World News

China’s economy shakes off Covid legacy to grow 4.5% in Q1

Published

1 year ago

April 18, 2023

Hong Kong
CNN
—

China’s economy got off to a solid start in 2023, as consumers went on a spending spree after three years of strict pandemic restrictions ended.

Gross domestic product grew by 4.5% in the first quarter from a year ago, according to the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday. That beat the estimate of 4% growth from a Reuters poll of economists.

But private investment barely budged and youth unemployment surged to the second highest level on record, indicating the country’s private sector employers are still wary about longer term prospects.

Consumption posted the strongest rebound. Retail sales jumped 10.6% in March from a year earlier, the highest level of growth since June 2021. In the January to March months, retail sales grew 5.8%, mainly lifted by a surge in revenue from the catering service industry.

“The combination of a steady uptick in consumer confidence as well as the still-incomplete release of pent-up demand suggest to us that the consumer-led recovery still has room to run,” said Louise Loo, China lead economist for Oxford Economics.

Industrial production also showed a steady increase. It was up 3.9% in March, compared with 2.4% in the January-to-February period. (China usually combines its economic data for January and February to account for the impact of the Lunar New Year holiday.)

Commuters during Beijing's morning rush hour in April 2023

Last year, GDP expanded by just 3%, badly missing the official growth target of “around 5.5%,” as Beijing’s approach to stamping out the coronavirus wreaked havoc on supply chains and hammered consumer spending.

After mass street protests gripped the country and local governments ran out of cash to pay huge Covid bills, authorities finally scrapped the zero-Covid policy in December. Following a brief period of disruption due to a Covid surge, the economy has started showing signs of recovery.

Last month, an official gauge of non-manufacturing activity jumped to its highest level in more than a decade, suggesting the country’s crucial services sector was benefiting from a resurgence in consumer spending after the end of pandemic restrictions.

As the economic recovery gains traction, investment banks and international organizations have upgraded China’s growth forecasts for this year. In its World Economic Outlook released last week, the International Monetary Fund said China is “rebounding strongly” following the reopening of its economy. The country’s GDP will grow 5.2% this year and 5.1% in 2024, it predicted.

However, some analysts believe the strong growth reported in the first quarter was the product of “backloading” of economic activity from the fourth quarter of 2022, which was weighed down by pandemic restrictions and then a chaotic reopening.

“Our core view is that China’s economy is deflationary,” said Raymond Yeung, chief economist for Greater China at ANZ Research, in a Tuesday research report.

If adjustments are made to account for the impact of delayed economic activity, GDP growth in the first quarter could have been just 2.6%, he said.

Some key data released on Tuesday support this idea. For example, private investment was extremely weak.

Fixed asset investment by the private sector increased a mere 0.6% from January to March, indicating a lack of confidence among entrepreneurs. (State-led investment, meanwhile, advanced 10%.) That’s even worse than the 0.8% growth recorded in the January-to-February period.

The Chinese government has resorted to surprising measures to restore confidence among private entrepreneurs, but the campaign has inspired more nervousness than optimism.

The all-important property industry is also mired in a deep downturn. Investment in property declined 5.8% in the first quarter. Property sales by floor area decreased by 1.8%.

“The domestic economy is recovering well, but the constraints of insufficient demand are still obvious,” said Fu Linghui, a spokesman for the NBS, at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “Prices of industrial products are still falling, and enterprises are facing many difficulties in their profitability.”

Unemployment continued to surge among the youth.

The jobless rate for 16- to 24-year-olds hit 19.6% in March, up for a third straight month. It was the second highest on record, only behind the 19.9% level reached in July 2022.

The high jobless rate among the youth suggests “slack in the economy,” Yeung said.

“By June, there will be a new batch of graduates looking for jobs. The jobless condition could worsen further if China’s economic momentum falters,” he added.

China’s education ministry has previously estimated that a record 11.6 million college graduates will be looking for jobs this year.

At last month’s meeting of the National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber-stamp parliament, the government set a cautious growth plan for this year, with a GDP target of around 5% and a job creation target of 12 million.

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Texas Braces for Hurricane Beryl as Tropical Storm Enters Gulf

Published

1 hour ago

July 7, 2024

The New York Times

Evacuation orders and hurricane warnings and watches were in place for parts of Texas on Sunday as Tropical Storm Beryl approached the state’s shores on the Gulf of Mexico after flattening islands and killing at least 12 people in Grenada, Jamaica and Venezuela days earlier.

The storm made landfall on Friday in Mexico as a Category 2 hurricane. Beryl, which then weakened to a tropical storm, was expected to become a hurricane before reaching the Texas coast as soon as late Sunday.

Hurricane warnings were in effect for the Texas coast, from Baffin Bay, about 40 miles south of Corpus Christi, north toward Sargent, about 160 miles up the shoreline from the bay.

On Saturday afternoon, the Office of Emergency Management for Refugio County, Texas, a shoreline area with a population of about 6,600, issued a mandatory evacuation order. Port Aransas, a city about 20 miles east of Corpus Christi, ordered visitors to leave.

