Violent protests have followed the death of a schoolgirl on a highway that has claimed 195 lives this year. But what’s causing the carnage?
Ghana: Protesters burn tyres next to deadly highway over incomplete footbridges - video
Kent Mensah in Accra- Across the busy Adenta-Madina highway in Ghana’s capital, Accra, there loom six incomplete concrete footbridges. Unusable for their intended purpose, they currently serve as advertising hoarding for politicians and companies.
For well over a decade since the highway – but not its pedestrian bridges – was completed, residents of the city’s Adenta district have watched, horrified, as the traffic has grown worse and pedestrian fatalities have become more common, thanks both to reckless driving and the lack of safe crossing places.If the government had prioritised the project this wouldn’t have happened
On 8 November 2018 more than 100 protesters clashed with police in response to the latest accident, which claimed the life of a local high school student. Demanding the completion of the footbridges, locals stormed the highway, setting fire to tyres, blocking the movement of vehicles and causing heavy gridlock.
Armed police were sent in to restore order; in the clashes that followed they were accused of using gunfire and brute force to subdue protesters – although police chief David Asante-Apeatu rejects these claims.
Angry residents say 195 lives have been lost on the road in the past year, but official police figures claim the total is significantly lower: 24, and 164 injuries. This discrepancy is due at least in part to low reporting rates for accidents and crime.
Schoolchildren run across Accra’s George W Bush highway. Photograph: Edward Echwalu
Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, has blamed the lack of pedestrian infrastructure on former administrations. Following the latest fatality, which he described as an unnecessary loss, Akufo-Addo pledged to ensure work will resume on the footbridges. Meanwhile, police have been deployed to the highway to control traffic and prevent further deaths.
Ghana’s former roads and highways minister Alhaji Inusah Fuseini says the government is simply attempting to shift the blame.
“Before I left office the only safety mechanism left on the road was to complete the footbridges,” Fuseini told Rainbow Radio. “If the government had prioritised the project this wouldn’t have happened.”
Campaigners blame the high casualty rate on a lack of infrastructure – as well as ignorance of road safety on the part of both drivers and pedestrians. Photograph: Edward Echwalu
Saul Billingsley, executive director of the UK-based FIA Foundation, an international organisation that promotes road safety, believes the real problem lies in the planning stages of such projects.
“Accra, like many African cities, is experiencing rapid motorisation and rising traffic casualties,” he said. “Politicians and urban planners urgently need to put the needs of local people before motor vehicles, and prioritise the health of pedestrians and children. Reducing traffic speed, designing at a human scale and resisting the urge to build yet more urban motorways is vital.”
Indiscipline on the roads is endemic in Ghana: in the first half of 2018 alone, the Ghana Police Service recorded 1,212 deaths in road accidents nationally.
There is a misconception that roads are for cars only. Drivers see pedestrians as a nuisance and pedestrians use the road in fear
Amma Oduro-Dankwah of the nonprofit organisation Amend Road Safety Ghana is advising all road users to be mindful of their safety.
“There is a misconception that roads are for cars only,” she said. “As a result, drivers see pedestrians as a nuisance and pedestrians use the road in fear. Until safe facilities are provided for pedestrians and all road users are properly segregated in Ghana, we must all be vigilant when using the road.”
Oduro-Dankwah also stressed the importance of comprehension and enforcement of traffic laws, saying: “Road safety should definitely be included in our [schools’] syllabus. It is important to realign our mentality towards road safety and to be conscious from a very young age about the risks on our roads.
“For instance, most pedestrians are ignorant of the elementary fact that they should walk facing traffic while walking on the road; drivers do not know the meaning of some road signs and do not adhere to speed limits.”
In the first half of 2018 official records show 1,212 traffic deaths nationally, although underreporting means that figure is likely to be higher. Photograph: Edward Echwalu
Ghana’s road safety issues are not an insoluble problem, campaigners say.
“The solutions of many of the challenges of road safety are not just known, but are widely available, and offer a significant return on investment,” said Kate Turner of the FIA Foundation.
“Traffic calming measures which physically force vehicles to slow down, combined with separated footpaths and cycleways, and safe crossing points, are likely to be the most effective short-term approach, as it also reduces the need for costly police enforcement.”
Back in Adenta, residents along the highway have vowed to continue protesting until the footbridges are completed.
“People are dying and we won’t keep quiet until the government solves our problem,” said the leader of the local pressure group #FixOurFootBridgesNow, Nana Ampomah.
In his interview with The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Josh Dawsey on Nov. 27, President Trump made a number of false or misleading claims, including many that we have fact-checked previously. Here’s a quick roundup, with statements listed in the order he made them. Some comments made by the president during the interview are unclear and may be subject to additional fact checks.
