For women and girls in Afghanistan, there is a ban from secondary school classrooms, and much of public life, by the Taliban.

But a few young women could flee the country, and are now enjoying freedom and education in the West.

The United Nations has called for a "full investigation" into the killing of a US-Turkish woman in the occupied West Bank during a protest on Friday.

Local media reported that Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot dead by Israeli forces as she took part in a weekly protest against Jewish settlement expansion in the town of Beita near Nablus.

Israel's military said it was "looking into reports that a foreign national was killed as a result of shots fired in the area".

[...]

Dr Fouad Nafaa, head of Rafidia Hospital where Ms Eygi was admitted, confirmed that a US citizen in her mid-20s had died from a "gunshot in the head".

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken deplored the "tragic loss", while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan branded the Israeli action "barbaric".

Turkey's foreign ministry said Ms Eygi had been "killed by Israeli occupation soldiers in the city of Nablus".

Before travelling to the Middle East, Ms Eygi had recently graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Archived version

Thirteen UN human rights experts have made public their concerns about the construction of the Kamtok hydroelectric dam on the Drichu River, commonly known as Yangtze, in Tibet, warning of “dire and irreversible environmental and climate impacts” and “irreversible destruction of important cultural and religious sites” should it go ahead.

The Kamtok dam came to widespread attention in February 2024, when large public protests in eastern Tibet against the dam were broken up by police. Tibetans in Dege and Jomda counties have long opposed the dam, because it would displace Tibetan communities, destroy cultural heritage, and cause severe environmental damage.

[...]

According to the experts, the dam threatens not only Tibet’s fragile biodiversity but also contributes to worsening climate change, as large-scale hydroelectric dams are known to increase greenhouse gas emissions and exacerbate natural disasters like landslides and floods.

[...]

Local Tibetans have expressed opposition to the Kamtok dam since plans were first proposed in 2012. The February 2024 protests were notable for their scale and for the number of images and videos of them, both of which are rare in occupied Tibet due to the intense levels of surveillance and security. Several hundred Tibetans were arrested and detained for opposing the dam’s construction.

[...]

The UN experts expressed numerous concerns over this response to the peaceful protests, noting “the widespread crackdown” on Tibetan individuals peacefully expressing their opposition to the construction of the Kamtok dam as well as China’s use of force, arbitrary arrests, and detentions against Tibetans simply exercising their “legitimate” human rights. “These incidents underscore the alarming reality for people living in Tibet, who have faced similar allegations and consequences, for exercising their fundamental rights,” said UN experts.

[...]

The Kamtok dam project, developed by a subsidiary of the state-owned enterprise China Huadian Corporation [...] is part of a broader strategy to export hydropower from Tibet to eastern China.

Yet UN experts state that the relocation of Tibetans from these lands will “adversely [impact] their rights to development and self-determination, to maintain their ways of life, to land and housing, to access and enjoy heritage, to exercise their religious and cultural practices, and their right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.”

Their statement spotlights the lack of free, prior, and informed consent from affected Tibetan communities, as well as China’s failure to provide for meaningful consultation about their forced displacement. There are also no indications that any environmental impact assessment that specifically considered the Kamtok project was ever conducted.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595100

Archived link.

Despite increasingly repressive efforts to prevent free expression under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), dissent in China occurs regularly. Issue 8 of the China Dissent Monitor (CDM), released last week, marked two years of Freedom House’s efforts to monitor these protests. With 6,400 events logged, CDM’s second anniversary is a good occasion to reflect on what we’ve learned about who is protesting in China, what it looks like, where it’s happening, and how often. Here are eight key takeaways.

Dissident occurs regularly, and economic issues play a major role.

Documenting nearly 6,400 dissent events over two years.

• CDM logged 805 dissent events in the second quarter of 2024, a 18 percent increase over the same period in 2023. The majority of events are labor (44 percent) and homeowner (21 percent) protests, with the remainder involving diverse groups like rural residents, students, parents, investors, consumers, members of religious groups, activists, Tibetans, ethnic Mongolians, and members of the LGBT+ community.

• The top regions for protest events were Guangdong (13 percent), followed by Shandong, Hebei, Henan, and Zhejiang. CDM has logged a total of 6,300 cases of dissent since data collection began in June 2022.

• Land grabs and corruption in rural China. CDM documented 228 protests led by rural residents over the past two years, most of which were linked to forced relocation and unfair land acquisition. These cases shed light on the corruption and discontent that arises from widespread land expropriation.

