Magaphone

As trade war goes on, a sport war has just begun. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV announced Tuesday it will no longer air two NBA preseason games set to be played in the country. The decision was prompted by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s remarks in Japan following a tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey last week that supported anti-government demonstrations in Hong Kong. “We’re strongly dissatisfied and oppose Adam Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right to freedom of expression,” CCTV said. “We believe that any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability are not within the scope of freedom of speech.” Silver said in an interview with Kyodo News on Monday that the NBA supports Morey. The league released a statement on the controversy accepting that Morey's remark might have "deeply offended" some fans in China, and stressing that the Rockets GM "does not represent the Rockets or the NBA." As t...

India's prime minister Narendra Modi said Wednesday the country's villages now all have access to toilets. At the same time the government announced another ambitious campaign aimed at eliminating single-use plastics within three years. Nearly 600 million people have been given access to toilets with more than 110 million toilets built since his government came to power in 2014, Narendra Modi said in a speech to thousands of villagers in his western home state of Gujarat, commemorating the 150th anniversary of independence leader Mohandas Gandhi's birth. He said that “today the world is amazed by this success of ours and they are rewarding us.” More than 60% of India's 1.3 billion people live in more than 600,000 villages. Poor villagers who can't afford to build toilets in their homes chose open fields, forests, ditches and other open spaces for defecation. After becoming India's prime minister in 2014, Modi promised to make India a...