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China on Tuesday voiced support for Cuba at a UN General Assembly debate on the decades-long US economic, commercial and financial embargo against the Caribbean country, saying the measures have caused serious hardship for the Cuban people and should be brought to an end.

The General Assembly voted earlier on Tuesday to proceed with the debate by 136 votes in favor, nine against and 30 abstentions, despite opposition from the United States.

Speaking at the debate, Fu Cong, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, said China supported the convening of the meeting and voted in favor of holding it. The 136 votes in favor "fully demonstrated the aspiration of the international community and the call for justice", he said.

The debate, convened at the request of Cuba, focused on "the necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba". The General Assembly last held its regular annual debate on the issue on Oct 28 and 29.

Fu said the United States has, for more than 60 years, imposed an economic blockade and unilateral sanctions on Cuba, "causing enormous suffering to the Cuban state and people".

"Cuba has suffered accumulated losses of more than $170 billion as a result of the blockade, while hospitals, schools, water supply systems, grain storage facilities and other infrastructure related to people's livelihood have come under severe pressure," he said.

Cuba is facing serious fuel shortages, a worsening electricity and energy crisis, and continued obstruction in the supply of medicines, medical equipment and other essential goods, with vulnerable groups such as children and pregnant women bearing a heavy impact, Fu said.

Cuba, which depends heavily on fuel imports, has received only one oil tanker in the past six months, the Russian vessel Anatoly Kolodkin, carrying about 100,000 metric tons of crude oil, Xinhua News Agency reported. The country needs about eight fuel tankers a month to maintain normal operations.

"Such acts violate the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including sovereign equality, the peaceful settlement of international disputes and the prohibition of the use or threat of force," Fu said.

They also "infringe upon the Cuban people's rights to subsistence and development, and undermine the international order based on international law and the basic norms governing international relations", he said.

"China urges the United States to stop its blockade against Cuba and all forms of coercive pressure, and to stop infringing upon the Cuban people's rights to subsistence and development," Fu said.

Fu called on the international community to support Cuba in safeguarding sovereignty, equality and national dignity, and to jointly resist illegal blockades, sanctions and military threats.

He said countries should uphold the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, adhere to sovereign equality, oppose interference in internal affairs, adhere to the peaceful settlement of disputes and oppose the use of force.m

Fu also called for opposition to all illegal unilateral sanctions, saying unilateral sanctions without authorization from the UN Security Council "have no basis in international law and damage the sovereignty and security of other countries".

"The international community should safeguard the Cuban people's rights to subsistence and development, and urge relevant countries to implement General Assembly resolutions, immediately terminate all kinds of sanctions and secondary sanctions against Cuba, refrain from frequently threatening sanctions, and protect the Cuban people's right to pursue a better life," Fu said.

Fu said international fairness and justice concern the survival and development of all countries. In the face of hegemonism and power politics, no country can remain immune, he said.

"No country can appoint itself as an international policeman, nor can any country style itself as an international judge," Fu said.

"The Chinese people empathize with the suffering of the Cuban people and China will, as always, provide Cuba with support and assistance within its capacity," Fu said.

He called on countries and UN agencies to step up humanitarian assistance to Cuba, help address shortages of fuel, food and medicines, ease the crisis facing the Cuban people and safeguard the bottom line of international humanitarianism.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla welcomed the Assembly's decision to hold the debate, saying Cuba rejects the claim that it represents a threat to the United States and condemns Washington's policy of hostility and aggression.

"Cuba is not a threat. Cuba is the nation that is under threat," said Parrilla, noting Cuba's commitment to "peace, international law, multilateralism, truth and justice".

Speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 and China, Laura Dupuy Lasserre, Uruguay's permanent representative to the UN, said the embargo "affects all the critical sectors of the Cuban economy, including public health, nutrition and agriculture, as well as trade, investment, tourism and banking".

Balendra Shah has 4.7 million Facebook followers, a James Bond video game on his phone, and almost no interest in explaining himself to anyone. One hundred days in, Nepal is still trying to figure out the person running the country.