• Over 2,800 protests linked to the struggling property sector. Dissent by homeowners and construction workers constitute 44 percent of all dissent cases in CDM’s database, reflecting the major impact of the real estate crisis on citizens’ livelihoods. Despite central government attempts to abate the sector’s collapse, CDM data indicates that protest frequency has not declined.

Here is the full China Dissent Monitor -- (archived)

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595222

Archived link

Japan vowed to bolster military ties with Australia during a high-ranking visit on Sept 5, with Tokyo’s top diplomat saying the “like-minded” partners must stick together to combat shared regional threats.

Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa and Defence Minister Minoru Kihara met their Australian counterparts at an old army fort outside Melbourne, striking deals on greater air force cooperation and expanded military exercises.

They also agreed to jointly help the Philippine Coast Guard, which is locked in an escalating tussle with Chinese ships in the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2595155

Archived link

Russian companies have been able to purchase spare parts for outdated microchip-making machines produced by Dutch tech giant ASML through Chinese intermediaries since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Dutch daily Trouw reported Wednesday, citing Russian customs data.

Small Russian importers reportedly obtained these parts at least 170 times between February 2022 and December 2023. Trouw noted that Russian trading firms continued to obtain “countless” spare parts on the secondary market.

The imported parts are suited for ASML machines built from the late 1990s and to the early 2000s, which, according to the report, remain “very useful for chips in everyday devices and weapons.”

Although tools from that era are not considered “dual use” — or technology with potential military applications — Trouw suggested they could still be used in the production of missiles, drones, tanks and military aircraft.

[...]

The FBI conducted searches at the homes of two of New York City Mayor Eric Adams' closest aides on Thursday, sources familiar with the investigation told ABC News.

The Hamilton Heights home of First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright, who is engaged to Schools Chancellor David Banks, and the Hollis, Queens, home of Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Phil Banks, were searched as part of an ongoing investigation, the sources said.

I hope this means Adams is next.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2563949

Archived link

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

Hong Kong has introduced Xi Jinping Thought as a new addition to the curriculum for some students.

Xi has been the president of the People's Republic of China since 2013.

The new school year began in Hong Kong this week.

The changes come alongside more lessons about national security and pro-Beijing patriotism, as the influence and control of China’s ruling Communist party increases in the semi-autonomous city, The Guardian reported.

The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.

[...]

The new module instils “patriotic education” for all three years of secondary students, and its content is aimed at “cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity”, according to government-issued curriculum guidelines. Third form students are expected to learn about Xi Jinping Thought in a module on “our country’s political structure and participation in international affairs”. The guidelines recommend teachers spend 12 40-minute lessons on the module.

Xi’s personal political philosophy, officially called “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, was enshrined in China’s constitution in 2018. In 2021 it was introduced into mainland Chinese schools. The Xi teachings in the mainland curriculum appear on available information to be far more comprehensive that those introduced to Hong Kong. However it has still sparked alarm among some parents and citizens.

Hong Kong school enrolments have declined sharply in recent years, driven by low birthrates and an exodus of residents and expats in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement and the imposition of tighter, pro-CCP social controls.

China's foreign ministry on Wednesday called on Eswatini, the sole diplomatic ally of Taiwan in Africa, to "recognize the trend" and “make correct decisions.”

Eswatini is the only African country absent from the 2024 Summit of the Forum of China-Africa Cooperation that is being held in Beijing this week.

Joined by representatives from 53 African countries and other regional and international organizations, the summit is expected to adopt an action plan for the two sides to further strengthen cooperation in global governance, security, trade and investment in the next three years.

China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters that is "It is not in Eswatini's interest to develop official diplomatic relations with the Taiwan region."

China has long regarded the self-ruled Taiwan as a reneged province that has no right to establish diplomatic relations with other sovereign states.

At the daily news briefing, Mao said she was unaware of a report that a former New York governor’s aide has been charged with acting as an undisclosed agent of Beijing.

Linda Sun was arrested Tuesday morning along with her husband at their multimillion-dollar home on Long Island, New York.

Prosecutors say Sun blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to high-level officials in New York and shaped New York governmental messaging to align with China's priorities, among other infractions.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2541440

Archived link

On 1 September, independent Chinese news website 'Weiquanwang' revealed that journalist and former lawyer Zhang Zhan is being held in Pudong Detention Center in Shanghai, the NGO Reporters Without Borders reports.

