PARIS (AP) - France will not join a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, President Emmanuel Macron said on Thursday, calling such a move “insignificant”. Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, meanwhile, said Paris was still seeking a common EU stance on the issue. “To be clear: You either have a complete boycott, and not send athletes, or you try to change things with useful actions,” Macron said at a news conference Thursday, adding that he was “in favor of action that has a useful outcome”.

***
CANBERRA (Dispatches) - Australia is to scrap its fleet of 47 Taipan multipurpose military helicopters and replace them with U.S. Lockheed Martin-designed Black Hawks at a cost of $4.8 billion. The decision to replace the European-designed helicopters, first reported by The Australian newspaper, was confirmed by Canberra on Friday. “The Taipans weren’t meeting their marks. Simple as that,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said during a press conference. “And we want to make sure that our defense forces have the best possible equipment to defend this country, and the Black Hawks will provide that.”

***
LONDON (Dispatches) – The UK’s controversial Nationality and Borders bill passed through the House of Commons this week, prompting outrage from citizens, politicians and activists who fear its potentially dangerous effect on ethnic minorities. Clause 9 of the bill is of particular concern as it will allow the government to deprive a person of citizenship without having to notify them. This can be done if officials either do not have the subject’s contact details or if doing so is not “reasonably practical”.

***
BERLIN (Reuters) - German Chancellor Olaf Scholz skirted a question on Friday about differences between Germany and France regarding whether nuclear power should be labeled sustainable and said it was up to every country to choose how to fight climate change. “Each country pursues its own strategy to fight man-made climate change. What unites us is that we recognize that responsibility and are ambitious,” he said at a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on his first trip abroad as German chancellor.

***
SAO PAULO (Dispatches) -The websites of Brazil’s Health Ministry and the ConectaSUS platform, which centralizes vaccination data and other health information for Brazilians, were taken down by hackers in the early hours of Friday. Both platforms were still down as of Friday noon in Brazil after the attack. Early in the morning, when trying to access the ministry website, users only saw a black screen with a message which read “The internal data of the systems were copied and deleted. Up to 50 Tb of data is in our hands. Contact us if you want the data back,” followed by an email address and a link to a Telegram channel.