Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17841591

The World Health Organization has urged China to share data on the origins of the Covid pandemic, five years on from its start in the city of Wuhan.

“This is a moral and scientific imperative,” the WHO said in a statement to mark what it called the “milestone” anniversary.

“Without transparency, sharing, and co-operation among countries, the world cannot adequately prevent and prepare for future epidemics and pandemics,” it added.

Many scientists think the virus transferred naturally from animals to humans, but some suspicions persist that it escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

China has not responded to Monday’s WHO statement. In the past it has strongly rejected the lab leak theory.

In September, a team of scientists said it was “beyond reasonable doubt” that the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.

[…]

[WHO] director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said at the time that at least seven million people had died in the pandemic.

But he added that the true figure was “likely” closer to 20 million deaths - nearly three times the official estimate.

Since then, the WHO has repeatedly warned against complacency about the possible emergence of future Covid-like illnesses.

Dr Ghebreyesus has said the next pandemic “can come at any moment” and has urged the world to be prepared.

[…]

This is an opinionated piece by Peter Pomerantsev, senior fellow at SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University.–

It’s also in Ukraine that one realises that “freedom” and “sovereignty” exist in a collaborative relationship with others. Ukraine is now defending its neighbours’ freedom from an advancing Russia. Kyiv’s resistance is benefiting Taiwan’s freedom, too.

[…]

As Ukraine prepares for possible negotiations, its leadership is asking what “guarantees” its partners can give. If “international order”, “Europe” and even “Nato” are flaky concepts, how can guarantees be secured into something real? Ukrainians remember the Budapest memorandum of 1994, when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for promises from Russia, the US and Britain to respect its borders. Everyone fears a repeat of those empty words. Even if Russia agrees to a ceasefire next year, what’s to stop it rearming and attacking again?

[…]

The idea that freedoms and military production are so interdependent may jar with the pacifist instincts of some progressives. But here Ukraine can offer a pointed lesson. Ever since she won the Nobel peace prize, the Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksanda Matviichuk has been gracefully explaining to the world that even though, indeed because, she is a human rights activist, she also advocates for Ukraine’s right to self-defence and to return fire inside Russia at the military bases that are being used to murder Ukrainian civilians. “International law” is also an empty term if it can’t be defended literally.

“The Chinese people are so miserable,” read a social media post in the wake of yet another mass killing in the country earlier this year. The same user also warned: “There will only be more and more copycat attacks.”

“This tragedy reflects the darkness within society,” wrote another.

Such bleak assessments, following a spate of deadly incidents in China during 2024, have led to questions about what is driving people to murder strangers en masse to “take revenge on society”.

Attacks like this are still rare given China’s huge population, and are not new, says David Schak, associate professor at Griffith University in Australia. But they seem to come in waves, often as copycat attempts at garnering attention.

[…]

From 2019 to 2023, police recorded three to five cases each year, where perpetrators attacked pedestrians or strangers.

In 2024, that number jumped to 19.

[…]

In 2019, three people were killed and 28 injured in such incidents; in 2023, 16 dead and 40 injured and in 2024, 63 people killed and 166 injured. November was especially bloody.

On the 11th of that month, a 62-year-old man ploughed a car into people exercising outside a stadium in the city of Zhuhai, killing at least 35. Police said that the driver had been unhappy with his divorce settlement.

[…]

Days later, in Changde city, a man drove into a crowd of children and parents outside a primary school, injuring 30 of them. The authorities said he was angry over financial losses and family problems.

That same week, a 21-year-old who couldn’t graduate after failing his exams, went on a stabbing rampage on his campus in Wuxi city, killing eight and injuring 17.

[…]

China’s slowing economy

A major source of pressure in China right now is the sluggish economy. It is no secret that the country has been struggling with high youth unemployment, massive debt and a real estate crisis which has consumed the life savings of many families, sometimes with nothing to show for it.

Studies appear to point to a significant change in attitudes, with a measurable increase in pessimism among Chinese people about their personal prospects. [While in the past] inequality in society could often be attributed to a lack of effort or ability, […] people were now blaming an “unfair economic system”.

[…]

A lack of options

In countries with a healthy media, if you felt you had been fired from your job unfairly or that your home had been demolished by corrupt builders backed by local officials, you might turn to journalists for your story to be heard. But that is rarely an option in China, where the press is controlled by the Communist Party and unlikely to run stories which reflect badly on any level of the government.

[…]

Then there are the courts – also run by and for the party – which are slow and inefficient. Much was made on social media here of the Zhuhai attacker’s alleged motive: that he did not achieve what he believed was a fair divorce settlement in court.