The journalist was apprehended by police while she was travelling to her hometown in the Shaanxi province in northwest China on 28 August. Since that time she has not answered her phone or updated her social media accounts where she had recently resumed posting.

No official reason has been given for her detention, but in the weeks prior to this incident, Zhang Zhan had been sharing news about the harassment of other activists in China on social media. She had also travelled to the northwestern province of Gansu to persuade the mother of a recently arrested activist to sign a power of attorney.

Zhang Zhan was initially arrested in May 2020, while covering the early stages of the Covid 19 outbreak in Wuhan, in central-eastern China. She had posted more than 100 videos on social media before her arrest on 14 May 2020, and seven months later was sentenced to four years in prison by a Shanghai court on the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

[...] During her early months of detention, Zhang Zhan nearly died after going on a total hunger strike to protest her situation. Prison officials forcibly fed her through a nasal tube and sometimes left her handcuffed for days.

China, the world’s biggest prison for journalists and press freedom defenders with at least 120 currently behind bars, is ranked 172nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2024 World Press Freedom Index.

english.elpais.com/internation…

Last October, Palestinian grandmother Ayesha Shtayyeh says a man pointed a gun at her head and told her to leave the place she had called home for 50 years.

She said he armed threat was the culmination of an increasingly violent campaign of harassment and intimidation that began in 2021, after an illegal settler outpost was established close to her home in the occupied West Bank.

The number of these outposts has risen rapidly in recent years. There are currently at least 196 across the West Bank, and 29 were set up last year - more than in any previous year.

The outposts - which can be farms, clusters of houses, or even groups of caravans - often lack defined boundaries and are illegal under both Israeli and international law.

But documents showing that organisations with close ties to the Israeli government have provided money and land used to establish new illegal outposts.

A Russian court sentenced physicist Alexander Shiplyuk to 15 years on treason charges on Tuesday in the latest of several cases against experts working on the science underpinning Russia's development of hypersonic missiles.

Shiplyuk, the 57-year-old director of a top Siberian science institute, was arrested in August 2022. Two of his colleagues, Anatoly Maslov and Valery Zvegintsev, were also detained on suspicion of treason. Maslov, 78, was handed a 14-year sentence in May.

[...]

The trio from the Khristianovich Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) in Novosibirsk are among nearly a dozen scientists researching such technology against whom Russia has brought treason cases in recent years.

Two people familiar with Shiplyuk's case [said] that the ITAM director was suspected of handing over classified material at a scientific conference in China in 2017.

The sources said Shiplyuk maintained his innocence and insisted the information in question wasn't classified and was freely available online.

Several other Russian scientists arrested on treason charges were also accused of betraying secrets to Beijing, according to Russian state media.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2528163

The journalists spoke witih Chinese students in Amsterdam.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2503153

China’s feared Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location (RSDL) system, a form of detention where the detainee is kept in isolation at a secret location for six months before formal arrest, has long come under heavy international criticism.

But in recent months, there have also been growing calls from inside China from legal experts, defence lawyers and in the media to reform or scrap the system following a string of deaths in RSDL.

UN human rights bodies have called out RSDL for being “tantamount to enforced disappearance” and posing “a high risk of torture or ill treatment” to detainees. Safeguard Defenders [an NGO focusing on China] has conducted extensive research into RSDL, focusing on human rights defender detainees, who are often disproportionately targeted.

These mounting calls inside China for RSDL reform come ahead of planned revisions to the country’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), which regulates RSDL.

[...]

RSDL was originally meant as a softer form of detention, a way to prevent filling up detention centres with suspects whose alleged crimes are not that serious and who are not candidates for house arrest because they do not live in the jurisdiction where the investigation is located. In 2012, the law was amended to allow police to use RSDL in cases involving national security (typically human rights defenders), terrorism and major bribery. It’s use under Xi Jinping has rapidly expanded and there is good evidence that it constitutes a crime against humanity.

[...]

Zhao Li, a partner at a Beijing-based law firm called for an end to RSDL in Jiemian News in August, saying that it was a system that allowed torture, illegal evidence collection and prolonged interrogations and interrogations under sleep deprivation.

"There is no way to improve it. As long as this system exists, it will keep being misused,” said Zhao.

[...]

At that forum, Chen Weidong, Executive Vice President of the Chinese Criminal Procedure Law Society and a professor at Renmin University, argued that RSDL was redundant. The majority of crimes committed in China, he said, were minor so that suspects could simply be released on bail. There was no need to send them to RSDL.