Dan Patrick, who is serving as acting governor of Texas while Gov. Greg Abbott travels abroad, on Saturday added 81 counties to the state’s Hurricane Beryl Disaster Declaration, bringing the total number of counties under the declaration to 121.

The declaration, which enables state resources to assist in local preparation and recovery efforts, is commonly made after an extreme event but can be made if a disaster is imminent.

The storm has left destruction in its wake.

Forecasters predicted that Beryl would hit Mexico twice. It crossed the Yucatán Peninsula on Friday, and then, after traversing the Gulf of Mexico over the weekend, it was expected to reach the coast of the northern state of Tamaulipas, where a hurricane watch was in effect.

Michael Brennan, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said Saturday that when the hurricane makes landfall in Texas it could bring storm surge of up to five feet above ground level off the Gulf of Mexico in Matagorda Bay, where Matagorda County officials issued a voluntary evacuation order late on Friday.

A sea wall built in 1903 would do little to protect Galveston Island from sea surge, Judge Mark Henry, Galveston County’s top executive, said on Saturday.

“That’s the only protection at this moment, and it’s obviously not much,” he said. “We’re anticipating some potential coastal flooding, and there’s not a lot we can do to stop it or prepare for it, we just have to respond to it as it happens.”

Farther south, officials in the Rio Grande Valley and Corpus Christi were distributing thousands of sandbags to help people prepare for potential flooding.

In Mexico, no injuries, deaths or major flooding had been reported as of Friday evening, Laura Velázquez Alzúa, Mexico’s coordinator of civil protection, said at a news conference.

The storm had dumped six to 10 inches of rain in Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán by early Friday, bringing wind gusts as high as 135 m.p.h. In Quintana Roo, power had been restored to most areas on Saturday after outages affected 20 percent of the population.

Earlier in the week, at least 12 people were killed as the storm lashed parts of Grenada, Venezuela, then Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.

Beryl made landfall on Monday in Grenada, where officials said about 98 percent of the buildings on Carriacou and Petite Martinique, home to 9,000 to 10,000 people in total, had been damaged or destroyed, including Carriacou’s main health facility.

Beryl killed three people and destroyed 400 homes in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro said at a news conference on Thursday. The storm left flooded towns, homes engulfed in landslides and damaged schools and bridges, he said at another news conference.

In Jamaica, the storm was the strongest to approach the island in over a decade. About 40 percent of the customers of the country’s main power provider were without electricity on Saturday, the company said.

This hurricane season is expected to be busy.

Forecasters have warned that the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season could be much more active than usual.

In late May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted 17 to 25 named storms this year, an “above-normal” number and a prediction in line with more than a dozen forecasts earlier in the year from experts at universities, private companies and government agencies. Hurricane seasons produce 14 named storms, on average.

Derrick Bryson Taylor, Kenton X. Chance, Johnny Diaz, Daphne Ewing-Chow, Sharefil Gaillard, Julius Gittens, Christine Hauser, Ricardo Hernández Ruiz, Mike Ives, Jesus Jiménez, Jovan Johnson, John Keefe, Emmett Lindner, Orlando Mayorquín, Claire Moses, Derek M. Norman, Aimee Ortiz, Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, Edgar Sandoval, Emily Schmall, Linda Straker, Remy Tumin, John Yoon and Yan Zhuang contributed reporting.

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Holly Jackson: ‘Obviously, I love murder

Published

7 hours ago

July 7, 2024

Shola Lee

Holly’s debut novel A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has been turned into a series for the BBC

Holly Jackson Holly Jackson against a grey background — Holly’s debut novel A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has been turned into a series for the BBC

Bestselling author Holly Jackson shares her secrets for plotting a modern murder mystery – and explains how true crime has influenced her.

For the author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, the process of writing a whodunnit is as meticulous as investigating a crime.

“I am obsessive about it,” she says. “I don’t quite have a ‘murder board’ because it’s not on the wall, but it is on the floor.”

Each scene in one of Holly’s books corresponds to an index card, which is then carefully placed into columns for each act in the story. The author admits this “does rather take over the room”.

While this is great for planning a storyline, Holly says opening her office door a “bit too ferociously” can literally blow her plot out of place.

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder follows plucky heroine Pip Fitz-Amobi as she investigates a closed murder case. Pip soon finds a co-detective in Ravi Singh, whose brother was implicated in the crime.

Each clue, twist and turn in the story has been thoroughly discussed by Holly’s fans on TikTok; the hashtag for A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder – #agggtm – has more than 58,000 posts.

And the story has now been turned into a BBC drama by lead writer Poppy Cogan, with Holly serving as executive producer.

The Guardian called the series a “very modern Nancy Drew,” with fans on TikTok praising the show, stitching their reactions with clips from the new series.

The BBC spoke to Holly about the process of writing her hit novel. “Obviously, I love murder,” she says, “fictional murder.”

‘I need true crime in my ears’

Holly, 31, from Buckinghamshire, published her debut in 2019. She won a British Book Award the following year and has sold millions of copies around the world.

While her fiction fits into the young adult category, Holly does not shy away from heavier topics, like crime. Her first novel, for example, follows the disappearance and apparent murder of a school girl.