Archived version

In Georgia’s recent parliamentary elections, the decisive factor in the ruling Georgian Dream party’s victory was the use of “carousels”: a method of vote rigging in which voters cast their ballots at more than one polling station.

In this case, those involved were predominantly male, allowing the fraud to be detected through a gender-based study of data that the Georgian Central Election Commission (CEC) inadvertently provided to independent observers.

Unlike in Russia, outright ballot stuffing is impossible in Georgia, so the orchestrators of carousel voting had to obtain IDs or other identification numbers from real voters who had been paid not to turn up at the polls. Election analyst Roman Udot estimates that a fair vote would have resulted in the ruling party losing its majority in parliament. Anyone interested in checking The Insider’s work can download the data and verify the accuracy of the calculation using this interactive tool.

[…]

Applying the methodology of renowned analyst Sergey Shpilkin to a pair of variables, The Insider was able to calculate the number of anomalous votes: approximately 300,000 in support of the Georgian Dream. The mathematical explanation for the anomaly is supported by eyewitness accounts of “carousel voting” by predominantly male groups.

Carousel organizers obtained genuine IDs — or at least their numbers — from real voters who had guaranteed they would not go to the polls. Carousel voters then used them to cast multiple ballots. The turnout figures showed no anomalies, as bribed ID holders did not come to the polling stations.

[…]

The main evidence of vote rigging is found in the reported electorate’s gender imbalance, which skews decidedly male. This is a statistical anomaly. In the absence of electoral fraud, the average turnout among men and among women would be roughly the same.

[…]

The CEC’s gender data immediately raised suspicions. Initially, the CEC reported that 961,751 women and 1,098,661 men had cast ballots — an incredible figure for a nation where women outnumber men by 200,000. In response to the reasonable surprise of local observers, the CEC, in a frantic attempt to cover up the scandal, hid the original data. However, the government body inadvertently issued a document with detailed data for each polling station. The second report attempted to mask the initial anomaly by adding 91,911 female voters and hiding 88,975 male voters, but analysts were not fooled.

[…]

Such a ratio of male to female voters is inexplicable. If male and female voters showed the same level of electoral activity at each station (the same number of ballots cast per 100 registered voters of each gender), a total of 913,584 male voters would have voted nationwide, instead of the recorded 1,006,170. In short, the CEC’s revised data still shows an anomalous surplus of 92,586 male votes.

[…]

The second most “hyperactive” male region of Georgia, Gori, […] showed a surplus of approximately 5,000 men. On Nov. 25, the Mtavari Arkhi TV channel broadcast the confession of a man called Gocha Chalauri, who shared how he and his associates repeatedly voted for Georgian Dream in the Oct. 26 elections:

"There were four of us in my car, all men, driving as part of a group of five vehicles. We traveled through Gori, from one village to another, and voted for Georgian Dream about 30 times each. In total, 120 or 130 cars like ours were driving around [the Gori region].”

Electoral fraud is a crime in Georgia, so Chalauri’s words should be taken seriously.

[…]

According to Georgian journalists, voters who “rented out” their IDs or personal data promised not to show up at the polls for the recent election. Eyewitness accounts and testimonies from those who took part in the fraud, captured on camera by Pirveli, suggest that this [fraud] scheme was orchestrated by heads of local administrations and members of the Georgian Dream party.

[…]

Each appearance of a “carousel” participant adds one vote for the Georgian Dream and likely subtracts one from the opposition while leaving voter turnout unchanged. As such, it renders fraud detection through traditional methods nearly impossible.

[…]

Subtracting these 300,000 “carousel” votes both from Georgian Dream’s results and from the overall turnout would lower the party’s share from 54% to 46%, reducing their parliamentary seats from 89 to 77 — to a tipping point of a majority in the 150-seat parliament.

However, if there had been no “passport rentals,” and if the citizens who were paid to stay home had shown up to vote for the opposition, genuine voters would have contributed to the turnout — and thus to the total denominator. In that case, the ruling party’s percentage would have dropped even further, to 39%. In this scenario, Georgian Dream would have secured only 67 seats in parliament — and ceased to be the ruling party.

In reality, not all of those voters would have necessarily supported the opposition, but calculations based on official Central Election Commission data show that even a slight influx of average voters would have inevitably tipped the scales.

Archived version

Listening equipment was placed on Eagle S and related tanker Swiftsea Rider to monitor Nato naval and aircraft activities.

Russia-linkex dark fleet* tanker Eagle S (IMO: 9329760), seized by Finland on December 25 for damaging an undersea cable, had transmitting and receiving devices installed that effectively allowed it to become a “spy ship” for Russia, Lloyd’s List has learnt.