[...]

Chen Yongsheng, who was part of the online discussion said RSDL was “unconstitutional, could lead to false convictions, and was a serious violation of human rights”.

Beijing-based lawyer Zhou Ze told the SCMP that the conditions of RSDL made torture more likely because there was no legal requirement to record interrogations (interrogations in detention centres must be filmed) and that the location was secret and outside supervision.

[...]

Custody and Repatriation System

>This is not the first time that a death in custody has caused public outrage in China and calls for it to be abolished.

>Back in 2003, police beat a young migrant worker, Sun Zhigang, to death in southern Guangdong province while he was being held in under an administrative type of detention called Custody and Repatriation. This system enabled police to temporarily hold anyone who did not have the correct paperwork to show they had the right to live and work in that area. The night the police picked up Sun, who was from Hubei province, he had forgotten to carry his ID card.

>The outcry over his death led the government to scrap the system, just months after Sun’s death.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2527018

A former Philippine mayor who was on the run for weeks after being accused of spying for China has been arrested in Indonesia.

Philippine authorities have been pursuing Alice Guo across four countries even since she disappeared in July following an investigation into her alleged criminal activities.

She has been accused of protecting online casinos, which were a front for scam centres and human trafficking syndicates in her sleepy pig farming town, Bamban.

Ms Guo denies the allegations. Philippine officials said they were co-ordinating with their Indonesian counterparts for her return to the Philippines "at the soonest possible time".

She said she grew up on the family farm with her Chinese father and Filipina mother, but MPs who investigated the scam centre operations said her fingerprints matched a Chinese national named Guo Hua Ping and accused her of being a spy who provided cover for criminal gangs.

The dramatic nature of her case, which has since seen her sister arrested and questioned before by the Philippine Senate, sparked fury in the country and drew international attention.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2504389

Dissident Chinese artist Gao Zhen has been detained on suspicion of "insulting revolutionary heroes and martyrs," his brother and artistic partner Gao Qiang has said.

The Gao Brothers are known for their provocative sculptures, which critique the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, and his regime.

Gao Zhen left China two years ago to live permanently in the United States, but had been visiting family when he was taken by authorities in Hebei province, his brother said in a post on Facebook.

Chinese authorities have not responded to the allegations by Gao Qiang, who said about 30 police officers stormed the brothers’ art studio in Sanhe City on 26 August.

[...]

Since the 1980s, the brothers have been drawing international acclaim for works such as Mao’s Guilt, a bronze statue of the former Communist dictator kneeling remorsefully.

[...]

Mao Zedong, often called Chairman Mao, helped found Communist China in 1949 and led it through a tumultuous period in the 1960s and 1970s known as the Cultural Revolution, in which more than a million people are believed to have died.

During this period, the Gao Brothers' father was labelled a class enemy and dragged off to a place that was “not a prison, not a police station, but something else”, where he died, Gao Zhen told The New York Times in 2009.

[...]

Spoofing or insulting China's revolutionary "heroes and martyrs" was made a crime in 2021, as part of a newly amended criminal code, under a campaign by China’s leader, Xi Jinping. It carries a penalty of up to three years' imprisonment.

Archived version

It has been two years since the US Supreme Court blew up federal protection for abortion, handing states the power to enact abortion bans and realising the decades-long fever-dream of anti-rights actors.

Though a minority in the US, these extremists are loud and determined and won’t stop at our borders. Their plans for the future are outlined in Project 2025, which is already being implemented in the US and abroad through anti-abortion and anti-LGBTIQ+ initiatives and would be fully executed if radical conservative forces reclaim the White House.

While political ads have featured Project 2025, no one is talking about the profound global impact of this manifesto. It would revive anti-gender US human rights policy frameworks like the Commission on Unalienable Human Rights and the Geneva Consensus Declaration, favouring anti-rights alliances and networks with other authoritarian regimes. Essentially, this amounts to a gutting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the cornerstone of multilateral engagement for the past 76 years.

[...]

The architects of this agenda would take a transactional and punitive approach to multilateralism, putting at risk the US’s entire $18.1bn contribution to the United Nations. Particularly vulnerable are the US’s $122m contribution to the World Health Organization and $32.5m to the United Nations Population Fund – which aims to improve reproductive and maternal health worldwide – as well as other UN agencies that were targeted by the 2017-2021 administration.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/2497340

Archived link

While the disinformation pieces attempted to stoke people's dissatisfaction with the military drills, some used the opportunity to raise skepticism in the United States.

