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China's State Council Information Office on Monday issued the Report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2021. The report said the human rights situation in the US, which has a notorious record, worsened in 2021 as political manipulation led to a sharp surge in COVID-19 deaths, and shooting deaths in the country hit a new record. `
The report revealed that despite having the world's most advanced medical resources, the US has the biggest number of COVID-19 infections and deaths globally. But the US government isn't rethinking its approach and still lacks effective anti-epidemic plans. Instead, it stoked the origins-tracing of COVID-19, and has been keen on passing the buck, shifting the blame and political manipulation. `
The public security situation in the country also deteriorated and violent crimes remained prevalent. There were 693 mass shootings in 2021, up 10.1 percent from 2020. More than 44,000 people were killed in gun violence, according to the report.
US human rights violations in 2021. Graphic: GT
`
The report also highlighted the country's growing discrimination against ethnic minority groups, especially people of Asian descent with around 81 percent of Asian American adults saying violence against Asian communities is rising. `
Unilateral US actions created new humanitarian crises across the globe, the report noted. A US drone strike during US' withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan killed 10 members of an Afghan family, including seven children, among which the youngest was only two years old. `
The report pointed out that in 2021, the US public persona of "human rights defender" was totally debunked as the so-called "Summit for Democracy" under the guise of safeguarding human rights became a farce. At the 48th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, many countries blasted the US for being the "biggest destroyer" of human rights in the world and urged the country to address its own human rights violations. `
It's universally acknowledged that the US has a big human rights problem. The problem is characterized by racial discrimination, the lack of respect for the disadvantaged, the disparity between the rich and the poor, and the number of shooting deaths every year, Li Haidong, professor at the Institute of International Relations of the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Monday. `
So when the US talks about human rights issues in other countries, it must have a clear understanding of its own human rights situation, Li urged. But the tragedy is that the politicians in the country always turn a blind eye to US' poor human rights record and pretend to be "teachers on human rights" in the international community, said Li. He added that the US has no qualification and pointed out the fact is that chaos on human rights in other countries and regions have often been brought by the US. `
On the human rights issue, the US should learn to communicate with other countries and regions on an equal footing, instead of imposing its own standards on them, Li urged. `
Chinese observers also criticized the US of weaponizing human rights to smear and attack other countries and regions, saying it is a despicable act.
The sixth National Security Education Day falls on Thursday, with the Chinese national security agency releasing a series of cases related to the threat against China's political security. Experts on international intelligence and security said under the intensifying China-US competition, foreign hostile forces have increased efforts to target the political security of China rather than merely conducting regular espionage activities.
The law enforcement cases released by relevant national security agencies this year are different from the past, which specifically focus on the political security issue, including suspects who have colluded with foreign anti-China forces that try to subvert the state power. Some of them are related to the Hong Kong turmoil in 2019, which try to expand the Western-backed color revolution from the special administrative region to the mainland.
"When we talk about national security, people will normally think of foreign espionage activities that target China's military and economic intelligence. But now many recent cases show that the internal and external anti-China forces are colluding with each other," Li Wei, an expert on national security and anti-terrorism at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, told the Global Times.
"This shows that the foreign hostile forces are strengthening their efforts to promote 'color revolution', to damage the political security of our country," Li said, stressing that this has become the primary national security challenge that China is facing at the moment.
Regular espionage activities targeting military and economic intelligence aim to help relevant countries in their negotiations or competition with China, "but the color revolution that directly targets our political security is trying to harm the stability and public order in our country, so it's much more serious and destructive," said a Chinese expert on international intelligence who asked for anonymity.
Technically, a color revolution is a "smarter measure" to help Western countries, especially the US, destabilize or overthrow a country, the expert said. "After the Iraq War, the US and its allies have been more reluctant to dispatch ground troops because direct military operation will cause casualties to their soldiers and other unpredictable costs. But using social media networks, NGOs, and 'diplomats' to mobilize, train, fund and organize local people against the government will cost less and is easier to create chaos."
Humanitarian disaster: the truth of US-initiated wars
"We can see many similar cases in Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Ukraine and Belarus. The main actors in those countries are local people guided by Western proxies, and Western military forces normally serve as a supporting role, and sometimes they don't even show up," he said.
