tumour types," said Gilles Gallant, head of oncology R&D at Daiichi Sankyo. "This agent has potential."

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HEALTH

Study finds Google system could improve breast cancer detection

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Google artificial intelligence system proved as good as expert radiologists at detecting which women had breast cancer based on screening mammograms and showed promise at reducing errors, researchers in the United States and Britain reported.

breast cancer, which affects one in eight women globally.

The study, published in the journal Nature, is the latest to show that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to improve the accuracy of screening for

The findings of the study, developed with Alphabet Inc's DeepMind AI unit, which merged with Google Health in September, represent a major

Radiologists miss about 20% of breast cancers in mammograms, the American Cancer Society says, and half of all women who get the screenings over a 10year period have a false positive result.

advance in the potential for the early detection of breast cancer, Mozziyar Etemadi, one of its co-authors from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said.

The team, which included researchers at Imperial College London and Britain's National Health Service, trained the system to identify breast cancers on tens of thousands of mammograms.

They then compared the system's performance with the actual results from a set of 25,856 mammograms in the United Kingdom and 3,097 from the United States.

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HEALTH tests are done every three years, and each is read by two radiologists. When they disagree, a third is consulted.

'SUBTLE CUES' In a separate test, the group pitted the AI system against six radiologists and found it outperformed them at accurately detecting breast cancers.

Connie Lehman, chief of the breast imaging department at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital, said the results are in line with findings from several groups using AI to improve cancer detection in mammograms, including her own work.

The notion of using computers to improve cancer diagnostics is decades old, and computeraided detection (CAD) systems are commonplace in mammography clinics, yet CAD programs have not improved performance in clinical practice.

The issue, Lehman said, is that current CAD programs were trained to identify things human radiologists can see, whereas with AI, computers learn to spot cancers based on the actual results of thousands of mammograms.

This has the potential to "exceed human capacity to identify subtle cues that the human eye and brain aren't able to perceive," Lehman added.

Although computers have not been "super helpful" so far, "what we've shown at least in tens of thousands of mammograms is the tool can actually make a very wellinformed decision," Etemadi said.

The study showed the AI system could identify cancers with a similar degree of accuracy to expert radiologists, while reducing the number of false positive results by 5.7% in the U.S.-based group and by 1.2% in the British-based group.

It also cut the number of false negatives, where tests are wrongly classified as normal, by 9.4% in the U.S. group, and by 2.7% in the British group.

These differences reflect the ways in which mammograms are read. In the United States, only one radiologist reads the results and the tests are done every one to two years. In Britain, the

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The study has some limitations.

Most of the tests were done using the same type of imaging equipment, and the U.S. group contained a lot of patients with confirmed breast cancers.

Crucially, the team has yet to show the tool improves patient care, said Dr Lisa Watanabe, chief medical officer of CureMetrix, whose AI mammogram program won U.S. approval last year.

"AI software is only helpful if it actually moves the dial for the radiologist," she said.

Etemadi agreed that those studies are needed, as is regulatory approval, a process that could take several years.

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HEALTH

Polish bird flu outbreak spreads, with four more cases

Inspectorate said in a statement.

60,000 birds are expected to be gassed in Lubelskie region, regional veterinary officer Pawel Piotrowski told. 40,000 have already died as a result of the flu, he added.

He said around 100,000 birds could be affected in Lubelskie and there was a big risk of the virus spreading in the area as there were a lot of poultry farms close together.

"The area has been secured against people coming in who shouldn't be there... we are focussing on cleaning the enclosures where birds have been affected," he said.

Local authorities said in a statement that the virus was a subtype of highly pathogenic H5N8 bird flu that can also pose risks to humans.

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our more outbreaks of bird flu have been reported across Poland, authorities said, bringing the total number of incidents in Europe's largest poultry producer to six this week.

An outbreak of the H5N8 strain was also confirmed on a chicken farm in Przygodzice, in the western Wielkopolskie region, Poland's General Veterinary

Piotrowski said that while a danger to humans could not be completely ruled out, the risk of the infection was much lower than for birds for whom it can be deadly.

Outbreaks were confirmed in Wolka Orlowska and Olchowiec Kolonia, both in the Lubelskie region of Poland, a spokesman for the governor of the Lubelskie region said on Twitter.

Another outbreak of the H5N8 strain reported was in the eastern Lubelskie region at a farm about 500 metres from where two cases in turkeys were confirmed this week.

Until then Poland had not had an outbreak of bird flu since 2017.

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SPORTS

No place like home for 2021 U.S. Solheim Cup captain Hurst time in Solheim Cup competition and have only lost once on American soil.

"Anytime you play on home soil you feel like you have the advantage," Hurst said in a conference call, vividly recalling the finish at Gleneagles.

"Before closing ceremonies we all huddled up and Juli, one of her speeches said how proud she was of the team and that there is a disappointment but nothing to be ashamed about.

"They (Europe) played great. There's nothing you can do about it. She (Matthew) did an awesome job."

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ix-times LPGA Tour winner Pat Hurst is the 2021 United States Solheim Cup captain and thinks home advantage should help her team avenge last year's surprise defeat

by Europe.

Hurst played in five Solheim Cups and was an assistant captain to Juli Inkster on the past three teams in the biennial event that uses the same matchplay format as the men's Ryder Cup.

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Hurst was on hand at Gleneagles, Scotland four months ago when Catriona Matthew-led Europe clinched a nail-biting 14.5-13.5 victory that came down to the final putt.

Matthew is returning as European captain next year, and Hurst is ready to turn the tables on her counterpart when they face off at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio from Sept. 4-6.

The U.S. lead Europe 10-6 all-

Hurst is determined to do likewise, and her passion for the event is evident in a blog on the LPGA website.

"No cheers in women's golf match the Solheim Cup. Nothing makes your hair stand up or causes tingles to run down your arms like the drama and intensity of those three days," Hurst wrote.

"Now that I’ve been blessed with this great honour and awesome responsibility, I'm giving it all I've got."

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SPORTS

Engraving error leaves Team GB bobsledders waiting for 2014 medals

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ix years after Great Britain's bobsledders competed at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the team members have yet to get their official bronze medals after they had to return the first ones they got because they were inscribed with errors.

Team GB finished fifth in Sochi but were moved up to third in March last year after two Russian teams that finished ahead of them were disqualified for doping offences. Denied their chance to get medals on

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an Olympic podium, the British team were officially presented with their medals at a ceremony but they soon realised they read "bobsleigh 4-men event" instead of 'Bobsleigh four-man event'.

most prized possessions of any Olympic athlete, when it came to it, the IOC still couldn't get it right," he said, referring to the International Olympic Committee.

"Receiving the medal nearly six years after the medal ceremony in 2014 was a relief," Team GB pilot John Jackson told BBC Sport.

The United States team, upgraded to second, were forced to return their silver medals because they read "Four-man's bobsleigh".

"To then realise there was a typo on (them) just summed up the whole farcical situation we had been through. "After all of the waiting for one of the

While the U.S. team has received new silver medals from the IOC, the British team is expected to get theirs later this month.

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