As Countries Seek Trade With China, Imprisoned Uyghur Community Has Become “Collateral Damage ”

Published on May 7, 2019
China’s top trade negotiator is traveling to Washington this week as tension over trade intensifies between the two nations. President Trump is threatening to impose a 25 percent tariff on nearly all Chinese imports after the U.S. accused China of backtracking on trade commitments. Talks are expected to resume on Thursday, but the Trump administration is facing criticism for refusing to address China’s human rights record as part of the negotiations. The United Nations and a number of human rights groups have accused the Chinese government of setting up massive camps in the far-west Xinjiang province to hold an unknown number of ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslims. Estimates of the population of the camps range from hundreds of thousands to more than a million. China says the camps have been built as re-education and training centers and are needed to combat extremism in the region. The New York Times reports the Trump administration has shelved proposed targeted sanctions over the mass detentions out of fear it could derail a potential trade deal. Last week, Human Rights Watch revealed new details about how China is carrying out mass surveillance in Xinjiang in part thanks to a mobile app that lets authorities monitor the Muslim population. We speak with Human Rights Watch’s China director Sophie Richardson and Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur-American activist and founder of Campaign for Uyghurs.

Re-education Camps, Infiltration, Surveillance: China Criticized over Persecution of Uyghur Muslims

Published on Dec 6, 2018
https://democracynow.org – The United Nations and human rights groups have accused China’s government of setting up massive anti-Muslim “re-education” camps in the northwest Xinjiang province to disappear, jail and brainwash Uyghur Muslims. Some estimates put the population in the camps at up to 2 million. After months of denials, China acknowledged their existence in October, saying they are part of efforts to counter extremism. But Uyghurs say it’s a form of collective punishment—and that they live under a high-tech surveillance state designed to eradicate Islam. We speak to Rushan Abbas, a Uyghur-American activist based in Washington, D.C. After she spoke out against China’s repression of the Uyghurs earlier this year, her aunt and sister disappeared and have not been heard from since.

How China is crushing the Uighurs | The Economist

Published on Jul 9, 2019
China’s Muslim Uighurs face systematic oppression from their own government. Their home province of Xinjiang has been turned into a police state—an estimated one million of them are detained in camps where they are brainwashed. How and why are China’s leaders doing this?

How the Uyghur people in China are being surveilled

Published on Jul 27, 2019
Chinese officials have been accused of surveilling and purposely separating Uyghur-Muslim families in the western region of Xinjiang. Uyghur citizens are subject to predictive policing, facial recognition software, data mining and home visits by Chinese officials in what Adrian Zenz, an independent researcher, characterizes as “a war against any competing ideology.” We spoke with Zenz, who did the research for a BBC report detailing the rushed construction of boarding schools for children who are separated from their parents, and Uyghur-American activist Rushan Abbas, founder and director of the Campaign for Uyghurs. “This is an unprecedented interment campaign in Xinjiang, worse than ever in the history of China, and this is the largest incarceration of a particular ethnic minority since the Holocaust,” says Zenz.

Businesses fight back over Amazon forest fires

Published on Sep 11, 2019
As the Amazon rain forest continues to burn the full impact of the devastation is still unclear. Experts said some areas could take centuries to fully recover. And then’s there’s the economic impact.

Judges rule suspension of Parliament is unlawful – BBC News

Published on Sep 11, 2019
MPs have demanded the immediate recall of Parliament following a landmark ruling by Scotland’s highest civil court. The Court of Session in Edinburgh ruled that the UK Prime Minister’s decision to suspend the Westminster Parliament for 5 weeks was unlawful. They said they were unanimous in their belief that Boris Johnson had been motivated by the ‘improper purpose of stymying Parliament’. The case now goes to the UK Supreme Court next week. Downing Street said it was disappointed by the ruling and that the prorogation of Parliament had been ‘legal and necessary’. We also report on the government’s publication of no-deal Brexit planning documents, the Labour Party’s Brexit divisions and the latest Brexit Party rally. Presented by Huw Edwards at Westminster with reports by Laura Kuenssberg, Clive Coleman, Sarah Smith, John Pienaar, Alex Forsyth and Faisal Islam. Produced for the BBC News at Ten

NASA Earth Mission Montage

Published on Sep 11, 2019
This is a roughly two-minute montage of recent NASA Earth missions and instruments (such as OCO-3, GRACE Follow-On, Oceans Melting Greenland and CORAL), from their construction and launch to their data products and scientists in the field. These campaigns study carbon, Earth’s gravity field, the ocean-ice interface in Greenland, and coral reef health.

Chaos is being normalised. It is all part of Boris Johnson’s pernicious plan | Paul Mason | Opinion | The Guardian

Paul Mason   @paulmasonnews

Wed 11 Sep 2019 08.17 EDT Last modified on Wed 11 Sep 2019 08.52 EDT

To expedite his power grab, the prime minister has brought darkness to our democracy and to our streets. We must resist

‘The aim of Boris Johnson is to create a darkest hour in which, though he created the darkness, he eventually gets to switch on the lights.’ Photograph: Toby Melville/AFP/Getty Images

On Saturday, for the first time in living memory, neo-fascists were chanting the name of the serving prime minister. Supporters of the English Defence League and the Democratic Football Lads Alliance wandered around Whitehall some drunk, harassing random remain protesters and shouting into the faces of journalists until, inevitably, they attacked the police.

It’s part of an unnerving trend that’s emerged in the past two weeks: the normalisation of chaos.

We have a parliament suspended against its will. We have ministers threatening to break the law. We have allegations that a network of advisers inside Whitehall are using encrypted messaging to circumvent legal scrutiny. And we have briefings to selected journalists that the government might suspend the rule of law by invoking the Emergency Powers Act.

Yet at the end of the headlines there is always the weather and the same jokey riff between a presenter and a hapless BBC political correspondent. Nine out of 10 stories on the front pages of news sites remain focused on dating, food fads and the antics of minor royals.

Nothing in this bleak and blurry picture is happening by accident. Listen to the reported promises of Dominic Cummings: he will “wreck” the Labour party conference; he will “purge” the Tory rebels; he will “smash” Jeremy Corbyn and he reportedly does not care if Northern Ireland “falls into the sea”.

Every time the government is thwarted by MPs it simply ups the ante: between now and the European council meeting in October, it will stage one calculated outrage after another.

One of the most dangerous factors in this situation is the incomprehension of Britain’s technocratic elites. At Eton they might ask pupils to write the imaginary speech they would give while leading a military coup, but on the philosophy, politics and economics course at Oxford, it is generally assumed you are heading for a career in the governance of a stable democracy.

Few are prepared to address the material roots and class dynamics of this crisis, because nobody taught them to do so. But they are clear.

In Britain, as in the US, the business elite has fractured into two groups: one wants to defend the multilateral global order and globalised free trade; another desires to break the system. Here, as with Trump, that group includes the fracking bosses, the tax-dodging private equity bosses and the speculative ends of property and high finance.

…(read more).

Adapt Our World – Caribbean

WorldResourcesInst

Published on Sep 11, 2019

Li Ganjie, Minister of Ecology and Environment, China

WorldResourcesInst

Published on Sep 11, 2019