No Gaza ceasefire until Israel war aims achieved, Netanyahu says

His [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s] statement comes after US President Joe Biden announced Israel had proposed a three-stage plan to Hamas aimed at reaching a permanent ceasefire.

You wouldn’t trust the Chinese supplier (or any supplier). You’d go to the bauxite shipment company and let them register with the network, you’d send independent auditors to their premises, very much as we do it with ibdependent audits nowadays.

We do need to physically access the premises across the supply chain to verify that ‘on-chain personas’ reflect their ‘real’ identities. But no single authority can control the data, we can be quite sure that all transfers of ownership across the supply chain have been authorized by their controllers. Compared to centralized systems, the blockchain provides us a much higher level of transparency and certainty over the fidelity of the information.

there’s no way tovtrack where resources, material, items come from, who made them

Independent audits are done -they are very common in many industry for a variety of reasons- and they work if done properly.

We could even track the provenance of each material through a trustless system like a blockchain to guarantuee a high level of credibility and transparency, just to name a relatively new technology. This is done already.

They have been already managing that for a long time. Independent audits are common - except in a few countries.

That’s strange. I can see the video at the top of the page, just before the text begins.

In addition to the other comments, the EU is considering to alter its decision-making process and implementing a majority vote (at the moment every single counrty must agree to a decision). That could significantly reduce the risks brought by countries like Hungary and Slovakia.

What do we understand by genocide?

The Encoclopedia Britannica says:

Genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”) …

Tibetan children are separated from their families at a very young age and sent to state-run boarding ‘schools’ where they have to complete a “compulsory education” curriculum in the Mandarin Chinese language, with no access to traditional or culturally-relevant learning.

Forced sterilization of Tibetan women.

Individuals advocating for Tibetan language and education are persecuted.

Rounding up hundreds of thousands of innocent Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other minorities in military-style reeducation camps where they are forced to work.

More can be found, for examples, in the report on 100 atrocities of CCP in Tibet (pdf)

There’s is many more across the web.

Forced labour in Chinese prisons isn’t limited to Xinjiang, nor to the car industry. A lot products we use in Europe and North America and elsewhere around the globe are made by Chinese prisoners forced to work under catastrophic conditions.

There is strong evidence for this provided by many independent sources, among them a documentary by Arte (a French-German media outlet). If interested:

Forced Labour - SOS from a Chinese Prisoner – (documentary, 95 min.)

A desperate cry for help written in Chinese was discovered in a pregnancy test sold in France and made in a Chinese factory. It revealed a hidden world of Chinese prison-companies where prisoners are forced to work for 15 hour days manufacturing products for export. This documentary tries to find out who wrote the letter.

(And, yes, prison labour exists also in the U.S., and it is as evil, but this doesn’t make the autocratic Chinese government any better.)

This is maybe a good idea. What would an emoji analysis tell us about a network? 😃

In addition to whst @taanegl already said:

Hong Kong’s Freedoms: What China Promised and How It’s Cracking Down

Before the British government handed over Hong Kong in 1997, China agreed to allow the region considerable political autonomy for fifty years under a framework known as “one country, two systems.”

In recent years, Beijing has cracked down on Hong Kong’s freedoms, stoking mass protests in the city and drawing international criticism.

Beijing imposed a national security law in 2020 that gave it broad new powers to punish critics and silence dissenters, which has fundamentally altered life for Hong Kongers.

Beijing had been chipping away at Hong Kong’s freedoms since the handover, experts say. Over the years, its attempts to impose more control over the city have sparked mass protests, which have in turn led the Chinese government to crack down further.

In the years following the 2014 protests, Beijing and the Hong Kong government stepped up efforts to rein in dissent, including by prosecuting protest leaders, expelling several new legislators, and increasing media censorship.

Yes, there is strong evidence for these practices. Safeguard Defenders, a rights group, published a comprehensive reports on that issues, for example on China’s Consular Volunteers (November 2023):

For at least a decade, PRC Embassies and Consulates have been running consular volunteers in countries around the world. These have been seemingly undeclared to most host nations.

[…]

The network runs through United Front-linked associations and individuals and shows the involvement of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (OCAO), on which a January 2022 Federal Canadian Court decision upheld labeling as an entity that engages in espionage and acts contrary to Canada’s interests with concerns over “OCAO’s interactions with the overseas Chinese communities, the information gathered, and the intended use of the gathered information”.

Everyone interested can find more at https://safeguarddefenders.com and across the web.

Yes, but not only in Africa. There’s a comprehensive report by Safeguard Defenders from 2022, but you’ll find more, just search for something like ‘chinese illegal police stations’ as already suggested.

Just two examples:

China responsible for ‘serious human rights violations’ in Xinjiang province: UN human rights report

A long-awaited report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) into what China refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) has concluded that “serious human rights violations” against the Uyghur and “other predominantly Muslim communities” have been committed.

Rights experts warn against forced separation of Uyghur children in China

Forced separations and language policies for Uyghur and other minority Muslim children at State-run boarding schools in China’s Xinjiang region carry the risk of forced assimilation, three UN independent human rights experts said on Tuesday.

What is a source you trust when it comes to China?

The report cites Latvia’s public broadcaster LSM, but you’ll find a lot of other sources (although at least some of them refer to LSM, too, or other media sources).

Charter97 is a Belarusian rights organization calling for democratic reforms in the country.

French lawmakers officially recognise China’s treatment of Uyghurs as ‘genocide’ — (2022)

France’s parliament on Thursday denounced a “genocide” by China against its Uyghur Muslim population […] The non-binding resolution, adopted with 169 votes in favour and just one against […] reads that the National Assembly “officially recognises the violence perpetrated by the People’s Republic of China against the Uyghurs as constituting crimes against humanity and genocide”.

It also calls on the French government to undertake “the necessary measures within the international community and in its foreign policy towards the People’s Republic of China” to protect the minority group in the Xinjiang region.

An example how the Chinese government is using espionage in its own country.

10 ‘spy’ cases China’s Ministry of State Security wants you to know about

In most of the world 15 April goes unnoticed. But in China, 15 April is Chinese National Security Education Day.

To mark the occasion, China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) posted a half-hour video on their official WeChat channel titled “Innovation Leads · Forging the Sword of National Security”. WeChat is China’s dominant social media app. Chinese and foreign media also covered the program’s release.

Here is an alternative link to the video posted in the article: https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=z8qdFHT9t3k

I fully agree. One of my former colleagues once said that the only thing which is worse than the capitalism we have in the west is the early-stage capitalism in China.

Microsoft faces bipartisan criticism in the U.S. for alleged censorship on Bing in China

Microsoft is the subject of growing criticism in the US over allegations that its Bing search engine censors results for users in China that relate to sensitive subjects the state wants blocked.

Republican Senator Marco Rubio has added his voice to criticism of the Redmond software giant for reportedly removing search results from Bing on human rights, democracy, climate change, and other sticky issues within China.

The move follows an earlier call from Democrat Senator Mark Warner for Microsoft to consider shutting off access to Bing in China for the same reasons after a report from Bloomberg claimed the platform was excluding information on certain topics to satisfy Beijing.

Rubio said there was “no defending” such actions, and that “every company doing business in China makes concessions to a genocidal, authoritarian regime.”

Well, maybe plus a portion of George Orwell.