Chinese analysts said the US and its allies dare not directly launch military operations against nuclear-armed major powers, like China and Russia, or their neighboring countries. So after a series of ineffective approaches like the trade war, military pressure and propaganda stigmatization, the color revolution is being used a major tactic to disrupt China's development, and it seems like is the last card that the US can play to stop China from realizing great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
More aggression
In one case among the recently released law enforcement cases that aim to promote national security education, a student surnamed Tian who studied journalism at a university in North China's Hebei Province has become a "cub reporter" in China working for a mainstream Western media. Tian established an anti-China website in 2018 and cooked up and spread a huge amount of disinformation and political rumors.
In April 2019, Tian was invited to visit a Western country, and has engaged with more than 20 hostile foreign groups and more than a dozen officials of the host country to receive direct instruction, which requires Tian to provide "evidence" that could be used to stigmatize China. Tian's acts have seriously harmed China's political security, and he was arrested in June 2019, according to information provided by state security agencies.
Li said this is a typical case of the US and Western anti-China forces infiltrating and inciting Chinese students and using them to serve the ideological warfare against China.
"Working for Western media outlets is not a problem, but if using the profession of a journalist as a cover to conduct activities to harm national security is a crime," Li said, noting that not all employees in Western media outlets are spies, but there are some Western journalists backed by Western politicians and intelligence agencies.
In cooking-up rumors about "genocide" and "forced labor" in China's Xinjiang, Western media are playing an important role, Li noted. "Just like this case, those 'journalists' are receiving funding and training in other countries, and implementing the tactic of anti-China politicians to destabilize China."
.
On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at the routine press conference that in 2020, the US ambassador to Turkey met with the head of the local ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement) branch.
The ETIM, or Turkistan Islamic Party, is an extremist, terrorist and separatist organization that challenges China's sovereignty and stability in Xinjiang. The UN Security Council Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee has listed ETIM as a terrorist organization since 2002.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry played a video segment at the press conference, which showed Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, revealing in a 2015 interview that "a lot of these people are taken out (from Xinjiang) by the Gladio operatives...they are trained, they are armed and then they are sent back."
Putting things together, one cannot help but wonder, what did the US ambassador to Turkey talk about with the head of anti-China force? What is Operation Gladio? Does the US intend to cause trouble in Xinjiang?" Zhao said.
According to the released information, in the past, some arrested former senior officials in Xinjiang said they even colluded with foreign separatist forces to conduct or tolerate terrorist attacks in the region, and use textbooks with extremist content in local schools, which brought serious damage to the national unity and political security.
Hong Kong frontline
Hong Kong is another frontline of China's national security and political security. Since the national security law for Hong Kong took effect in June 2020, foreign forces behind months-long anti-government riots in the city since June 2019 have begun to waver, given that offenders would face severe sentences — as high as life imprisonment. The law would also cut off "the invisible hands" behind the chaos caused by foreign troublemakers, experts said.
It's not surprising to many that Western forces used Hong Kong's open city status to incite color revolution through various channels, including media outlets, student unions, political parties and labor unions by funding, training, advising them or organizing illegal assemblies, protests and riots, all tactics that could be found in the 2019 turmoil.
The implementation of the national security law helped Hong Kong restore social order, plugging the loopholes in local security laws, Chris Tang Ping-keung, Commissioner of Police, told the Global Times on Wednesday, as the law has been functioning as an effective deterrence to those lawbreakers who endanger national security.
Since the implementation of the national security law for Hong Kong, 100 people have been arrested by the Hong Kong Police Force for suspected of endangering national security, Tang said.
Safeguarding national security is regarded as the top priority for the Commissioner of Police for 2021, which is also among the top four tasks for the HKPF. The police team will continue collecting and analyzing national security-related intelligence, investigating in criminal cases endangering national security and conducting intelligence-driven operations to prevent acts endangering the national security, Tang noted.
"The HKPF will also enhance cooperation with all institutions and stakeholders in safeguarding national security and earn more public trust and support," he said.
