World
Four dead, three missing in Australia storms
Sydney:At least four people have died and three remain missing due to the massive storm that hit Australia’s east coast.
The waves and a massive king tide have eroded 50 metres of beach along a key stretch of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, according to the University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) Water Research Laboratory, risking a number of multi-million dollar waterfront properties falling into the sea.
While most of the damage occurred on Saturday and Sunday nights, Australia’s weather bureau has forecast another “king tide” on Tuesday night, potentially causing more erosion to the coastline as wave heights continue to remain high, Xinhua reported.
“The threat of coastal erosion continues to ease as wave heights gradually reduce along the coast. There remains a low-level threat of some residual erosion, given the forecast tides being at or near the highest of the year,” Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said.
Local residents were anxious as the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) said on Tuesday that those properties were unlikely to be insured given most policies do not cover “actions of the sea” which include king tides and coastal erosion.
At least 93 per cent of all new home insurance policies purchased in Australia include cover for flooding (under the standard definition), but neither actions of the sea nor the effects of gradual sea level rise are considered to be flooding for insurance purposes, ICA spokesman Campbell Fuller said.
The ICA said insurers have received more than 11,150 claims worth an estimated 38 million Australian dollars from the storms, however it’s expected that the figure will rise over the coming days.
Many residents and government authorities have known the present situation on Sydney’s northern beaches may rise as the area is the most “at-risk” to coastal erosion along the New South Wales state coast, leading coastal management experts have told the media.
“It has been a risk for more than 100 years and essentially nothing has been done,” University of Sydney professor of geoscience Andrew Short said.
Though the number east coast lows that caused the damage along Australia’s east coast are expected to fall by 25 per cent due to human-induced climate change, the intensity of the storms, and resulting damage, however will rise, climate experts have said.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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