The US House of Representatives China committee plans to hold a Taiwan war game with financial and business executives in New York on Monday, in an effort to raise awareness about the risks attached to Americans investing in China.

Mike Gallagher, the Republican head of the panel, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, its top Democrat, will lead the delegation, according to a person close to the committee.

The war-game participants include representatives from investment banks, in addition to current and former executives from pharmaceutical companies and retired four-star US military officers. The committee declined to name the financial executives who will participate.

The bipartisan delegation will also meet other financial executives in New York, as the committee steps up its scrutiny of how American investment in China could undermine US national security. On Tuesday they have scheduled a hearing that will include testimony from former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission Jay Clayton and Jim Chanos, the hedge fund short seller.

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US House panel plans Taiwan war game with Wall Street executives https://t.co/6majRMqQAH

— Financial Times (@FT) September 8, 2023

Nyamut Gai lost everything four years ago when armed militias stormed through her village in South Sudan, a landlocked African country tormented by civil war, famine and flooding.

Desperate, she and her family fled almost 600 miles north across the border to Sudan, where she worked as a cleaner in the capital, Khartoum, and began to settle in. But then, a fierce war broke out in Sudan in mid-April between rival factions of the military, sending her packing yet again.

As she and her family made the weekslong journey by foot and bus from Khartoum, her 1-month-old son began coughing and withering away from hunger, and soon died. When she finally crossed the border into South Sudan, any sense of relief she felt was shattered when her 3-year-old son succumbed to measles.

“We are not safe anywhere,” Ms. Gai, 28, said on a recent morning at a muddy and congested aid center in Renk, a town in South Sudan.

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Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese fled a grisly civil war years ago to settle in Sudan. With war now raging in Sudan, they are streaming home to a country ill-prepared to take them back. https://t.co/0u0yV1Hu22

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) September 7, 2023

What is new in The Times‘s “story”, however, is the particularly high level of pessimism among my colleagues. Declining numbers, churches closing, exhaustion at trying to hold things together… But I greet that “news” with something of a shrug. The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Because, if it is true that there is a God, then none of this really matters at all. Unpopularity doesn’t make the creeds false just as (another huge mistake) popularity doesn’t make them true.

But a nervous church leadership doesn’t like the ebb to happen on their watch. And so, spooked by these dismal stories of decline, they seek a very secular model of success. Borrowing their thinking from management consultants trying to revive ailing companies like Wilko and Pizza Hut, the leadership focuses on what the customer wants, sets sales targets, closes down underused outlets, and re-energises the sales team for greater, more frenetic activity. But the more we run around like headless chickens, the more desperate, and less attractive we look. Inevitably, the job becomes impossible and the workers in the vineyard become drained of motivation. As The Times reveals, a third of clergy have considered quitting in the past five years. This, then, is what’s new about the Church of England’s current death spiral. “All of the church’s problems stem from the clergy’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” as Pascal almost wrote.

The latest, and most ridiculous of these corporate reinventions of the Church is the idea that the clergy no longer has to work on Sundays – because other people are busy on that day. One deanery in Cornwall will have 23 churches, and only two full-time clergy. One of these “will work primarily in the community, looking for exciting opportunities to grow churches for people who have never been to church,” the area dean bubbled enthusiastically. He went on: “I’ve heard it has come as a bit of a shock that she won’t be working regularly on Sunday mornings.” But this is just another example of the “exciting opportunities” that await us as the Church is dismantled from within by those who are supposed to be protecting it.

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When will our Church leaders stop behaving like deranged management consultants? | @giles_fraser https://t.co/Ria1E3znw2

— UnHerd (@unherd) August 31, 2023

Two years ago, Bishop Richard Frith started visiting the diocese of Winchester, shortly before his appointment as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Episcopal Commissary. The term that he uses to describe the people he met is “shell-shocked”.

In September 2021, the month of the first visits, just two months had passed since the resignation of the Bishop of Winchester, Dr Tim Dakin (News, 23 July 2021). He had “stepped back” in the previous May (News, 20 May 2021), after the threat of a vote of no confidence in the diocesan synod. The motion referred to “allegations of poor behaviour and mistreatment on his part of a number of individuals”, and described the governance and financial management of the diocese as “unfit for purpose”.

“It was pretty unknown for such a thing to have happened,” Bishop Frith recalls. “What on earth was going to happen next? There was a lot of uncertainty.”

These were, indeed, unprecedented events. More than 40 members of the diocesan synod had supported the motion, while one of Dr Dakin’s appointed suffragans, the Bishop of Basingstoke, the Rt Revd David Williams, had presented concerns to Lambeth Palace and the Bishop of London.

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Two years on from Bishop Tim Dakin’s resignation & with a new Bishop appointed I’ve got a long read in todays paper about the diocese of Winchester. As one person put it, there are many stories to be told https://t.co/ZSspWN8XGh

— Madeleine Davies (@MadsDavies) September 8, 2023

Father in heaven, by whose grace the virgin mother of thy incarnate Son was blessed in bearing him, but still more blessed in keeping thy word: Grant us who honor the exaltation of her lowliness to follow the example of her devotion to thy will; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

8 Sept: feast of the Nativity of the BVM

Study for a painting of the Birth of the Virgin Mary Alessandro Casolani, c. 1584 (British Museum)

Smiley baby. pic.twitter.com/MGENnex0q1

— John McCafferty (@jdmccafferty) September 8, 2023

O God, who hast commanded us to walk in the Spirit and not to fulfill the lusts of the flesh: Perfect us, we pray thee, in love, that we may conquer our natural selfishness and give ourselves to others. Fill our hearts with thy joy, and garrison them with thy peace; make us longsuffering and gentle, and thus subdue our hasty and angry tempers; give us faithfulness, meekness and self-control; that so crucifying the flesh with its affections and lusts, we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit to thy praise and glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Happy Friday! 📸🏛🚐 Golden hour at St. Thomas Becket, Romney Marsh, Kent. pic.twitter.com/pD5l4cGWVY

— Andy Marshall 📸 (@fotofacade) September 8, 2023

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and get gain”; whereas you do not know about tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and we shall do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

–James 4:13-17

Windermere wander 💕🥾#LakeDistrict pic.twitter.com/r0IEzktzRZ

— Claudine (@BreenClaudine1) September 8, 2023