KATHMANDU – On the morning of May 11, Prime Minister Balendra Shah arrived at the federal parliament building wearing his now-familiar uniform: a black coat, his signature sunglasses, and a pair of white Goldstar sneakers. He handed President Ramchandra Paudel a folder containing his government’s first policies and programmes — the roadmap by which his administration would be judged. Then, forty-five minutes into the President’s address to a joint session of federal parliament, the Prime Minister got up and left.

He did not leave the building. Shah walked into a chamber set up for the prime minister inside the parliament complex, and he stayed there — while, just beyond the wall, the head of state read out the policies of Shah’s own government to the assembled members of the House of Representives and National Assembly. Shah remained in the chamber, alongside his chief personal secretary, Subash Sharma, for more than half an hour, mostly looking at his phone.

Later that evening, one of his advisers posted on social media that the prime minister left the parliament meeting because he felt uneasy about his health. But minutes later, the post was deleted.

The episode became a hot topic for days, as questions were raised both inside parliament and on social media about why Shah would walk out of a joint session where his own government’s agenda was being presented. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that Shah’s government found itself explaining — or declining to explain — what the prime minister had just done.

[...]

The pattern repeats with his attention. On April 5, when his party’s candidate, DP Aryal, was elected Speaker of the lower house unopposed, ministers and lawmakers rose to offer their congratulations. Shah did not. He stood up and left. This particular incident, however, went largely unnoticed.

On May 31, after weeks of opposition demands that the prime minister submit to the monthly questioning that parliamentary rules require, Shah appeared — and upended the format entirely. He stood, asked the Speaker for time, walked to the rostrum, and announced that MPs had waited long enough. Opposition MPs objected that they had not been given the preparation the rules promised them.

But that was exactly the plan: to surprise everyone. Shah’s advisers had told the Post that, unlike his predecessors, he would not answer pre-submitted questions or rely on prepared notes. Instead, he would go to parliament, stand at the rostrum, invite lawmakers to ask questions on the spot, and surprise them.

When the Post asked Aryal on June 1 whether he had been informed in advance about the prime minister’s question-and-answer session, he responded with a question of his own: “How did it look to you?”

When told that it appeared he hadn’t been informed beforehand, Aryal replied, “You can figure that out yourselves,” declining to answer directly.

Nevertheless, that was his first address to parliament since assuming office, and by then, a narrative was already taking shape that he had an aversion to parliament — or parliamentary proceedings, for that matter. Though largely expected, Shah had conveniently skipped the first meeting of the newly elected parliament on April 2.

[...]

He does not read much, Ben said, but he reads social media constantly — by his aides’ account, three to four hundred comments a day — and has played through Persona 5, the critically acclaimed Japanese role-playing game that follows a group of teenagers who use magical powers to confront corruption and injustice. “One of the reasons why the prime minister is so sharp and intelligent is because he plays the game,” Ben said, appearing genuinely impressed by Shah’s gaming habit.

[...]

Shah, however, did not speak much during the campaign. His speeches at various rallies totalled just 27 minutes — across 40 days and 11,000 kilometers of road. He won anyway, by a significant margin, which told its own story about what Nepali voters were looking for, and what they were willing to accept in its place.

If there is one place Balendra Shah does speak — reliably, frequently, on his own terms — it is on Facebook.

He posts often, and the posts are reposted automatically to his social media accounts. On Saturday, June 6, at 10:15 pm, he posted a single line on Facebook: “I also want to become an ambassador. If anyone has the prime minister’s number, could you please share it?”

It appeared to be a dig at a government secretary who had texted the prime minister, seeking an ambassadorial appointment.

Within hours, his political adviser Asim Shah replied with laughing emojis and “I will tell the PM,” Education Minister and government spokesperson Sasmit Pokharel offered to message him, lawmaker Tika Sangraula joked that she had his number but wouldn’t share it, and another MP Ranju Darshana told him to pick one job or the other.

