The New York Times - Your Friday Briefing

By Melina Delkic

Writer, Briefings

Good morning. We’re covering Australia’s refusal to cut carbon emissions and the rise in Covid cases and deaths in Britain.

Why Australia won’t commit to slashing emissions

Australia is the world’s third-largest exporter of fossil fuels and one of the last holdouts among developed nations to commit to net zero emissions by 2050.

With just days to go before a major U.N. climate conference opens in Scotland, Australia has refused to strengthen its 2030 target or make plans for transitioning away from fossil fuel production.

Coal mines and gas fields are still being opened and approved. Tax breaks for the fossil fuel industry last year alone were worth more than what Australia spends on its army.

“The government and the opposition are captured by the coal and gas industries,” said Adam Bandt, the leader of the Australian Greens and a member of Parliament from Melbourne. “It’s a version of a petro-state.”

Growing backlash: Polls show that a strong majority of Australians want climate action even if the costs are significant, and want the government to stop approving new coal mines. Several states, including New South Wales, have committed to net zero emissions by 2050.

COP26: Prime Minister Scott Morrison only recently agreed to attend the climate summit after criticism from Queen Elizabeth II and a crowd-funded billboard in Times Square that mocked his reluctance to address climate change, calling him “Coal-o-phile Dundee.”

Related: U.S. intelligence and defense agencies issued reports warning that the warming planet will increase strife between countries and spur migration.

Virus surge tests Britain’s Covid strategy

For the last four months, Britain has run a grand epidemiological experiment, lifting virtually all coronavirus restrictions, even in the face of a high daily rate of infections.

The rapid rollout of vaccines, leaders said, allowed the freewheeling approach to be safe.

But that theory is being put to the test. Cases, hospital admissions and deaths are up, and the effect of vaccines is beginning to wear off. More vaccinated people seem to be getting infected, a shift from a few weeks ago, when schoolchildren made up the bulk of cases.

“Everything is hitting us at once,” said Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiology professor at King’s College London. The sudden resurgence is a rude jolt for a country that believed it had put the worst of the pandemic behind it.

Details: New cases surpassed 50,000 on Thursday, an 18 percent increase over the last week. The number of people admitted to hospitals rose 15.4 percent over the same period, reaching 959, while 115 people died of Covid-19, an increase of almost 11 percent.

Government response: Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that “the numbers of infections are high but we are within the parameters of what the predictions were,” adding, “We are sticking with our plan.”

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

In other developments:

• India’s vaccine campaign reached a billion doses administered, marking a turnaround after early stumbles.
• Canada is rolling out a national vaccine passport that will be required for travel.

Women in China face barriers in schools

Women are trying to crack traditionally male-dominated professions such as civil aviation, but they are quickly finding out that schools stand in their way.

Across China, women’s education levels have soared; female undergraduates now sharply outnumber males. But women still face significant barriers getting into training and academic programs. Some programs accept only men or cap the number of female applicants, and women often have to test higher than their male counterparts to be accepted.

Growing feminism in China has clashed with the Communist Party’s campaign for social control. Activists have been censored online when bringing up gender bias.

“I don’t understand why they don’t even offer those academic opportunities to us,” said Vincy Li, who spent a year studying for police academy exams. Only 4 percent of women got in, and they had to score far better than male applicants.

Details: Civil aviation-related study programs often specify that they seek male applicants only, except for flight-attendant training. Military and police training academies publicly impose gender quotas. Some art schools have imposed 50/50 gender ratios to curtail the growing share of female students.

THE LATEST NEWS

• South Korea launched its first homemade rocket — a mission that was only partly successful but that officials called an important step toward ​placing satellites in orbit to monitor threats from North Korea.
• Boston Celtics games were pulled from the internet in China after a basketball player called the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, a “brutal dictator” on social media.
• New Zealand’s chief coroner said that she had begun a fresh investigation into the attack on two Christchurch mosques in 2019, citing unanswered questions.
• President Biden’s choice to be U.S. ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, told senators that he sees the post as a bulwark against China.

• When 98 women were sworn in this week to serve on Egypt’s highest administrative court, the moment was celebrated. But for many Egyptian women, it was the exception that proved the rule.
• More than 160 reports from U.S. asylum officers that were obtained by Human Rights Watch revealed details of mistreatment by border officials.
• For more than a century, Indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend residential schools, where many endured abuse. We followed a team of archaeologists who came to the Muskowekwan First Nation to search for the graves of these lost children.
• The U.S. House of Representatives voted on Thursday to find Stephen Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for stonewalling the investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Over the past decade, the waters around Cape Cod have become host to one of the densest seasonal concentrations of adult white sharks in the world. The annual returns are a sign of a recovering ecosystem. But the sharks’ summer residency in New England overlaps with tourist season. This puts large numbers of people in close contact with a megapredator and has upended assumptions about using the water.

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ARTS AND IDEAS

125 years of covering literary greats

The Times has been publishing its Book Review as a stand-alone supplement since 1896. Our editors celebrated with a look back at the classics we reviewed.

From the archives: James Baldwin reviewed Alex Haley’s “Roots” in 1976, calling it an exploration of “how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one.” James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was dubbed the “most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the 20th century.” And Reynolds Price saw in Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” evidence for “the possibility of transcendence within human life.”

An early interview with Gore Vidal explored his self perception and view on goodness (it “may be beside the point”); and in a 1985 conversation with the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, she reflected on the release of her first novel while she was living in exile.

Take a journey through the history of the coverage and its predecessors and peek at our first best-seller lists.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

This recipe for meskouta, Moroccan orange cake, is featured in our desserts that require no mixer. Enjoy it with your coffee in the morning or your amaro in the evening.

These protest songs recommended by the Opinion columnist Tom Morello. The Industrial Workers of the World, he argues, virtually invented the protest song.

Need to have a conversation in a language you don’t know, make sense of a printed sign or quickly translate a message? Use these free translation apps.

Readers wrote in to our Education Briefing newsletter to share their favorite children’s books for all ages.

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Turn on the waterworks (three letters).

And here is today’s Spelling Bee.

You can find all our puzzles here.

That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — Melina

P.S. “Call and Response: The Story of Black Lives Matter” is a visual book by Times journalists for young readers. Here’s how it came together.

The latest episode of “The Daily” is about police union practices.

You can reach Melina and the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

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