To facilitate public participation in safeguarding national security, the HKPF national security department has launched a hotline for reporting relevant non-emergency cases since November 5, 2020.
Nasty acts will backfire
Apart from targeting Xinjiang and Hong Kong which are traditional geopolitical hotspots, foreign hostile forces are also keen to use issues like LGBT, feminism and environmentalism which are easy to stir heated discussions on social media via disinformation and rumors to create problems by instigating conflicts between specific groups in China, said the anonymous expert on international intelligence.
Fortunately, this kind of practice is unable to cause a significant impact or escalate into a massive color revolution, since with the modernization and development of China, the majority of Chinese netizens are able to discuss these issues with a mature and reasonable attitude, and legal civil organizations on LGBT or environment protection will distance themselves from hostile foreign intervention, the expert said.
"Those extremists backed by Western forces have been marginalized in our society and their illegal activities online and offline will be managed and controlled effectively by relevant law-enforcement agencies," he noted.
Ironically, the US has found that some of its approaches to push color revolution worldwide could backfire, and the rise of Trumpism and intensifying Black Lives Matter movement and the Capitol Hill riot have seriously undermined its image and credibility when it tries to promote color revolutions in other countries, the expert said.
International cooperation
The Western-backed color revolution is a common threat faced by China and many countries including Russia, and countries in Central Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. So defending political security now also requires international cooperation, analysts said.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at a press conference after his meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in March that the two countries will jointly oppose color revolutions and safeguard their national sovereignty and political security.
"Fighting color revolutions is an important task for China and Russia to not just protect themselves but also safeguard regional peace and stability. The two countries could cooperate on intelligence sharing, joint operations against Western illegal NGOs that would create disinformation to hype instability and cybersecurity," Yang Jin, an expert at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times
People march in downtown Montreal, Canada during a demonstration against anti-Asian racism on March 21, 2021 [Andrej
Children attend a March 17 vigil at Clemente Park in Lowell, Massachusetts, for the victims of the shooting spree in Atlanta.
Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Imageshttps://theconversation.com/racism-is-behind-anti-asian-american-violence-even-when-its-not-a-hate-crime-157487
MY sister and her husband, both senior citizens, are very cautious about going out.
It’s not just because of Covid-19. It’s because they fear being victims of a hate crime in their country for simply being Chinese. The country? Australia.
Which is ironic because they made the difficult decision to leave Malaysia 30 years ago to give their children a better future in a nation they believed would play fair and recognise talent with no quota system based on race.
But anti-Asian sentiments are making headlines everywhere as the number of attacks on people who look “chinky” rise alarmingly in many Western countries.
A study on police records in 16 of the largest American cities showed hate crimes increased 150% against Asian people in 2020. The latest is the March 16 attack on three Atlanta spas that killed six Asian-American women.
In the UK, hate crimes toward Chinese, East and South-East Asians rose 300% in just the first quarter of 2020. In Vancouver, Canada, the number rose from a mere dozen in 2019 to 142 in 2020, a 717% increase.
And an Australian National University survey of more than 3,000 people found 85% of Asian Australians reported at least one instance of discrimination between January and October last year.
My sister and her husband live in Sydney and being sensible people, they wear their face masks whenever they venture out. That has earned them brushes with white idiots who come up to them and deliberately cough in their faces.
The pandemic, because of its assumed origins in China, has brought out latent, long-simmering resentment, prejudice, even jealousy towards Asians in Western countries.
Asian immigrants, notably the Chinese, because of their capacity for hard work and determination to succeed, created backlashes wherever they landed in droves.
The United States and Australia treated the Chinese badly. Brought in to work on building America’s railroads, they were accused of stealing jobs from the whites. Chinese gold miners in Australia faced the same accusation. Both countries enacted anti-Chinese immigration laws; the US Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the White Australia Policy of 1901 to 1911.
The second half of the 20th century was a better time for Asians in the West with the rise of human and minority rights but racism never completely went away.
Emboldened by former president Donald Trump’s four years of insane leadership, the racists in America wormed their way out of the woodwork to wreak havoc on the country’s race relations, particularly in the treatment of black Americans.