“We’re not having a wall because of the Democrats. We need Democrat votes to have a wall.”
Trump needs 60 votes in the Senate, meaning he needs all Republicans and at least nine Democrats, to clear the way for a filibuster-proof bill that funds the border wall.
The Secure and Succeed Act would do just that. Sponsored by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and backed by the White House, the bill would provide $25 billion for the wall, among other measures.
But the president's claim that Democrats are blocking the wall makes sense only if all 51 Republicans are on board. They're not. Grassley's bill failed 39 to 60 in the Senate in February. It got 36 of 51 GOP votes and three Democratic votes, far short of passage.
Three other immigration proposals, backed by broader mixes of Republicans and Democrats, each got more than 50 votes.
“We almost had a deal [with Democrats], and then the judge ruled shockingly in favor of Obama’s signature, when even Obama said what he’s doing is not legal. Essentially, he said, it’s not going to hold up. But when the judge ruled, all of a sudden it was like, that’s the end of that deal. But we were very close to having a deal — $25 billion for a wall and various other things on the border. And DACA.”
Trump claims he almost struck a deal with Democrats to extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and fund the border wall with $25 billion. But the deal fell through, he says, because a judge ruled to uphold DACA in the middle of negotiations.
These comments are confusing and wrong in several ways.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) met with Trump in early September 2017 and then announced they had a tentative deal that extended DACA but did not fund the border wall, although they did agree to include some form of border security measures.
Meanwhile, Obama never said his executive order on DACA was illegal. His administration argued in court that the order was “a lawful exercise of the enforcement discretion that Congress delegated to the executive branch in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which charges the executive with ‘the administration and enforcement’ of the country’s immigration laws,” as the ACLU put it.
“You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean.”
This is false. The 1970 Clean Air Act, and its amendments in 1990, has certainly made a difference in keeping the air in the United States cleaner than in countries such as China and India. But “record clean”? Nope. U.S. carbon emissions have declined, but they are only the lowest since 1996, according to the World Bank. Emissions were lower before then. In fact, it was nearly two times lower in 1960.
“If you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death; then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion.”
Trump appears to be referring to some speculative journalism a half century ago. There had been a period of cold winters in the early 1970s, and so some reporters put two and two together — and came up with five.
The Washington Post, for instance, published a 1970 article titled, “Colder Winters Held Dawn of New Ice Age.” It warned: “Get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters–the worst may be yet to come.”
The Trump administration released on Nov. 23 a long-awaited report outlining that climate change impacts "are intensifying across the country."(Luis Velarde /The Washington Post)
Time magazine in 1974 titled an article “Another Ice Age?” and said “climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.” And Newsweek, in 1975, ran an article titled “The Cooling World,” which said: “Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend. … But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”
(There is even a fake Time Magazine cover floating around the Internet, which purports to be a 1977 cover displaying a lone penguin underneath this headline: “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age: 51 things you can do to make a difference.” But this is actually a photoshopped version of a Time cover from 2007 titled, “The Global Warming Survival Guide.”)
In any case, the science was still unsettled at the time, which allowed reporters to pick and choose the angle to emphasize. In 2008, several scientists decided to go back and review the peer-reviewed literature at the time. Despite the media coverage highlighted by Trump, it turns out that peer-reviewed articles on global cooling were in a distinct minority compared with those concerned with global warming. “The survey identified only seven articles indicating cooling compared to 42 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations,” the researchers reported.
“The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light — you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California. ... You go to other places where they have denser trees — it’s more dense, where the trees are more flammable — they don’t have forest fires like this, because they maintain. And it was very interesting, I was watching the firemen and they’re raking brush — you know the tumbleweed and brush and all this stuff that’s growing underneath. It’s on fire and they’re raking it working so hard, and they’re raking all this stuff. If that was raked in the beginning, there’d be nothing to catch on fire. It’s very interesting to see. A lot of the trees, they took tremendous burn at the bottom, but they didn’t catch on fire. The bottom is all burned but they didn’t catch on fire because they sucked the water, they’re wet. You need forest management, and they don’t have it.”
This is not what Smokey Bear meant when he said, “Only you can prevent forest fires."
Experts say the most recent wildfires besetting California were not sparked by forest management problems such as an overpopulation of trees or a lack of raking. (Trump previously said the president of Finland once told him they avoid forest fires by raking the ground, but the Finnish president denied saying this.)
“The ones in Southern California are burning in chaparral, so it’s not a forest management issue at all,” LeRoy Westerling, a climate and fire researcher at the University of California at Merced, told us in a previous fact-check. “The fire in Northern California didn’t start in forest; it started in other types of vegetation, from what I read. … There, you’re talking about what kind of vegetation people manage on their homes on private properties.”