And Holly says true crime content – like the podcast Serial – became a “very useful” tool when writing A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. The structure of the book feels like a podcast, Holly says, adding: “We have transcripts of dialogue the whole time.”

In the sequel to Holly’s first book – called Good Girl, Bad Blood – Pip even creates a true crime podcast herself.

And Holly says this research tool soon seeped into her real-life. “I can’t really do anything without a true crime podcast,” she says. “If I’m walking the dog or washing the dishes, I need true crime in my ears.”

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In the last ten years, true crime series have won international acclaim: Serial won a Peabody Award in 2015 and In The Dark – a long-form investigative journalism series – became the first podcast to win a George Polk Award in 2019. And, according to The New York Times, Serial has had more 705m downloads.

Even Holly is curious why crime is such a popular source of entertainment.

“Especially with young women,” she wonders, “is that like, an instinct in us that’s trying to protect ourselves?”

Georgia Hardstark is the co-host of My Favorite Murder, a US podcast that looks into historic and modern cases, with one episode covering the Dancing Plague of 1518 and the Paper Bag Killer.

For Georgia, part of the reason she is so interested in true crime is that it helps her feel less “paranoid” and validates her anxieties about life, she explains.

“That is at the forefront of my mind, constantly, you know, ‘What’s around the next corner? Are my doors locked?'”

‘I know who the murderer is’

For Holly, the line between fact and fiction is clearly drawn: unlike true crime cases, she always knows “the ending before I even write the first sentence”.

“I knew from the get-go who the murderer was going to be, this whole setup,” she says. “The slightly more complicated thing is not working out the mystery – it’s working out how Pip is going to solve the mystery.”

In A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, for example, Pip uses her Extended Project Qualification – an accreditation where a student independently researches a given topic – to interview suspects and keep track of clues for the case.

The story centres on Pip Fitz-Amobi (played by Emma Myers, left) who investigates a closed murder case with the help of Ravi Singh (Zain Iqbal, right)

BBC/Moonage/Sally Mais From left to right Emma Myers, Holly Jackson and Zain Iqbal gathered for a script read through of the TV series — The story centres on Pip Fitz-Amobi (played by Emma Myers, left) who investigates a closed murder case with the help of Ravi Singh (Zain Iqbal, right)

While Holly uses true crime as a “jumping off” point for research, she notes the content, often used as a source of entertainment, is “obviously, about real life people’s trauma”.

Jessica Jarlvi – a “Scandi-noir” writer and lecturer on the University of Cambridge’s Crime and Thriller Writing course – says things like true crime podcasts risk sensationalising these events.

“It just puts me off,” she says, “whereas in fiction, you don’t have to worry about that.”

In Georgia’s view, however, ignoring real-life crime – often with women victims – “is to sweep it under the rug”.

‘I don’t have passive readers’

Modern crime readers are “becoming more and more demanding”, Jessica adds.

Holly agrees: “I don’t have those passive readers, I have the really active ones who are looking to solve the mystery.”

On TikTok, fans of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder share videos with their predictions and suspect lists as they read along with the book.

In one video, a reader guides people on how to annotate the book to keep track, colour co-ordinating sections into “clues” and “conflicts”.

“It makes me have to up my game a bit more,” Holly says.

Wondering how to watch A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder? You can stream the series on BBC iPlayer.

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World News

For sale: A piece of California’s country music history

Published

8 hours ago

July 6, 2024

Melody Gutierrez

The famed Buck Owens Crystal Palace, where music legends including Willie Nelson, Dwight Yoakam, Garth Brooks and a young Taylor Swift have played, is up for sale, with the foundation that runs the Bakersfield venue planning to list it for $7 million on Monday.

The nightclub, museum and steakhouse was owned by its namesake Buck Owens, the country music trailblazer who bucked the slick commercial melodies of Nashville for a distinctly West Coast twang. Owens opened the Crystal Palace in 1996, watching it become a premier venue for the biggest names in country music, including himself. Buck and the Buckaroos played there every Friday and Saturday night until his death in 2006.

Jim Shaw, a member of the Buckaroos and a director of the Buck Owens Private Foundation, said that after 28 years of running the famed venue, the Owens family plans to step back and find new owners amid a challenging business climate. The foundation said in a statement that “since Buck’s passing in 2006, we’ve tried to maintain the excellence that he expected, even as it became more and more difficult during these challenging times of increasing food and labor costs.”

The venue is not closing and scheduled events will continue as planned, Shaw said.

“It’s business as usual for now,” Shaw said. “Ideally, someone who wants to keep it exactly as it is will come forward.”

Owens’ youngest son, Johnny Owens, wrote on Facebook that the family’s hope “is that a buyer steps forward with a vision for the future and a reverence” for his father and the Bakersfield Sound.

The Crystal Palace, located on Buck Owens Boulevard, is a major tourism staple for Bakersfield. The 18,000-square-foot venue is next to the city’s downtown entrance.

“It’s the No. 1 tourist attraction in Bakersfield,” Shaw said. “There are people stepping forward and we are waiting to see what happens. I am getting a lot of phone calls. I’m anxious to see what happens.”

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