Covid-19 gave them the perfect ammunition to revive old hatred towards Chinese people and fuel resentment against China’s rise as a superpower. Since they can’t tell us apart, all East Asians are attacked.
The hate crimes spurred The Washington Post to look at past episodes of a similar nature. One was the 1900 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco in which the Chinese community was made the scapegoat:
“It is likely that the outbreak began with a ship from Australia, but since the first stateside victim was a Chinese immigrant, the whole community was blamed for it. The episode was a prelude to the racism that has been aimed at Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic... Trump frequently called it ‘the China virus, ’ ‘the Wuhan virus, ’ and the ‘Kung Flu’.”
What hit me hard was what theconversation.com had to say:
“Research has found that most Americans assume a person of Asian descent is foreign-born, unless there is some aspect of their appearance that clearly marks them as American – such as being overweight.” (This is hilarious, I must say.)
“Asian Americans of all types experience this perception of being ‘forever foreigners’ in a wide range of ways. Regardless of whether some or all – or none – of these latest assaults on Asian Americans are proved to be hate crimes or not, race plays a historic role.”
“Forever foreigners”. Now doesn’t that make you think of how Malaysian Chinese (and Indians) are forever called pendatang? Indeed, race plays a huge role in our history too, and still does.
It was just last month that HRH Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar felt the need to say that where Johor is concerned, the Chinese are not pendatang but guests invited in by his forefathers dating back to the 16th century to help develop the state.
“They are the ‘Bangsa Johor’ – just like the Malays, Indians and others, who are all Malaysians, ” he was quoted as saying in the interview with Sunday Star (“’The Chinese are not pendatang’”, Feb 21; online at bit.ly/star_chinese).
That was a nice gesture but as Sabahan anthropologist Dr Vilashini Somiah writes in The Evolution of Pendatang on newnaratif.com, the word meaning immigrant, which was originally neutral and without political insinuations, has evolved since the late 1970s to become derogatory and disparaging.
She says the word has been weaponised and “Today, pendatang is used by Malaysian politicians as an exclusionary tool of identity politics” and as a divisive and exclusionary insult by members of the public.
As an example, Dr Somiah recounts the 2010 incident in which a school head called all non-Muslim students “pendatang” and told them to “balik” (return) to their “country”.
That same taunt to go back to China was thrown at Asians in Western countries since the start of the pandemic. We have had none of that in our part of the world.
I did not fear being spat at or coughed on by fellow non-Chinese Malaysians. For once, in a country that is obsessed with race and where every form requires us to state our ethnicity, that did not seem to matter in the fight against the coronavirus.
Malaysians have been fortunate that no major racial riots have taken place since May 13,1969, but the reality is, our race relations have been fraying for decades.
Time and time again, certain politicians have shamelessly alluded to the possibility of another May 13 whenever they felt the need to warn “immigrant” Malaysians not to be too demanding of their rights.
The anxiety my sister feels now in Australia will surely pass and hopefully they remain safe from harm. But this ugly period will not make them regret their decision to emigrate. After all, their sacrifices paid off as their children are doing very well in Sydney.
The most important thing is racism is no longer institutionalised or legitimised in that country.
Australia has laws that make it a crime to discriminate on the basis of age, disability, race and sex in certain areas of public life, including education and employment.
Even that is not seen to be enough after the spate of pandemic-induced racist attacks and there are calls now to “simplify and strengthen Australia’s racial discrimination and vilification processes... to properly protect victims”.
On the other hand, in Malaysia, where it has long been recognised that racial polarisation has increased while racial and religious tolerance has ebbed, the previous short-lived government did plan to table a Religious and Racial Hatred Act to curb the growing number of such cases, particularly on social media.
Back in 2018, the then Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department (Religion) Mujahid Yusof Rawa said the law was to “ensure that our multi-religious and multiracial society is protected from being insulted and belittled”.
But in August 2020, Perikatan Nasional’s National Unity Minister Datuk Halimah Mohamed Sadique told the Dewan Rakyat that there would be no new law as existing ones are able to look after interracial and religious harmony in the country.
I wish I could believe she’s right but as a born and bred Malaysian of Chinese descent who has no desire to call anywhere else home, I think more can be done.