Some California forests appear to have many more trees per acre than what is considered healthy, according to an expert cited by the San Francisco Chronicle. But more than half of the state’s forested land is managed by the federal government. Because of “the rising costs of fighting fires,” the U.S. Forest Service has been forced to “regularly raid its $600 million budget for forest management,” according to the Sacramento Bee.
Why does Trump keeping attacking California over its deadly wildfires?
As wildfires grow in frequency and intensity in California, President Trump is launching false attacks and threats at the state.(Jenny Starrs , Whitney Leaming/The Washington Post)
The scientific consensus is that climate change is the big driver of these intensifying wildfires, although other factors such as forest management play a (smaller) role. Trump is not convinced that global warming is an issue, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus and reports from his own administration.
A 2016 study of western U.S. forests published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found “human-caused climate change caused over half of the documented increases in fuel aridity since the 1970s and doubled the cumulative forest fire area since 1984.”
“We estimate that human-caused climate change contributed to an additional 4.2 million [hectares] of forest fire area during 1984-2015, nearly doubling the forest fire area expected in its absence,” authors John T. Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams wrote. “Natural climate variability will continue to alternate between modulating and compounding anthropogenic increases in fuel aridity, but anthropogenic climate change has emerged as a driver of increased forest fire activity and should continue to do so while fuels are not limiting.”
“We lose $800 billion a year with trade.”
The United States does not “lose” money on trade deficits. The trade deficit just means Americans are buying more products from other countries than foreigners are buying from the United States, not that they are somehow stealing U.S. money. Trade deficits are also affected by macroeconomic factors, such as the relative strength of currencies, economic growth rates, and savings and investment rates. By passing a large deficit-financed tax cut, Trump has made it harder to reduce trade deficits, if that were even important.
Trump’s figure is also inflated. The U.S. had a $552 billion trade deficit in 2017, when goods and services are counted. But Trump only counts trade in goods, thus inflating the total. The trade deficit has widened in 2018, according to the Commerce Department.
Virtually every mainstream economist would argue that it is far more important to focus on overall trade and investment between nations. If overall trade increases between nations, people in each country generally gain, no matter the size of the trade deficit.
The president has harsh words about trade imbalances, but his numbers don't always add up.(Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
“We have $52-a-barrel oil right now and I called them about three months ago, before this whole thing happened with Khashoggi, and I let him have it about oil. We were up to $82 — probably two and a half months ago — we were up to $82 a barrel and it was going up to $100 and that would’ve been like a massive tax increase and I didn’t want that. And I called them and they let the oil start flowing and we’re at $52.”
Trump may have called the Saudi king to complain about oil prices. But the plunge from about $80 started in mid-October after reports of slowing demand, exacerbated by Trump’s unexpected grant of sanctions waivers to some of Iran’s biggest customers. The Saudi government has indicated it will join other OPEC producers in cutting production in order to boost prices, as the current level strains its budget. OPEC in July decided to increase production and the Saudis were slow to follow. But now the oil cartel plans to cut production in an effort to get the price of oil up again. (Note: Trump appeared to be mixing up the price for Brent crude, produced outside the United States, with West Texas Intermediate, produced in the United States. Brent has been trading about $10 a barrel higher than WTI, so the price drop has been $20, not $30.)
“We have an ally that’s investing billions and billions of dollars in our country. They could very easily invest $110 billion, $450 billion overall over a period of time, fairly short period of time. $110 billion in military. Russia and China would love to have those orders and they’ll get them if we don’t.”
We have repeatedly explained that these numbers are a fantasy. We had earlier documented that the commercial agreements announced after Trump’s 2017 trip to the kingdom were mostly smoke and mirrors, with many of the purported deals aimed at creating jobs in Saudi Arabia, not the United States. At the time, Trump claimed they were worth $350 billion, but without explanation the figure has grown to $450 billion.
As for the $110 billion in military sales, according to a confidential 2017 document of all of the military sales agreements reviewed by The Fact Checker, most of the items on Trump’s $110 billion list did not have delivery dates or were scheduled for 2022 or beyond. There appeared to be few, if any, signed contracts. Rather, many of the announcements were MOIs — memorandums of intent. There were six specific items, adding up to $28 billion, but all had been previously notified to Congress by the Obama administration.
Moreover, the Saudis have been clear that they expect to impose a 50 percent localization rule. In other words, only half of the $110 billion, if the deals were actually inked, would be spent in the United States.