The hi-tech equipment on board was abnormal for a merchant ship and consumed more power from the ship’s generator, leading to repeated blackouts, a source familiar with the vessel who provided commercial maritime services to it as recently as seven months ago.

[…]

As well as Eagle S, another related tanker from the same ownership cluster, UK-sanctioned Swiftsea Rider (IMO: 9318539), also had similar equipment installed, Lloyd’s List was told.

Cook Islands-flagged Eagle S and Honduras-flagged Swiftsea Rider are two of 26 elderly Russia-linked tankers with opaque ownership structures connected to three related shipmanagers, including two sanctioned by the UK government 12 months ago for “propping up Putin’s war machine”.

[…]

Eagle S was boarded by Finnish forces investigating sabotage of the Estlink 2 undersea cable that disrupted the supply of electricity to Estonia from Finland.

The tanker slowed and dragged its anchor around the cable around midday, December 25, Finland’s police said. Another three cables were also damaged.

[…]

The equipment was kept on the bridge or in the “monkey island”, they said. The monkey island is the top-most place on the ship.

The transmitting and receiving devices were used to record all radio frequencies, and upon reaching Russia were offloaded for analysis.

“They were monitoring all Nato naval ships and aircraft,” Lloyd’s List was told.

“They had all details on them. They were just matching their frequencies.

“Russians, Turkish, Indian radio officers were operating it.”

[…]

Archived version

A vessel carrying a sanctioned shipment of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) appears to be off-loading the fuel into storage in Russia’s far east, having failed to find a buyer willing to circumvent US restrictions despite a four-month, across-the-world journey.

[Edit title for clarity.]

Azerbaijan’s transport minister has said the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed on 25 December was subjected to “external interference” and damaged inside and out, as it tried to land in Russia’s southern republic of Chechnya.

“All [the survivors] without exception stated they heard three blast sounds when the aircraft was above Grozny,” said Rashad Nabiyev.

The plane is thought to have come under fire from Russian air defence systems before being diverted across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, where it crashed with the loss of 38 lives.

The Kremlin has refused to comment, but the head of Russia’s civil aviation agency said the situation in Grozny was “very complicated” at the time and a closed-skies protocol had been put in place.

[…]

Azerbajian Airlines said on Friday that a preliminary inquiry had blamed both “physical and technical external interference”, without going into details.

However, aviation experts and others in Azerbaijan believe the plane’s GPS systems were affected by electronic jamming and it was then damaged by shrapnel from Russian air-defence missile blasts.

The transport minister said investigators would now examine “what kind of weapon, or rather what kind of rocket was used.”

[…]

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17776417

Archived version

China’s leader Xi Jinping wants the recent spree of mass killings that shocked the country not to happen again. He ordered local governments to prevent future “extreme cases.”

The attacks, where drivers mow down people on foot or knife-wielding assailants stab multiple victims, are not new in China. But the latest surge drew attention.

Local officials were quick to vow to examine all sorts of personal disputes that could trigger aggression, from marital troubles to disagreements over inheritance.

However, the increasing reach into people’s private lives raises concerns at a time when the Chinese state has already tightened its grip over all social and political aspects in the East Asian nation.

[…]

'Revenge on Society Crimes’ - this is how people in China label these attacks.

In November alone, three took place: A man struck people at an elementary school in Hunan province, wounding 30, after suffering investment losses. A student who failed his examination stabbed and killed eight at a vocational school in the city of Yixing. The most victims, 35 people, resulted from a man mowing down a crowd in the southern city of Zhuhai, supposedly upset over his divorce.

“On the surface, it seems like there are individual factors, but we see there’s a common link,” Wu Qiang, a former political science professor, said. “This link is, in my personal opinion, every person has a feeling of injustice. They feel deeply that this society is very unfair and they can’t bear it anymore.”

Since 2015, Chinese police have targeted human rights lawyers and non-profit advocacy groups, jailing many, while keeping tight surveillance on others, effectively destroying the civil society that had been active from the early 2000s to 2010s.

Wu was fired from Tsinghua University after conducting fieldwork during the 2014 Occupy protests in Hong Kong. He says police officers have been regularly stationed outside his home in Beijing since last year.

[…]

A decade ago, media outlets could report an incident as it developed and even share a suspect’s name. Nowadays, it’s rarely possible.

During the 24 hours before the death toll was released in the Zhuhai slaying, state censors were quick to remove any videos of the incident and eyewitness accounts shared online. In the case of the Hunan elementary school attack, authorities shared the number of the wounded only after the court sentencing, nearly a month later.

