John Hayward - Page 122

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday celebrated “Islam’s view” of women and praised Iranian women “martyred, handicapped, or imprisoned” while fighting his regime’s wars as the “summit of glory.”

Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said on Monday that legislative elections, already postponed for a year by the coronavirus pandemic, could be delayed again while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “reforms” the island’s electoral system to ensure only Communist loyalists can hold public office in the future.

Women of the oppressed Uyghur minority demonstrated at the Chinese consulates in Kazakhstan and Turkey on Monday, International Women’s Day, to call attention to the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal campaigns of “re-education” and ethnic cleansing against their families.

A string of huge explosions ripped through a military base in the Equatorial Guinea city of Bata on Monday, killing up to 20 people and causing over 600 injuries. According to President Teodoro Obiang, the explosions were caused by “negligent handling of dynamite.”

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) annual legislative meeting this weekend will take action against the “unregulated expansion of capital,” according to Premier Li Kequiang, signaling another regulatory beating to teach outspoken tech billionaires who is truly in charge of the Chinese economy.

China’s state-run Global Times reported on Friday that the Communist government plans to increase carbon emissions for at least nine more years.

Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against anti-government protesters Thursday comparing them to child sex traffickers and suicide cultists because they supposedly use the Internet to exploit young people.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling noted Wednesday that while China makes all sorts of grandiose promises about reaching “net zero” carbon emissions by 2060, it was the only major economic power in the world that increased pollution in 2020.

China began its largest annual political meeting Thursday, an event known as the “Two Sessions” that assembles some 5,000 members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elite to work out an agenda for the coming year.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Thursday morning reported the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) is scrapping the interim report from a team of investigators who visited Wuhan, China, in early February, under pressure from scientists who said the Chinese government withheld too much data from the investigating team, necessitating a new and more exhaustive investigation into the origins of the coronavirus.

Freedom House on Wednesday released the 2021 edition of its annual Freedom in the World report, charting an alarming “deterioration of democracy” around the world in 2020.

Top Chinese political adviser Tan Jianfeng on Tuesday called for the establishment of a national “data bank” of biometric data, including facial and fingerprint recognition data, to protect Chinese “national security” and “information security.”

A jihadist group of Balochis, an oppressed and impoverished minority in Iran, claimed responsibility on Tuesday for an attack that reportedly killed at least five members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and took three others prisoner.

The BBC on Tuesday reported on a “high-level Chinese study,” meant for top Chinese Communist Party officials only but accidentally leaked online, that outlined a plan to crush the Uyghur people of Xinjiang province by dispersing their population across China’s vast land mass, making it difficult for them to raise families and pass along their traditions.

China’s effort to promote its coronavirus vaccines is not quite an “all hands on deck” effort, because one set of hands is notably missing: dictator Xi Jinping, who has evidently not been vaccinated himself and is putting very little personal effort into convincing his skeptical subjects to trust Chinese vaccine products.

A 38-year-old Chinese blogger named Qiu Ziming who writes under the name “Labixiaoqiu” on the social media platform Weibo was forced to broadcast a humiliating video apology on Tuesday for daring to question Beijing’s official narrative of the clash between Chinese and Indian soldiers in the Himalayas last June.

China’s state-run Global Times on Monday defended the prosecution of 47 pro-democracy activists and politicians in Hong Kong against a rising tide of global criticism, insisting the Hong Kong defendants are no different than the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, so China is equally justified in cracking down on them.

Vice President Kembo Mohadi of Zimbabwe resigned Monday after a month of media exposes that purportedly caught him soliciting sex from married women, including an intelligence officer who was one of his subordinates.

The government of Japan on Monday asked China to stop using anal swab coronavirus tests on Japanese citizens, a practice to which the U.S. has also objected.

China’s state-run Global Times bragged Sunday that Chinese companies are making a fortune selling syringes and needles to the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, a tidal wave of imports that makes a mockery of “the U.S. government’s attempt to get rid of the Chinese supply chain.”

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC), a professional association for journalists from over 40 nations working in Beijing, released a report Monday that said the Chinese government is using the coronavirus pandemic as “yet another way to control journalists.”

Turkey summoned Iranian Ambassador Mohammed Farazmand in Ankara on Sunday to complain about Iran’s criticism of Turkish military operations in Iraq. The complaint concerned demands by another Iranian ambassador, Iraj Masjedi in Baghdad, for Turkey to suspend operations and remove all of its forces from Iraqi territory.

Internet security firm Cyfirma reported Monday that hackers linked to the Chinese government are attacking the computer systems of two major Indian pharmaceutical companies involved in producing vaccines for the Wuhan coronavirus.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) cited Chinese court documents on Thursday to tell the story of Zhang Wenfang, a resident of Hubei province thrown in prison for six months last April because she wrote social media posts that included coronavirus information the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wished to suppress.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Thursday that no final decision has been made about boycotting the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over China’s human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province.

A pair of pro-Kremlin humorists who call themselves “Vovan and Lexus” on Thursday tricked top Amnesty International (AI) managers into admitting they “undermined” captive Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, and seriously damaged their own credibility, by stripping Navalny of his “prisoner of conscience” status this week after an intense pressure campaign orchestrated by Russian media operatives.

A non-governmental organization called South China Sea Chronicle Initiative (SCSCI) published satellite photos on Wednesday that show China building a surface-to-air missile base near the Vietnamese border.

Chinese state media continued its efforts to deflect criticism of human rights abuses against the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province on Wednesday, as the state-run Xinhua news service wrote a furious editorial denouncing all accounts of oppression against the Uyghurs as a “string of lies” fabricated by “anti-China forces in the West.”

Voice of America News (VOA) reported on Wednesday the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is targeting a new Muslim community for persecution, much like the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province: a much smaller group called the Utsuls who live primarily on the tropical resort island of Hainan.

The Afghanistan Ministry of Defense (MoD) announced the U.S. Army presented it with “combat equipment,” including 640 military vehicles, in a Wednesday ceremony.

An unnamed U.S. State Department official said Wednesday that Chinese officials required an unspecified number of American diplomatic personnel to submit to anal testing for Chinese coronavirus. The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Thursday denied any such testing had occurred.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran reportedly opened fire on protesters in the city of Saravan on Monday, killing and injuring an unconfirmed number of people.

Chinese state media lashed out at the Canadian government on Tuesday, threatening “serious consequences” for the Canadian parliament’s non-binding resolution to declare China’s abuse of the Uyghur Muslims as “genocide.”

Social media platform Twitter announced on Tuesday it has banned 373 accounts linked to the governments of Russia, Iran, and Armenia for violating various policies and “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.”

Amnesty International (AI) said Wednesday that it would remove “prisoner of conscience” status from Russian dissident and prisoner Alexei Navalny after deeming some of his past comments “hate speech” or advocacy of violence.

The South Korean Foreign Ministry announced on Tuesday that $7 billion in Iranian assets, frozen in two South Korean banks due to U.S. sanctions since September 2019, would be released to Iran following “consultations” with the Biden administration.