“Germany shouldn’t like that aggression. You know they’re paying 1 percent, and they’re supposed to be paying much more than 1 percent. … They’re absolutely not doing enough. Germany? Absolutely not. Many of those countries are not doing enough toward NATO. They should be spending much more money.”
There are two types of funding for NATO: direct funding and indirect funding. Direct funding, for military-related operations, maintenance and headquarters activity, is based on gross national income — the total domestic and foreign output claimed by residents of a country — and adjusted regularly.
With the largest economy in NATO, the United States pays the largest share — about 22 percent.
Germany is second, with about 15 percent. A significant portion of the U.S. share is operating the Airborne Early Warning and Control System (AWACS) fleet operations, according to the Congressional Research Service.
President Trump (still) consistently misstates his impact on NATO's budget and how that budget works.(Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
The U.S. share of the actual military budget is negotiated each year but is largely based on the cost-sharing formula and amounts to less than $500 million a year, according to Defense Department documents.
But Trump is really talking about indirect funding. Since 2006, each NATO member has had a guideline of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense spending. At a 2014 summit, responding to Russian aggression in Ukraine, NATO members pledged to meet that guideline by 2024.
In 2017, only five of the 28 members exceed the guideline — with the United States leading the way at 3.5 percent. The other members that exceed the guideline are Greece, Estonia, Britain and Latvia, but the perceived threat from Russia has prompted other nations to bolster their defense spending.
It’s important to remember that the United States is a world power with global responsibilities, including in Asia. Iceland, which spends the smallest percent of its GDP on defense, does not even have a standing army.
Germany spends 1.24 percent of its GDP on defense, but the somewhat arbitrary measure penalizes countries with strong economies. Greece manages to meet its 2 percent commitment mainly because its economy is weak.
What sickens me the most is that from Truman to Trump, every American president has chosen to ignore this blatant injustice and the American news media has chosen to look the other way
by Thomas Are-
( November 28, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) From Truman to Trump, we have never had an American president to speak with integrity when calling for peace in the Middle East.
What was it? Eleven minutes? And Truman was falling all over himself to be the first national president to “recognize” the new state of Israel. Never mind the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had their homes, freedom and livelihood taken from them by force. Truman celebrated “peace” in Israel.
Even a child will shout, “It’s not fair,” when forced to accept tranquility without regard to justice. When Donald Trump casually announced Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, totally ignoring the historic, emotional and religious claims of Jerusalem as their national capital, even children will respond, “It’s not fair.”
Not only that. It is not going to work. In spite of what Trump and Netanyahu wish, Palestinians are not going to just disappear. Even with the more than three billion dollars a year the U.S. sends to Israel to enforce the repression of Palestinian rights, international law and human conscience is caught in a bind facing the unlawful occupation and oppression of another people.
Let us be honest, at least with ourselves. The United States has never been an “honest broker” when it comes to Israel. From Truman to Trump, we have acted more like Israel’s defense attorney while ignoring the endless building of more and more settlement in the West Bank and Israel’s repeated bombardment of Gaza, including the destruction of sewage treatment plants, rendering what little water they have undrinkable.
In the meantime, Israeli snipers are firing live ammunition into crowds of unarmed demonstrators at the border, having already killed hundreds and wounded thousands.
What sickens me the most is that from Truman to Trump, every American president has chosen to ignore this blatant injustice and the American news media has chosen to look the other way.
HOUSE prices across Asia Pacific have been soaring for years now with many young professionals struggling to get a foot on the property ladder.
Those looking for second homes are also hard pressed to find good value deals that offer a decent amount of space for their money. High-density metropolises like Tokyo and Hong Kong are seeing the rise of micro- or nano-flats as the pressure for space pushes the price of property ever higher.
People are confined to tiny cupboard-like “apartments,” sleeping within touching distance of their microwave cookers. And that’s the ones who can afford property at all.
A recent study from market research company Nielsen found 73 percent of people believe young people hoping to buy property will need the financial assistance of their parents, needing on average US$180,000 from the bank of mum and dad.
Without this support, buying property is almost out of the question, with a quarter of Hong Kongers believing they will never be able to afford a property.
As young people in the region struggle to get a foot on the property ladder, how does real estate affordability compare globally?
Research from Homes.com found Turkey to be the country where buyers got the most home for their money, with locals being able to purchase 742 ft² when earning a median household income of US$17,067.
After Turkey, a close second was the United States, where buyers can get 669 ft2 of home with earnings of US$44,049.
Top 5 affordable countries to buy:
1. Turkey (742 ft² on US$17,067)
2. United States (669 ft² on US$44,049)
3. Mexico (463 ft² on US$13,891)
4. Russia (415 ft² on US$16,657)
5. Slovakia (350 ft² on US$20,265)
Asia Pacific OECD countries didn’t appear anywhere near the top most affordable. In fact, both Japan and South Korea were in the bottom five.