For one, I would like to see calling someone like me a pendatang forever banished.
The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.
The Xinjiang regional government on Tuesday condemned
the EU sanctions, calling the lie-based sanctions using the excuse of
"human rights" pure interference in China's internal affairs.
A growing number of Chinese individuals, angry with
some Western media outlets' frequent attacks on China, are standing up
to fight against the Western media's propaganda war that targets China,
and especially their baseless smear campaign on China's COVID-19
response ...
Climate of fear: Anti-Asian hate crimes and harassment have risen to historic levels during the Covid-19 pandemic. — AFP
“IT’S wrong, it’s un-American and it must stop”, President Joe Biden called out the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the pandemic on Thursday.
“Too often, we’ve turned against one another, ” the president said, denouncing the “vicious hate crimes against Asian Americans, who have been attacked, harassed, blamed and scapegoated.”
Biden noted that the attacks are happening despite the fact that “so many of them, our fellow Americans, ” are health care workers working on the front lines of the pandemic.
“And still, still, they are forced to live in fear for their lives, just walking down streets in America, ” he said.
Many on social media were quick to thank Biden for addressing the issue, saying that “words matter, ” and compared his rhetoric to that of former President Trump, who referred to Covid-19 as “China virus, ” among other derogatory terms.
Although this was not the first time Biden had highlighted it – in his first week in office Biden had issued a memo condemning racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders – this wave of violence had remained relatively low profile because it didn’t fit neatly into the standard narrative of race in America.
As Korean American writer Jay Caspian Kang put it in his article in The New York Times, many people don’t realise that Asian Americans comprise people of different ethnic backgrounds “who do not speak the same language and, in many cases, dislike one another.”
Then there is the perception of racial violence in the US as "simply black and white", he added: “What doesn’t exist now is a language to discuss what happens when the attackers caught on video happen to be black.”
There is also a problem of tracking these crimes, which are believed to be under-reported by victims wary of dealing with the police or contributing to the criminalisation of African Americans.
A new report published this week found that while hate crimes fell overall by 7% in 2020, Asian Americans experienced a 150% surge in attacks.
In July 2020, there were more than 2,100 anti-Asian American hate incidents that were directly related to the pandemic. According to Stop AAPI Hate, a tracker supported by Asian American advocacy groups, many of the incidents they tracked included a perpetrator using language similar to Trump’s.
Question of identity
Kiwi Wongpeng was stopping at a traffic light in suburban Cleveland when a man pulled up beside her and motioned for her to roll down the window.
“Get out of my country – that’s an order!” he shouted from his pickup. After a pause, he added: “I’ll kill you.”
It wasn’t her first brush with racism. But she had never heard something so direct and violent until last April, as cities around the country were shutting down amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The man, she believed, must have mistaken her for Chinese and blamed her for the virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China.
“I’ve felt scared for not just myself, but my community and Asians all over this country, ” said Wongpeng, 34, whose family immigrated to the US from Thailand 20 years ago and runs a Thai restaurant.
Anti-Asian hate crimes climbed in 15 of the 16 cities in the past year, with New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle and San Jose experiencing the most significant increases and their highest tallies in at least five years.
Chinese and Korean restaurants vandalised with anti-Asian epithets and stereotypes – “stop eating dogs, ” said the graffiti on a New York noodle shop. Elderly Asian Americans were shoved on the street in broad daylight. And a Burmese refugee and his children were attacked by a man with a knife.
Brian Levin, director of the Cal State center, described the growth in hatred as one of “historic significance for the nation.”
“Opinion polls, derisive online activity, harassment and crime data have converged to show a vast spread and increase in aggressive behavior toward Asian Americans, ” he said.
In New York, where the number of anti-Asian hate crimes jumped from three to 28, all but four were related to the coronavirus. Many of the 2020 incidents in New York – and across the country – occurred in the early days of the pandemic, when fears ran highest.
That February, an Asian American woman wearing a face mask in a Manhattan subway station was kicked and punched by a man who called her “diseased.”
In March, an Asian American man walking with his 10-year-old son was followed and hit over the head by a stranger who assailed him for not wearing a mask.