To Shah’s supporters, this is simply who he is — a head of government willing to be human, to joke around with colleagues in public. To a wide range of critics, including within the Gen Z movement that helped elect him, the timing is the point.

The pattern, as critics have assembled it, runs like this. On April 27, the cabinet abruptly postponed a parliamentary session Shah’s government had itself requested, in order to push through ordinances on the Constitutional Council and cooperative fraud management. As criticism mounted, Shah posted a stylised portrait on Facebook on May 9 — seated with his legs folded in a white linen button-down shirt and beige pinstripe trousers — an image that went viral and spawned a wave of AI-generated imitations across Nepali social media, displacing the ordinance story from public conversation.

A week later, on May 16, with the government under fire over conditions for displaced families in temporary holding centers, Shah posted another photo in the same outfit — this time holding a piece of cheese, captioned “Say cheese, DDC’s cheese,” noting that DDC (Dairy Development Corporation) belongs to the government of Nepal. The post drove a roughly 30 percent jump in demand for yak cheese — the state dairy corporation’s marketing chief Sanjeev Jha told the Post they were receiving calls from supermarkets asking for additional supplies.

Not everyone was smiling. Social activist Sushma Barali wrote that she had just watched a video of a postpartum mother in a displacement centre with no access to proper nutrition for herself or her newborn. “Meanwhile, the head of our government posts playful pictures telling everyone to ‘say cheese’,” she wrote.

Then, on a more recent weekend, after a photo of Shah with two fellow ministers captioned them as “nation builders,” he posted again — this time a photo of himself at a local tea shop.

Critics have a name for the strategy: In an interview with Kantipur, Gen Z activist Amit Urja said Shah understands digital algorithms and knows how to capture public attention. “He is highly skilled at introducing populist themes to ensure that no single political controversy lingers in the public imagination for too long. However, this approach prioritises spectacles over solutions, undermining the rule of law while offering the public temporary entertainment,” he said.

Another youth activist Arnab Chaudhary noted that former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli was once praised for using proverbs and sarcasm to disarm critics. “While humour has its place, we must question when, where, and who is delivering these jokes. The current leadership claims to represent a new political era, yet they employ the exact same tactics to obscure core issues and avoid accountability,” he told Kantipur.

an important distinction is that KP Oli Sharma is actually funny

Shah’s response to all of this criticism appears to be disarmingly plain. “After a week of work, I like fooling around on weekends, this is not a problem,” he posted on Facebook on June 15. “You should be sad on the day I stop fooling around.”

The kind of posts shared by Shah, on its face, is an ordinary thing for anyone to say. The issue is that Shah is not anyone. He is the prime minister of a country of 30 million people who voted for him in record numbers, and who are waiting — many of them increasingly impatiently — to hear how he plans to think about their future. Whether his weekends are his business, in other words, depends a great deal on what happens to the country during his weekdays — and that is precisely the part of his government that remains hardest to see.

If Shah’s personal life is described by those close to him as small and self-contained, his prime ministership has been built the same way.

Since taking office, Shah has effectively imposed what several RSP leaders describe as a moratorium — not formally announced, but understood — on meetings with foreign diplomats, senior bureaucrats, party leaders, lawmakers, security chiefs, business leaders, and journalists. He has met the full diplomatic corps jointly exactly twice, on April 8 and May 25. Both meetings, according to one diplomat present, followed the same choreography: ambassadors introduced themselves, and Shah read a statement prepared in advance by the Foreign Ministry. “He listened to our opinion quietly but did not ask many questions,” said the diplomat, who asked to stay anonymous so they can share details from the meeting.

The format struck at least two diplomats as unusual. Meetings with a new head of government are typically an early priority for embassies — a chance to establish rapport and signal the tenor of a bilateral relationship. Shah’s government has instead handled the diplomatic corps collectively, twice, in sessions that two diplomats described as scripted on both sides. “It is different from what we are used to,” a diplomat from Asia told the Post. “Whether that is by design or simply how this government works, it is too early to say.”