South Korea came dead last with the average cost per square foot coming in at a whopping US$772. On the median national salary of US$21,723, that gets you just 84.4 ft².
Property prices in the capital Seoul have been skyrocketing this year, seeing a steep rise following mayor Park Won-soon’s announcement of development plans.
According to South China Morning Post, the neighbourhoods of Yeouido and Yongsan saw a particularly steep rise after plans were announced to turn the area into amixed residential-commercial island. And Yangcheon-gu and Jungnang-gu where the mayor said light rail train lines will be built are also making a quantum jump.
A 1,000 ft² in Yangcheon-gu’s Mokdong area, for instance, was sold recently at 1.57 billion won (US$1.4 million), jumping from 1.2 billion won earlier this year.
The government is taking measures to curb the inflating property market by increasing taxes and earmarking anti-speculation zones in the capital.
“If the housing market shows signs of overheating or the rise expands to other regions, we will come up with additional measures quickly. We will also consider further supply plans for newlyweds and young people,” a land ministry official said.
Japan was also in the bottom five countries in the OECD for home affordability, with buyers only able to get 157 ft² on the median salary of US$28,641.
Others in the bottom five were Switzerland, Israel, and Luxembourg.
Radical overhaul in farming and consumption, with less meat eating, needed to avoid hunger and climate catastrophe
A family cooking amid floodwater in Lalmonirhat, Bangladesh, 2017. Photograph: Zakir Chowdhury/Barcroft Images
The global food system is broken, leaving billions of people either underfed or overweight and driving the planet towards climate catastrophe, according to 130 national academies of science and medicine across the world.
Providing a healthy, affordable, and environmentally friendly diet for all people will require a radical transformation of the system, says the report by the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP). This will depend on better farming methods, wealthy nations consuming less meat and countries valuing food which is nutritious rather than cheap.
The report, which was peer reviewed and took three years to compile, sets out the scale of the problems as well as evidence-driven solutions.
The global food system is responsible for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than all emissions from transport, heating, lighting and air conditioning combined. The global warming this is causing is now damaging food production through extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.
The food system also fails to properly nourish billions of people. More than 820 million people went hungry last year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, while a third of all people did not get enough vitamins. At the same time, 600 million people were classed as obese and 2 billion overweight, with serious consequences for their health. On top of this, more than 1bn tonnes of food is wasted every year, a third of the total produced.
“The global food system is broken,” said Tim Benton, professor of population ecology, at the University of Leeds, who is a member of one of the expert editorial groups which produced the report. He said the cost of the damage to human health and the environment was much greater than the profits made by the farming industry.
“Whether you look at it from a human health, environmental or climate perspective, our food system is currently unsustainable and given the challenges that will come from a rising global population that is a really [serious] thing to say,” Benton said.
Research published in the journal Climate Policy shows that at the present rate, cattle and other livestock will be responsible for half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and that to prevent this will require “substantial reductions, far beyond what are planned or realistic, from other sectors”.
“It is vital [for a liveable planet] that we change our relationship with meat, especially with red meat. But no expert in this area is saying the world should be vegan or even vegetarian,” said Benton.
Rearing cattle and other livestock causes the same carbon emissions as all the world’s vehicles, trains, ships and planes combined. “We have spent 30 to 40 years investing quite heavily on fuel efficiency in the transport sector,” said Benton. “We need do something similarly radical in the farming sector and the scope for doing that by changing the way we raise the animals is much smaller than the scope we have by changing our diets.”
The IAP report notes that in poorer countries meat, eggs and dairy can be important in providing concentrated nutrients, especially for children. It also says other things livestock can provide should be taken into consideration, such as leather, wool, manure, transport and plough pulling.
Jawaida, 12, (left) and her friend in Mpati, North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Norwegian Refugee Council ise helping displaced people. Photograph: Christian Jepsen/NRC
The UN climate change conference, COP24, which starts on Sunday in Katowice, Poland, is an opportunity for political action, said Joachim von Braun, a professor who co-chairs the IAP project. “Our food systems are failing us. Agriculture and consumer choices are major factors driving disastrous climate change.”
Another member of the IAP editorial group, Aifric O’Sullivan, from University College Dublin, said: “We need to ensure that policymakers inform consumers about the climate impacts of their food choices, provide incentives for consumers to change their diets, and reduce food loss and waste.”
The report recommends many actions that could help deliver the “whole-scale root and branch transformation” that is required, said Benton. These include crops that are more resilient to climate change, smarter crop rotation, soil protection, precier use of fertilisers and less use of pesticides. It also backs innovation such as laboratory-grown meat and insect-based foods.
