Your Monday Briefing: Russia’s Pre-Holiday Push

Good morning. We’re masking Russia’s nationalist vacation, Hong Kong’s new chief and a Taliban decree focusing on girls.

Lee, the highest architect of the crackdown on Hong Kong’s antigovernment protests in 2019, plans to push by way of legal guidelines on treason, secession, sedition and subversion, and to root out critics within the civil service. He inherits a metropolis that has been tamed and cowed: Sweeping nationwide safety legal guidelines imposed two years in the past have quashed dissent, gutted the free press and put critics behind bars or despatched them into exile.

He can even face a metropolis embattled by a few of the world’s hardest pandemic restrictions. The economic system is shrinking, unemployment is rising and rising numbers of individuals are leaving town, imperiling its standing as a world monetary heart.

Context: Beijing has at all times let it’s identified who it needs within the prime job, although extra subtly previously. This time, China eliminated any veneer of competitors and successfully neutered the pro-democracy camp with new electoral guidelines and the nationwide safety regulation.

Quotable: “Even in Iran, there may be extra of a contest for the pinnacle of presidency,” one knowledgeable stated.

New restrictions on Afghan girls

The Taliban decreed on Saturday that ladies ought to cowl themselves from head to toe in public. The transfer expands a collection of onerous Taliban restrictions on girls that dictate practically each side of public life, together with their employment, schooling, journey and deportment.

A burqa is the popular garment, however the Ministry for the Promotion of Advantage and Prevention of Vice — which changed the earlier authorities’s Ministry of Girls’s Affairs — didn’t mandate burqas so long as girls in any other case cowl themselves with a hijab.

Failure to take action may lead to a jail sentence for the male head of the girl’s household. The comparatively few girls nonetheless permitted to carry jobs could possibly be fired if they don’t adjust to the decree.

Historical past: The Taliban required the burqa, which leaves solely a girl’s fingers and toes seen and features a stitched facial netting for imaginative and prescient, when it dominated most of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

Eid: For a lot of Afghans, the top of Ramadan confirmed the dissonance between the promise of peace many had imagined and the realities of the top of the warfare.

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Louis Faidherbe, a French basic, helped form Senegal’s former capital — and in addition led brutal navy campaigns in West Africa. Now, town is split over what to do with a bronze statue of him that has stood in a central sq. for greater than a century.

The King, down beneath

Elvis Presley by no means performed a live performance in Australia, however that hasn’t stopped tens of hundreds of individuals from celebrating his life and work at an annual pageant a few five-hour drive from Sydney.

For practically 30 years, “Elvi” — the plural of Elvis, at the very least on the largest Elvis pageant within the Southern Hemisphere — have blurred the road between followers and impersonators. This 12 months, after a pandemic hiatus, there have been extra pompadours and leisure fits than anybody can rely: About 25,000 individuals often come to rejoice.

“It lets us overlook every part,” stated Gina Vicar, 61, a small-business proprietor from Melbourne who had come to the pageant with a dozen associates. “With all that we’ve gone by way of, and what the world goes by way of now, it’s nice to see all this pleasure.”

There are performances and rhinestones, gold-rimmed sun shades and pa bods. “The pageant has turn into a nationwide treasure that exemplifies how Australians are likely to do quite a lot of issues: all collectively, with self-deprecating humor and copious quantities of alcohol,” writes Damien Cave, our Sydney bureau chief.

Learn Damien’s private account of the journey to the pageant, right here.

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