News Headlines - 19 May 2021

▽Pelosi calls for U.S. and world leaders to boycott China's 2022 Olympics | Reuters

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday called for a U.S. diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, criticizing China for human rights abuses and saying global leaders who attend would lose their moral authority.

▽As census numbers puzzle, China upgrades birth data by 1m per year - Nikkei Asia

A week after releasing its 2020 census, China has begun revising demographic data for most of the preceding decade upward, raising concerns about the integrity of its statistics in the face of a looming population decline.
The government is adjusting the birth data for 2011 to 2019, which was based on a sample of about 0.1% of the total population. This comes on the heels of suspicion over how the 2020 head count of children greatly exceeded the total number of babies reported born in the years prior.
The National Bureau of Statistics is working to revise such numbers as the total population, births and the urbanization rate for 2011 to 2019, spokesperson Fu Linghui told a news conference Monday. The number of births will go up by about 1 million per year on average, he said -- the equivalent of a 6% increase for the entire nine-year period.

▽4 arrested over forged names on petition in Aichi recall bid : The Asahi Shimbun

Police arrested four people on May 19 in connection to a mass-forgery scandal stemming from a petition to recall Aichi Governor Hideaki Omura.
Aichi prefectural police arrested Takahiro Tanaka and three others on suspicion of violating the Local Autonomy Law by forging the names of residents in a campaign to oust the governor. The law forbids even signing petitions on behalf of family members who may be temporarily away.
Tanaka, 59, a former Aichi prefectural assembly member, headed the secretariat in charge of gathering the signatures for the recall. Police also arrested Tanaka’s wife, Naomi, 58, his second son, Masato, 28, and Michiyo Watanabe, 54, who worked in the secretariat.

▽Myanmar activists say more than 800 killed by security forces since coup : The Asahi Shimbun

More than 800 people have been killed by Myanmar's security forces since a wave of protests broke out across the country after the military seized power in a coup in February, an activist group said... As of Monday, 802 people had been killed in the junta's crackdown on its opponents, according to the activist group the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.

▽Lost village emerges from Italian lake - BBC News

Repair works at a reservoir in Italy have revealed the remains of a village that had been submerged for decades.
Lake Resia, in the north of the country, is best known for the church steeple emerging from its icy waters... But with the lake temporarily drained, locals have been able to see the final traces of Curon, a village once home to hundreds before it was flooded to create a hydroelectric plant in 1950.
Lake Resia - or Reschensee as it is known in German - lies in South Tyrol, the Alpine region that borders Austria and Switzerland.