Much of the world has turned a blind eye to Beijing’s abuses. Washington cannot remain silent in the face of an elaborate campaign of repression and religious discrimination.
Chinese police patrol a night market near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region on June 25, 2017, a day before the Eid al-Fitr holiday. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
The Chinese Communist Party is carrying out a methodicalcampaign of oppression in an apparent attempt to extinguish the religion and ethnicity of the Uighur people. Residing mostly in what the Chinese state calls its Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, Uighurs today are not free in the most fundamental sense of the word—not to travel, not to practice their faith, not to speak with their relatives, not to name their children. Not even submission to discriminatory government regulations and coercion keeps their families safe. And the world barely seems to notice.
While the United States may not be able to achieve everything it might want when it comes to China, it must call the world’s attention to Xinjiang, pressure Beijing, attempt to ease the plight of imprisoned Uighurs and other minority groups, and deter other countries that might seek to emulate Beijing’s campaign of oppression.
The human engineering experiment the Chinese government is undertaking resembles the policies of the most repressive colonial regimes and is as Orwellian as China’s Cultural Revolution. Around 1 million Uighurs—more than the population of San Francisco—are locked up in so-called re-education camps. There, “Thousands of guards equipped with tear gas, Tasers, stun guns, and spiked clubs keep tight control over ‘students’”—who are supposed to “break [the Uighurs’] lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins” to “build new, better Chinese citizens.” Torture and beatings are reportedly regular occurrences.
Detailed reports monitoring Chinese government contracts and satelliteimages of Xinjiang camp construction, in addition to more than 1,000 testimonies from family members of interned Uighurs and Kazakhs, reveal a terrifying picture. Many Uighurs who remain in their homes live under the surveillance of government-assigned Han Chinese “relatives” in forced homestays. The government has mobilized more than 1 million uninvited guests “to aid the military and police in their campaign by occupying the homes of the region’s Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, and undertaking programs of indoctrination and surveillance.”
It is well-known that the Chinese government violates its people’s human rights. But what is happening in Xinjiang—and also in Tibet, where some of the tactics used in Xinjiang were first employed—is even more dire. The Communist Party views the very existence of ethnic and religious minority groups inside China as a threat to be extinguished with a pseudoscientific policy of psychological and physical aggression.
This is not just about human rights or China. It’s about how the United States and others respond to a growing trend of authoritarian impunity that is gaining ground worldwide. The striking silence of most of the Islamic world—with many countries either beholden, fearful, or eager to curry favor with China—has greased Beijing’s path to mass repression of their fellow Muslims.
Advocating for human rights inside a state as resistant to outside pressure and geopolitically important as China can feel futile. But for reasons simultaneously moral and strategic, the United States and the world can and should do something.
Despite the United States’ terrible past treatment of Native Americans and other minorities, respecting human rights should be part of what sets America apart from autocracies such as China. That distinction represents a moral and diplomatic comparative advantage that the current administration has ignored if not undermined outright. True to form, the Trump White House has largely ignored the crisis in Xinjiang.
Not only does President Donald Trump disregard human rights; he outright embraces the illiberal tactics of Xi Jinping and other strongmen. Trump has likewise used the rationale of counterterrorism to justify persecution of a large group of people as inherently dangerous based on their identity: He proposed banning all Muslims from entering the United States during the 2016 campaign and raised the specter of gang violence to foment fear of Mexicans and stir up opposition to asylum-seekers from Central America.
The atrocities in the camps may occur far away, but what happens in China is not staying in China. The Chinese government has sought out Uighurs around the world for extradition, intimidated and collectively punished Xinjiang-based families as a method of threatening overseas Uighurs, including extorting them to come back to China and submit to internment. Beijing even abducted the head of Interpol (a Chinese national)—allegedly for failing to execute this campaign with sufficient fervor.
Tibet and Xinjiang have become laboratories for high-tech totalitarianism, deploying large-scale use of networked surveillance cameras, facial recognition, smartphone scanners, and big data to monitor and control citizens with superhuman efficiency. China is building a model it can export. Sales to Malaysia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Arab countries are just the beginning.
China’s repression of Uighurs beyond its borders demonstrates how brazen authoritarian countries have become in attacking would-be critics overseas and how dismissive they are of other countries’ sovereign rights to protect their populations in their own territory. Dramatic murders of dissidents overseas by Saudi Arabia, Russia, and North Korea have captured headlines. Given the White House’s toothless, half-hearted condemnation, they surely won’t be the last.