A tally of violent attacks can be documented in other countries; notably, the U.S. had 38 mass killings so far this year, according to an Associated Press database. But in China, a lack of public data makes it hard to decipher mass killing trends.

[…]

Luqiu believes the government may be enforcing censorship thinking it will prevent copycats from imitating such crimes.

“Things will only become more and more strict,” she predicted. For the Chinese state, “the only method to deal with it is to strengthen control.”

[…]

At least a dozen local government notices, from small towns to big cities, [are now] announcing actions in response.

In eastern Anhui province, a ruling Communist Party leader inspected a middle school, a local police station, and even the warehouse of a chemical factory where he urged the workers to “ferret out any hidden risks.” He said they must “thoroughly and meticulously investigate and resolve conflicts and disputes,” including in families, marriages and neighborhoods.

[…]

However, many expressed worry over how such disputes will be detected.

“I think we’re at the beginning of a vicious cycle,” said Lynette Ong, a professor at the University of Toronto and author of “Outsourcing Repression: Everyday State Power in Contemporary China.” “If you nip the conflict in its bud, you’d imagine the system then would impose a lot of pressure … on schools, enterprises and factories.”

[…]

The new announcements reminded Ong of China’s strict policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Neighborhood committees, the lowest rung of government, set up fences and barriers in front of buildings to control entry and exit and broke into homes in extreme cases to disinfect the apartments of people who had caught the virus.

Eventually, people protested en masse.

“If we see non-sensible measures being introduced, you’ll be met by resistance and anger and grievances from the people, and it’s going to feed into this vicious cycle where more extreme measures are going to be brought,” she said.

Archived version

Disruptions have been detected in a total of four telecommunications cables connecting Finland in the Baltic Sea.

Two of the cables are marine cables operated by Elisa, running between Helsinki and Tallinn, Estonia. One also running from Helsinki to Tallinn is owned by the Chinese-owned CITIC Telecom.

The fourth cable is Cinia’s C-Lion1 submarine cable, which connects Helsinki to Germany. Finnish state-owned Cinia has pinpointed the damage to its cable southeast of Porkkala peninsula, just west of Helsinki on the Gulf of Finland.

According to the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom), Elisa’s cables have been severed, and two other cables have sustained damage.

At a press conference on Thursday, Jarkko Saarimäki, Director-General of Traficom stated that the agency was informed about disruptions to the Elisa and Cinia cables on Wednesday evening. Information about the fourth cable damage emerged on Thursday morning.

According to Saarimäki, telecommunication cables are robust, and their failure typically requires external force.

[…]

Archived version

Finnish authorities have detained a Russia-linked ship as they investigate whether it damaged a Baltic Sea power cable and several data cables, according to police and news media reports, in the latest incident involving disruption of key infrastructure.

Finnish police and border guards boarded the vessel, the Eagle S, early Thursday and took over the command bridge, Helsinki Police Chief Jari Liukku said at a news conference. The vessel was being held in Finnish territorial waters, police said.

The Eagle S is flagged in the Cook Islands, but was described by Finnish customs officials as a suspected part of Russia’s shadow fleet of fuel tankers, Yle television reported. Those are aging vessels with obscure ownership, acquired to evade Western sanctions amid the war in Ukraine and operating without Western-regulated insurance.

[…]

Estonia’s government was holding a extraordinary meeting on the issue Thursday, Prime Minister Kristen Michal said on X. Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina said she was in close touch with Michal and Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.

“Our armed forces have strengthened surveillance and are monitoring the situation,” she said on X. “The Baltic states currently have sufficient energy production capacity, although we are challenged by the Baltic Sea cable incidents.”

[…]

Archived version

It’s a simple but brutal equation: The number of people going hungry or otherwise struggling around the world is rising, while the amount of money the world’s wealthiest nations are contributing toward helping them is dropping.

The result: The United Nations says that, at best, it will be able to raise enough money to help about 60% of the 307 million people it predicts will need humanitarian aid next year. That means at least 117 million people won’t get food or other assistance in 2025.

The UN also will end 2024 having raised about 46% of the $49.6 billion it sought for humanitarian aid across the globe, its own data shows. It’s the second year in a row the world body has raised less than half of what it sought. The shortfall has forced humanitarian agencies to make agonizing decisions, such as slashing rations for the hungry and cutting the number of people eligible for aid.

[…]

UN officials see few reasons for optimism at a time of widespread conflict, political unrest and extreme weather, all factors that stoke famine. “We have been forced to scale back appeals to those in most dire need,” Tom Fletcher, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, said.

