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      Pressure from Trump led to 5G ban, Britain tells Huawei

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      The British government privately told the Chinese technology giant Huawei that it was being banned from Britain’s 5G telecoms network partly for “geopolitical” reasons following huge pressure from President Donald Trump, the Observer has learned.In the days leading up to the controversial announcement on Tuesday last week, intensive discussions were held and confidential communications exchanged between the government and Whitehall officials on one side and Huawei executives on the other.As part of the high-level behind-the-scenes contacts, Huawei was told that geopolitics had played a part, and was given the impression that it was possible the decision could be revisited in future, perhaps if Trump failed to win a second term and the anti-China stance in Washington eased.Senior Huawei executives have gone public since Tuesday’s decision saying that they hope the British government will rethink, apparently encouraged by the results of back-channel contacts.The government’s private admissions are out of kilter with public statements last week by ministers, who said Huawei had been banned because of new security concerns raised by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ.In the Commons, Oliver Dowden, the secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport, said new sanctions forbidding the sale of US-produced components to Huawei – meaning the Chinese company will have to source them from elsewhere – had changed the balance of security risk.“The new US measures restrict Huawei’s ability to produce important products using US technology or software,” he said. “The National Cyber Security Centre has reviewed the consequences of the US’s actions …“The NCSC has now reported to ministers that they have significantly changed their security assessment of Huawei’s presence in the UK 5G network. Given the uncertainty this creates around Huawei’s supply chain, the UK can no longer be confident it will be able to guarantee the security of future Huawei 5G equipment affected by the change in the US foreign direct product rules.” More

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      WHO's Covid-19 inquiry is a shrewd move in a sea of disinformation

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      In the world of epidemiology it’s sometimes said that pandemics are lived forwards and understood backwards.We encounter them head-on, chaotically, trying to fathom the disease in real time even while trying to mitigate its impact. Lessons generally come later as the evidence accumulates.What’s also true is public health, especially on a global scale, is rarely separable from politics. One of the complicating factors of the recently ended outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the country’s long history of conflict and the toxic relationship between central government in Kinshasa and the affected population in the country’s east, which led to deep and sometimes violent distrust.One of the most depressing subtexts of the coronavirus pandemic is how these kinds of conflicts are now being writ large as a range of actors, including western ones, have used the crisis to spread disinformation.The past months have been marked by dodgy dossiers leaked to the media and conspiracy theories, pushed by US officials engaged in a struggle for global influence with Beijing, suggesting that the virus was deliberately cooked up in a Chinese lab. More

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      The Guardian view on Facebook and democracy: real and present danger | Editorial

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      In every political debate since Facebook began to dominate democracy, the company has placed itself on the wrong side of history. The social media firm cannot be reformed from within because its business model profits from hosting bomb-throwing circuses of hate, humbug and hogwash. The platform harvests users’ personal data to algorithmically recommend content but […] More

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      Trump and Johnson aren't replaying the 1930s – but it's just as frightening | George Monbiot

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      Trump and Johnson aren’t replaying the 1930s – but it’s just as frightening George Monbiot It may not be fascism, but in the US and UK rightwing nationalists are reviving classic myths and resentment ‘Trump and Johnson mobilise their base through polarisation, culture wars, promiscuous lying, the fabrication of enemies and rhetoric of betrayal.’ Photograph: […] More

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      The Observer view on the need to know the extent of the Russian threat to Britain | Observer editorial

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      The Observer view on the need to know the extent of the Russian threat to Britain Observer editorial A slew of allegations about destabilisation campaigns must not be brushed aside According to a US briefing, agents attached to Russia’s military intelligence agency offered bounties to Taliban-linked extremists for killing American and British troops Photograph: Andrew […] More

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      The US and China are entering a new cold war. Where does that leave the rest of us? | Timothy Garton Ash

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      Let’s be honest: there is a new cold war between China and the United States. The coronavirus crisis has only heightened the antagonism. There are few, if any, countries in Africa or Latin America where the two superpowers do not loom large as rivals. When Chinese and Indian soldiers clash with brutal hand-to-hand fighting on […] More

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      'I was leaving a shop and security stopped me. I was four': young protesters on why they are marching against racism

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      ‘I was leaving a shop and security stopped me. I was four’: young protesters on why they are marching against racism Natasha, 21, creative writing and drama student and Aima, 18, student and co-organiser of LDNBLM Composite: Anselm Ebulue/Anselm Ebulue / The Guardian The UK’s Black Lives Matter protests have been spearheaded by a new […] More