The world cannot afford for a Xinjiang model to become normalized. The government of Myanmar used a campaign of violence to drive hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims out of the country. If countries come to see Chinese state oppression in Xinjiang as a success, it raises the question of how many other strongmen worldwide with restive border regions and ostracized minority groups will brutally follow suit
Washington’s ability to influence Beijing’s actions within China is limited. Moreover, there are other issues of great consequence in U.S.-Chinese relations to consider. And yes, never has a U.S. president been worse-positioned to make the moral case. But there is still much the United States and the world can do.
Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have introduced bipartisanlegislationrequiring the State Department and intelligence community to report on what the Chinese government is doing in Xinjiang. This is a good start, but with the Trump administration unlikely to act, Congress will need to take the lead on a more robust policy.
The first thing the United States should do is to protect Uighurs living on U.S.
soil. Swedenand Germany have reportedly halted any extraditions of Uighur asylees back to China, and the U.S. government should follow suit. The United States should offer temporary protected status to endangered Uighurs in America and encourage other countries to do the same. As called for in the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies must be empowered to hold accountable Chinese officials who intimidate overseas Uighurs, particularly inside the United States.
Congress should push the Trump administration to use the Global Magnitsky Act to sanction individual officials responsible for developing and implementing China’s cyber-authoritarian toolkit in Tibet and Xinjiang. This law, designed as a tool to punish gross human rights abuses and corruption, was used to sanction Saudi officials after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This will show China that the United States will hold high-level officials responsible for these human rights violations.
The U.S. government should collect, declassify, and publicize intelligence about the camps and other extrajudicial abuse of Uighurs, to share credible information with the rest of the world. U.S. diplomats can ensure that this kind of information is disseminated widely—especially in Muslim-majority countries in Asia, where it would contribute to public pressure on governments in Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia to at least broach the issue with China, raising the diplomatic price of repression. While these countries may see the costs of criticizing China as too great, public pressure could change their calculus. And the more that countries which aren’t normally critical of China raise the issue, the more Beijing may register this as a genuine problem.
Members of Congress should openly call for international inspectors and U.N. officials to be admitted to the prison facilities in Xinjiang. Since Beijing denies the reports of abuses in the Xinjiang camps—a recent pivot from denying their existence outright—a call for inspectors would place the onus on Beijing to explain to the world what it is doing. The United States should also sign on to efforts such as the request of 15 Western ambassadors (from Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) for a meeting with Xinjiang region Communist Party Secretary Chen Quanguo, which the Trump administration did not join.
Congress could also apply the Magnitsky Act to the Chinese companies—such as Hikvision, Dahua Technology, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, and Huawei—that supply the Chinese government with tools of high-tech oppression. Through hearings, Congress can pressure U.S. businesses, such as Intel and Nvidia, that have enabled Chinese repression in Xinjiang by investing in or providing technology to these Chinese companies. Companies that have exported the tools of mass surveillance to China, or those that do business in Xinjiang should be asked to appear before Congress and explain why they continue to sell such technology to China.
The U.S. government may not be able to solve all the world’s problems. But the way Washington responds to the most difficult challenges says a lot about the United States as a country. America cannot ignore what China is doing in Xinjiang.
Like destroying the rainforests and oceans, destroying the soil is an ongoing investment in future extinctions. And so is our overconsumption and contamination of the Earth’s finite fresh water supply.
by Robert J. Burrowes-
( November 27, 2018, Victoria, Sri Lanka Guardian) Have you heard the expression ‘climate change’? That lovely expression that suggests a holiday in a place with a more pleasant climate.
Unfortunately, only the rarest individual has the capacity to see through the elite-promulgated delusion that generated this benign expression and its twin notions that 1.5 degrees celsius (above the preindustrial level) is an acceptable upper limit for an increase in global temperature and that the timeframe for extinction-threatening outcomes of this ‘climate change’ is the ‘end of the century’.
Today several media outlets report that a team of scientists in China has used CRISPR to modify the DNA of healthy human embryos to genetically “vaccinate” against HIV infection.
This is the first reported case of humans born with CRISPR-modifed DNA.
The molecular scissors known as CRISPR (CRISPR/cas9 in full) allow scientists to modify DNA with high precision and greater ease than previous technologies. There are high hopes these molecular scissors may aid in curing diseases such as cancer or other conditions – but scientists around the world had agreed careful regulation was required before the technology was used in humans.
Now with this news, all eyes will be on the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing taking place this week in Hong Kong. This meeting will hopefully lead to a renewed consensus for tighter control of CRISPR editing in human embryos.
How has the babies’ genome been modified?
According to several reports, researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen (China) have created the first gene-edited babies.