[…]

The majority of humanitarian funding comes from just three wealthy donors: the US, Germany and the European Commission. They provided 58% of the $170 billion recorded by the UN in response to crises from 2020 to 2024.

Three other powers – China, Russia and India – collectively contributed less than 1% of UN-tracked humanitarian funding over the same period, according to a Reuters review of UN contributions data.

[…]

With a 2023 gross national income (GNI) less than 2% the size of America’s, Norway ranked seventh among governments who gave to the UN that year […] It provided more than $1 billion.

Two of the five biggest economies – China and India – gave a tiny fraction as much.

China ranked 32nd among governments in 2023, contributing $11.5 million in humanitarian aid. It has the world’s second-largest GNI.

[…]

[Former UN humanitarian chief and now head of the Norwegian Refugee Council Jan] Egeland noted that China and India each invested far more in the type of initiatives that draw world attention. Beijing spent billions hosting the 2022 Winter Olympics, and India spent $75 million in 2023 to land a spaceship on the moon.

“How come there is not more interest in helping starving children in the rest of the world?” Egeland said. “These are not developing countries anymore. They are having Olympics … They are having spaceships that many of the other donors never could dream of.”

[…]

When aid does come, it is sometimes late, and with strings attached, making it hard for humanitarian organizations to respond flexibly to crises. [This includes that some] Donors dictate details to humanitarian agencies, down to where food will go. They sometimes limit funding to specific UN entities or nongovernmental organizations. They often require that some money be spent on branding, such as displaying donors’ logos on tents, toilets and backpacks.

[…]

The US has a long-standing practice of placing restrictions on nearly all of its contributions to the World Food Program, one of the largest providers of humanitarian food assistance. More than 99% of US donations to the WFP carried restrictions in each of the last 10 years.

[…]

In 2014, António Guterres, now the UN’s secretary-general and then head of its refugee agency, suggested a major change that would charge UN member states fees to fund humanitarian initiatives. The UN’s budget and peacekeeping missions already are funded by a fee system. Such funding would offer humanitarian agencies more flexibility in responding to need.

The UN explored Guterres’ idea in 2015. But donor countries preferred the current system, which lets them decide case by case where to send contributions, according to a UN report on the proposal.

[…]

Cross posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/17750855

Archived version

Chinese authorities wrongfully detained more than 20 Tibetans and severely tortured a Tibetan village head named Gonpo Namgyal to death with the repeated use of electric equipment in detention for several months in Ponkor township, Darlag County in Golog in the traditional Tibetan province of Amdo now incorporated into Qinghai, Sichuan and Gansu provinces.

As per information received, in May 2024, due to the extensive “Pure Mother Tongue” campaign […] Chinese authorities arrested over 20 Tibetans including Khenpo Tenpa Dhargye and village head Gonpo Namgyal. They were forcibly taken to Golog Prefecture headquarters.

Gonpo Namgyal tragically passed away on 18 December 2024 after suffering severe torture and inhuman treatment by the Chinese police for over seven months while in detention. As reported by the source, Gonpo Namgyal was released from detention after becoming ill, but within three days of his release he passed away. During the preparation of his body for cremation at the Traling Monastery’s crematory, many of his internal organs were discovered to have been burned as a result of electric torture.

[…]

The Tibetan people inside Tibet’s efforts to preserve their Tibetan identity, especially the Tibetan language, despite huge threats of persecution and imprisonment from the Chinese government, are of paramount importance with the Communist government’s so-called “Chinese national unity consciousness” framework or policy, which basically meant making Chinese the dominant language by degrading Tibetan from all walks of life.

Until the Communist regime is challenged and Tibetans within Tibet are denied basic human rights as guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution and international human rights law, Tibetan identity will have a dwindling future.

Hong Kong police have offered rewards of HK$1m (£103,000; $129,000) for information leading to the arrests of six pro-democracy activists living in the UK and Canada.

Among them is Tony Chung, the former leader of a pro-independence group who fled to the UK last year.

The group - which includes a former district councillor, an actor, and a YouTuber - have been lobbying for more democracy in the territory.

[…]

Also on the wanted list is former district councillor Carmen Lau and activist Chloe Cheung. Both are based in the UK and lobby on behalf of two NGOs calling for more democracy in Hong Kong.

[…]

Ms Lau posted on [social media] that the warrant would not stop her advocacy work. She called on the UK, US and EU governments to impose sanctions on “Hong Kong human rights perpetrators”.

She also asked the British Labour government to “seriously reconsider its strategies for tackling transnational repression targeting Hong Kongers” and to look at blocking plans for a new Chinese embassy in Tower Hill.