In April, an Asian American woman in the Bronx was attacked on a bus by a woman and three teenage girls who hit her with an umbrella and accused her of starting the pandemic.
“There’s no question about it: All Asians feel extra vulnerable because the attacks have definitely increased, ” said Don Lee, a community activist in Brooklyn. “The harassment, the pushing, the shoving.”
The most comprehensive national data on hate crimes comes from the FBI, which defines them as offenses “against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity.”
The FBI, which relies on voluntary submissions from law enforcement agencies, is not expected to publish figures for 2020 until November. But all indications suggest it will prove to be a record year for hate crimes targeting Asians.
While most of what is known so far comes from major police departments that have released their own data, Levin said that some of the worst anti-Asian hate crimes occurred in smaller cities – including the attack on the Burmese refugee and his two sons.
Last March, 34-year-old Bawi Cung was grocery shopping at a Sam’s Club in Midland, Texas, when a man grabbed a knife from a nearby rack. Cung was slashed on his face, his 3-year-old was stabbed in the back, and his 6-year-old was stabbed in the face. A Sam’s Club employee intervened, tackling the suspect, 19-year-old Jose Gomez, who was indicted on hate crime and attempted murder charges and is awaiting trial.
“Gomez admitted, he confessed to trying to kill the family, ” said Midland Dist. Atty. Laura Nodolf.
“He thought that they brought the virus here and were trying to spread it” and that “all Asians must be from China.”
“Most people think hate crime, white sheets, white hats, going after someone who is of African descent, ” she said. “This is a whole new dynamic.”
The police department data do not include harassment, which has been vastly more common but is not considered criminal.
Stop AAPI Hate logged 1,990 anti-Asian harassment incidents and 246 assault cases in the 10 months after its launch in March 2020. The victims who Stop AAPI Hate tracked were largely Chinese Americans – 40% – and Korean Americans – 15%.
“That and victim statements tell us that people are likely targeting people who they believe are from China. Covid-19 did not start in Korea, but racists aren’t always accurate, ” stated Stop AAPI Hate.
Historical hatred
Anne Anlin Cheng, a professor of English and American studies at Princeton, believes there is a historical root to the anti-Asian violence spike in the past year.
“This recent onslaught of anti-Asian violence can partly be attributed to former president Trump, who spoke non-stop of the ‘Chinese virus’, but he could not have rallied the kind of hatred that he did without this country’s long history of systemic and cultural racism against people of Asian descent, ” she wrote in The New York Times.
She pointed out that Asian-Americans exist in “a weird but convenient lacuna in American politics and culture.”
If they register at all on the national consciousness, it is either as a foreign threat (the Yellow Peril, the Asian Tiger, the Spy, the Disease Vector) or as the domestic but ultimately disposable prism for deflecting or excusing racism against other minorities, she noted.
What many are not aware of is that our histories are more entangled than how we tell them, she said.
Few people know that many of the same families that amassed wealth through slavery also profited from the opium trade in China, she explained.
“Or that at least 17 Chinese residents were the targeted victims of one of the worst mass lynchings in American history in Los Angeles’ ‘Negro Alley’ in 1871; or that America’s immigration policy and ideas of citizenship were built on top of laws like the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese labourers from immigrating to the US for 10 years.”
Mari Cobb, a 26-year-old immunology and genomics research lab technician at the University of Chicago, said she has watched in dismay as hatred even hit her. Her mother is Japanese American, and her father is white, which she said is how people usually see her.
This January at a Taco Bell, she was refilling her cup at the soda dispenser when a man approached her.
“The Oriental touched the dispenser!” he yelled. “Stop her! She started this whole thing!”
The reference to Covid-19 was clear.
Cobb later shared her story on Instagram, and eventually it was featured on standagainsthatred.org, a testimonials site launched recently by the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
“Growing up, my mom told me this could happen, ” Cobb said. “But I think my white privilege has prevented me from experiencing a lot.”
In an era of growing activism against racism, she said that concern shouldn’t be limited to Black and Latino communities.