The moratorium has not only been observed by outsiders — it has been enforced. An incident involving Krishna Hari Pushkar is a case in point. According to officials familiar with the matter, when Pushkar on June 5 attempted to reach the prime minister directly by text message seeking an open ambassadorial role, police picked him up from his home later that and took him to the Valley Crime Investigation Office in Teku for questioning, following orders from the Prime Minister’s Office

A day later, Pushkar told the Post that he decided to send the text after his attempts to meet the prime minister had failed. A Home Ministry official said he was detained for reaching out to the prime minister directly, breaching “the chain of command” while seeking personal favors. According to the police, he was released after questioning, as there were insufficient grounds to press any charges against him. The move was criticized by former bureaucrats as an authoritarian overreach with no precedent in the civil service.

The PMO then swiftly transferred him from the Vice President’s Office to the reserve pool.

Bureaucrats have been told to route matters through Chief Secretary Suman Raj Aryal rather than approach the PMO directly, though, officials note, Shah does still summon and meet senior officials privately when he judges it necessary.

The rhythm of government itself has changed. Cabinet meetings, which under previous governments rotated between the PMO in Singha Durbar and the official residence in Baluwatar — and which ran on a fixed Monday-and-Thursday schedule — now happen only in Singha Durbar, on no fixed schedule, and rarely run longer than thirty minutes. The official residence, once jokingly called the “party palace” for the political meetings that filled it, now hosts none of Shah’s government business.

“He hardly interacts and intervenes, but he does not prefer discussion either,” said one minister. “That is why our cabinet meetings are short.”

[...]

RSP leaders privately acknowledged unease over Shah’s tendency to govern from within a tight circle of old friends rather than party structures, though publicly the party has dismissed any suggestion of a gap. “Party matters are sent to the prime minister through chairperson Rabi Lamichhane, while government matters are communicated to the party through the prime minister in the same way,” said Ganesh Parajuli, the RSP’s parliamentary party deputy leader.

But outside the party, observers have begun drawing their own conclusions. Bhaskar Gautam, who teaches international relations and diplomacy at Tribhuvan University, argues that Nepal’s weak political institutions have historically allowed powerful individuals to reshape the state around themselves rather than the other way around — and that Shah is no exception. “The prime minister has resorted to selective actions that reinforce a culture of impunity and fail to uphold the spirit of rule of law,” Gautam said. “He is not focused on institution-building or ensuring the equitable and just distribution of state resources among citizens.” Whether that judgment proves correct will depend largely on what the next hundred days look like — and how much of Shah’s government remains visible enough to assess.

For a prime minister who avoids almost everyone, Shah’s government has moved with unusual speed on paper. Eight ordinances have been issued since March 27. Law Minister Sobita Gautam, who led the drafting effort working out of the PMO, said Shah gave direction on what the ordinances should cover — public procurement law, the Constitutional Council, the removal of political appointees, the abolition of employee trade unions — but left the drafting itself to her team, which included senior secretaries and Sudip Dhakal, the head of the prime minister’s administration.

[...]

His one-way communication with the public remained firmly in place. Twelve weeks into his tenure, Shah was yet to deliver a public address, a point critics continued to cite as both a failure to acknowledge the voters who put him in office and a symptom of a broader communication style they argued was at odds with democratic accountability.

On June 21, he finally spoke, addressing the first general convention of the Rastriya Swatantra Party. It was his first and only public address since assuming office.

He spent much of his speech responding to lingering criticism. On the surface, the address was about party consolidation, governance priorities and political direction. But beneath the structure of a convention speech, it functioned largely as a sequence of replies — and responses often appeared less like acknowledgements of criticism than rejections of the premises behind them.

Earlier in the day, UML leader Pradeep Gyawali had urged the RSP to exercise its mandate with caution, warning that democratic institutions could be weakened if the balance between acceleration and restraint. Comparing state power to a vehicle, he said the brakes matter as much as the engine.

Shah returned to the metaphor almost immediately.

“Such concern may apply to vehicles on local roads,” he said. “But our vehicle is not on a local road, it is on an expressway. We only need brakes once we reach the destination.”