It’s important to note here the science has not been posted on a preprint server or published in a peer-reviewed journal – the usual standard applied to confirm new research is valid and ethically sound. However, Chinese medical documents posted online support the notion that a trial had been set up, and the lead scientist involved (He Jiankui) has made a video statement.
Scientist He Jiankui of Shenzhen says he said he has altered DNA in human embryos, and that healthy twin girls are now at home with their parents.
In China the prevalence of HIV infection is high, and access to health care a serious public health concern. According to the medical document published online, the study recruited HIV-positive men with HIV-negative female partners, and who were willing to participate in an IVF program and allow embryos to be edited with CRISPR.
The team led by Jiankui He focused on removing a gene called CCR5, critical for the HIV virus to enter into the cells. The goal was to genetically “vaccinate” the babies against HIV infection. They modified the DNA of the embryos, verified the molecular scissors were truly on target and implanted edited embryos in the mother’s body.
Reports indicate that gene-edited twin girls have now been born. In one of the twins both copies of the CCR5 gene are said to be modified, and for the other one only one copy is modified.
We have little to no details on how this was performed and we must take these reports with a lot of caution.
Serious ethical concerns
CRISPR is easier to use and more precise than previous methods, but it is not a perfect technology. It can lead to unintended consequences, such as affecting other genes (“off-target” effects) or making multiple modifications of the gene we are aiming to modify (“on-target” effects). There is an ongoing discussion as to how widespread “off target” and “on-targets” modifications are, and what the unintended consequences of these effects may be.
Modifying embryos may have lasting consequences: not only would affected children have had their genome modified, but their future offspring could also carry these genetic modifications. To date we do not know what the long term effects of CRISPR-modification of human DNA are.
Given the massive, multi-generational implications of editing embryos, we argue it should only be considered in cases where the modification would cure an existing disease and for which no other, lower-risk solution is available and when potential side effects are known.
Controversially, in the study being discussed, the edit does not cure a pre-existing disease, and we already have existing alternatives to prevent HIV infection and limit its clinical progression to AIDS.
The reports fall in the grey area between attempts to cure diseases, and the dreaded “designer baby” scenario, where humans could be modified for benefits unrelated to health (potentially expanding to include intelligence, aesthetics and more).
An important, broader discussion is taking place
As soon as CRIPSR technology was widely available, it was a matter of when, rather than if, it would be used on humans. The first modification of human embryos was reported by another Chinese team in May 2015. Those embryos were not viable, but it sparked an intense debate about the ethics of such modifications.
This led to the the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Royal Society (RS), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and U.S. National Academy of Medicine (NAM) coming together to organise an International Summit on Human Gene Editing in December 2015 in Washington, DC.
it would be irresponsible to proceed with any clinical use of human embryos editing unless and until (i) the relevant safety and efficacy issues have been resolved, based on appropriate understanding and balancing of risks, potential benefits, and alternatives, and (ii) there is broad societal consensus about the appropriateness of the proposed application.
The committee also noted:
these criteria have not been met for any proposed clinical use: the safety issues have not yet been adequately explored; the cases of most compelling benefit are limited.
CRISPR pioneers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier rightly noted the need for a rational public discourse on the use of the technology. However, this rational debate can only take place if all scientists play their part and ensure that all experiments are done in the public interest.
Based on the information currently available, it is difficult not to consider this latest experiment as anything but an attempt to win a “race” and grab attention.
The Southern University of Science and Technology has now released a statement that it gave no permission to Jiankui He for his experiment, that he has been on leave since February, and that they believe the experiment violates academic ethics and academic norms.
Rice University has also opened an investigation into Michael Deem (a bioengineering professor at Rice and previous supervisor of He) and his possible role in the study.
Whether He’s claims are true or not, this whole situation is a disservice to the entire field of research, and to potential future recipients of CRISPR-based therapies.
Kent Mensah in Accra-
Schoolchildren run across Accra’s George W Bush highway. Photograph: Edward Echwalu
Campaigners blame the high casualty rate on a lack of infrastructure – as well as ignorance of road safety on the part of both drivers and pedestrians. Photograph: Edward Echwalu
In the first half of 2018 official records show 1,212 traffic deaths nationally, although underreporting means that figure is likely to be higher. Photograph: Edward Echwalu
Turkey is the country where property buyers get the most home for their money. Source: Leonardo da/Shutterstock
Jawaida, 12, (left) and her friend in Mpati, North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the Norwegian Refugee Council ise helping displaced people. Photograph: Christian Jepsen/NRC
Chinese police patrol a night market near the Id Kah Mosque in Kashgar in China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region on June 25, 2017, a day before the Eid al-Fitr holiday. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images) 