“There’s been an increase in more people trying to actively become anti-racist, and I think that’s great, but I also think you need to include Asian people in that conversation.” — Los Angeles Times/TNS/Agencies
Trump Is ‘Blaming Black And Brown People For Covid-19 Surge
https://youtu.be/HNxfYf_1ud8
Joe speaks with Jason Johnson, Morgan State University professor of Politics & Journalism, about ‘sending our kids to slaughter’ at schools in infection hotspots such as Florida and Georgia, and Trump’s racist theory that Black Lives Matter protests and Mexico border crossings are to blame for the coronavirus surge. Aired on 07/23/2020.
The U.S. hit another grim milestone on Thursday as thee number
of total confirmed cases of COVID-19 passed four million, with data
showing it only took 16 days to go from three million to four million,
with the average number of new cases now rising by more than 2,600 every
hour. Deaths are also increasing, with Florida and Texas each reporting
record one-day increases in the number of new deaths.
Trump US President Donald Trump. REUTERS/Leah Millis. File Photo
Donald Trump has 100 days from Sunday to save his presidency, while the US tries to avoid a collective nervous breakdown ahead of one of the most divisive, tension-filled elections in US history.
Coronavirus is ravaging the economy, adding to a death toll already above 140,000, while undermining national trust in government institutions.
Add explosive protests against racism and police brutality, leftist-led riots, flourishing right-wing conspiracy theories and the spectre of Russian meddling — and you have a country more on edge than at any time since the cataclysmic 1960s.
At the centre is Trump, a man who boasts he never tires of “winning” yet faces possible humiliation on November 3.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden, whom Trump derides as weak and mentally incompetent, leads by double digits in some polls.
Trump is 74, Biden 77 — a matchup of two elderly white men seemingly out of step with 2020s uprisings against racism and sexism.
One is a billionaire born into privilege; the other, with three decades in the Senate and two terms as vice-president under Barack Obama, the epitome of the professional politician.
Trump vs Biden will deliver all the upheaval a confused US electorate can stomach.
Trump’s pitch boils down to claiming Biden will have Americans “cowering to radical left-wing mobs”.
Biden says he’s fighting for “the soul of America”.
On Thursday, Trump cancelled the traditional Republican convention planned in Florida in August due to coronavirus concerns.
The Democrats scrapped theirs weeks ago.
Polls give Biden an advantage nationally and strong leads in swing states.
Congressional Democrats, who already control the House, are eyeing recapture of the Senate.
Many incumbents in Trump’s predicament might at this point start planning their post-presidential libraries.
Trump presides over mass unemployment triggered by the coronavirus shutdown, racial unrest and a growing crisis of confidence.
On coronavirus, polls show two-thirds of Americans have no faith in his leadership.
Trump, with approval ratings stuck in the low 40% range, is the first president to seek re-election after impeachment.
Yet no-one counts him out.
Belittled in 2016, he defeated all the top Republican establishment names for the nomination, then came from behind to defeat Hillary Clinton.
Trump believes he still has the secret sauce.
“I’m not losing, because those are fake polls,” he insisted last weekend.
“They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake.”
Biden is running his campaign from his Delaware home, with no rallies, few media interviews and even rarer press conferences.
Biden is able to sit back and watch Trump lurch ever deeper into self-inflicted troubles.
Until the onset of Covid-19 and the economic downturn, Trump was on a roll.
His then confident campaign manager Brad Parscale described the Republican re-election team in May as the “Death Star” in the Star Wars movies and tweeted they were about to press the “fire” button.
Today, that vaunted machine resembles a misfiring rocket.
Trump’s mass rallies have fizzled due to health risks, while his trademark bravado and name-calling sit less easily in a country shaken by death and economic misery. — AFP
China has ordered the US to shut its consulate in
Chengdu, Southwest China's Sichuan Province, in retaliation for the US
asking to close China's Consulate General in Houston, the Chinese
Foreign Ministry said on Friday, which analysts have called “an
equivalent and reciprocal countermeasure.”
US federal agents and local law enforcement entered
China's consulate compound in Houston after it was forced to close on
Friday local time, according to CNN reports. Several SUVs, trucks, two
white vans and a locksmith's van entered the property, CNN reported