Videos on Facebook and LINE claimed that "the United States sold expired weapons to Taiwan" and referenced the example of the recent Pingtung military drill in August, in which some firearms provided to Taiwan by Americans failed to strike targets. The TFC determined that the videos were accurate, but the claim was misleading. According to the military, the purpose of this drill was to clear the almost outdated ammunition while training soldiers with less experience. Military specialists also confirmed that the US did not sell unusable weapons to Taiwan.

However, this assertion echoed another piece spread in July, which claimed that "according to US laws, the US can only sell obsolete weapons to Taiwan" because Americans do not want China to get US weapons if Taiwan loses the war. The disinformation that the US provided useless weaponry to Taiwan has once again repeated the theme of skepticism toward the US that has hung over Taiwan in recent years.

Everything is about how great the Chinese military is

The US skepticism narrative also appeared in the disinformation pieces centering on the conflicts between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea. Although in the past months, the US was not directly involved in the confrontations, rumors claimed that China and the US started "an electronic war" over the South China Sea. According to the false claim, the conflict caused a significant disruption to GPS signals in the Northern Philippines. Eventually, China defeated the US in this war, making the US aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt malfunction and escape.

The claim described an event that never happened. However, it has spread rapidly on Chinese social media and websites, as well as among Taiwanese social media users via LINE and Facebook, and has reverberated through Taiwanese news media and talk shows, with the underlying message being that the Chinese military is strong enough to beat the US.

Different stories reiterated the same lessons

Overall, military disinformation was very active this summer. While some disinformation pieces capitalized on the most recent developments in military drills or conflicts, others were seen before. Nevertheless, they all repeated similar lessons, which extolled the power of the Chinese military while undermining the Taiwanese’s trust in their own and the US. We urge researchers and policymakers to be aware of and examine the phenomenon of repeating themes constantly reinforced with old and new claims. Furthermore, more attention should be devoted to the consequences of disinformation pieces that continuously impart the same lessons to audiences over time.

The China-Africa cooperation forum [that takes place in Beijing at the beginning of Septmber] has become the most important event on the African international relations calendar. More African leaders attend these summits than the United Nations general assembly. Data shows that the forum attracts 40 to 60 African heads of state and government, far more than any other regular summit with a single country.

[...]

Although the EU, France, South Korea and the US are important to the African continent, they do not have the same ambition that China has. Nor the kind of free hand that China’s authoritarian system allows its leaders. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation is therefore important for African leaders because it often leads to big promises which outweigh anything that can be promised by other partners in one sitting.

It has become clear, however, that the forum is a platform for China to dole out aid and loans to African countries, and to articulate priorities that serve its own broader ambitions. Africa’s voice is minimal in the agenda-setting, due mostly to the multiplicity of African states, African Union weakness and competing needs among African countries.

[...]

Unequal gains likely to persist

The result of a lack of an African strategy is the imbalanced terms of trade between China and African countries. This is seen most notably in the trade surplus that China enjoys: most recently measured at US$64.1 billion as of 2023 and still seemingly growing (having been at US$46 billion the previous year and US$42 billion in 2021).

Over the past ten years, the structure of that trade has not changed either, despite China’s pledge to help Africa industrialise.

African countries still largely export raw minerals and agricultural goods to China, while it sends back advanced manufactures, such as electronics, machinery and vehicles. Without an African strategy, the same pattern looks set to continue.

Archived version

Namibia, grappling with one of the worst droughts in decades, is preparing to cull more than 700 wild animals, including 83 elephants, as part of an effort to address food insecurity among its population. The decision, announced by the country’s environment ministry, comes as southern Africa faces a prolonged drought that has led to widespread food shortages and increased human-wildlife conflict.

The culling will target animals in national parks and communal areas where officials have determined that the wildlife population exceeds the available resources of grazing land and water. In addition to elephants, the cull will include hippos, buffalo, impalas, blue wildebeest, zebras, and eland. The ministry’s plan involves distributing the meat from these animals to communities struggling to feed themselves. The United Nations reports that Namibia has already depleted 84% of its food reserves.

This move has sparked controversy, with Animal rights activists expressing concern over the lack of a comprehensive assessment of the potential economic and environmental impacts. They argue that the decision might be driven by political motivations, especially in an election year, and have launched a petition to halt the culling.