Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola Lobby To Preserve Slavery of Uighurs by Communist China

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Major American corporations are flexing their Washington influence to fight legislation reeling towards the president’s desk that curbs their ability to profit off Chinese slave labor.

According to the New York Times on Sunday, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple have deployed their teams of lobbyists to push back on a bill prohibiting product imports manufactured in China using forced labor. The bill, Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, passed overwhelmingly in the House with bipartisan support 406-3, is expected to be signed by President Donald Trump or a President Biden next year if approved by the Senate.

Company lobbyists, the Times reported based on discussions with congressional staff and lobbying records, have been working Capitol Hill to weaken the legislation arguing that if passed, it could put excessive stress on supply chains. Targeted provisions include mandates to prove at customs products were made without forced labor and public disclosure requirements documenting ties to Xinjiang, where millions of Uyghur Muslims have been subject to religious persecution, including slavery.

“China’s detainment of Uyghur Muslims and their use of forced labor is an absolute travesty,” Colorado Republican Congressman Ken Buck told The Federalist. “No American company should be lobbying against a bill to end slave labor or relying on slave labor to make their products, no less.”

(Read more from “Apple, Nike, Coca-Cola Lobby To Preserve Slavery of Uighurs by Communist China” HERE)

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195 Million Chinese Students Are in School. Why Aren’t Our Kids?

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Right now in China, 195 million students K-12 are learning in-person in Chinese public schools. Meanwhile, millions of American public school students are learning in a failed remote system that can’t even keep track of thousands of students who haven’t shown up for class all year. . .

Most parents and students already know that online learning is not working. A look at recent headlines says it all: “Coronavirus: Failing grades spike in Bay Area schools with distance learning,” “25% of Wake middle and high school students failed a class during remote learning,” “Remote learning increases failing grades by 83 percent in Fairfax county,” and “5000 Alabama students haven’t shown up for any sort of class.”

Yes, the way China manages in-person schooling is authoritarian. The Communist Party keeps watch, making sure teachers are following a detailed hygiene protocol. Local officials routinely inspect classrooms, and the government uses apps and other technology to monitor students and staff, and restrict their movements. It has even instructed parents to stay away from their children.

But Americans have also been very compliant with overreaching COVID regulations. When school was open, singing was banned and kids were forced to wear masks while playing basketball or attending outdoor football practices, until finally many were shut down entirely. Americans have for too long put up with hypocritical governors and public health officials who violate their own rules.

The difference between us and the Chinese is what we value. The Chinese Communist government understands that an educated population is key to global economic dominance, so they have prioritized keeping schools open, which the science has proven can be done safely. Meanwhile, in the U.S. we have closed our schools, but have deemed pot dispensaries, liquor stores, abortion clinics, and strip clubs “essential.” (Read more from “195 Million Chinese Students Are in School. Why Aren’t Our Kids?” HERE)

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Judge Jails 6 Americans Who Were Lured to Venezuela

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A Venezuela judge convicted and immediately sentenced six U.S. oil executives who had been charged with corruption and have been detained for more than three years.

The judge sentenced each of the six executives to eight years imprisonment on Thursday evening, The Associated Press reported. The executives, who work for Houston-based and Venezuela state-owned oil company Citgo, had been lured to the South American country in November 2017 for a business meeting, but were jailed instead.

“During the trial, the truth has proven undeniable,” one of the executives, Tomeu Vadell wrote prior to the verdict in a letter provided to The AP. “It proves that I am innocent.”

However, Venezuela’s chief prosecutor told The AP before Thursday’s verdict that investigators had discovered “serious evidence” of wrongdoing.

“The Citgo case has developed normally during all the stages established by the Venezuelan criminal process,” the chief prosecutor said in a statement, according to The AP.

(Read more from “Judge Jails 6 Americans Who Were Lured to Venezuela” HERE)

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UK Govt: Lockdown Likely to Last 12+ Months, ‘Hard Winter’ Coming, Repeated Vaccinations May Be Required

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Lockdowns won’t end until anticipated vaccines “come to our aid” in the future and the country can expect a “hard winter”, the Prime Minister has said, as the government’s science advisor warned it is quite possible the coronavirus will simply mutate to outperform vaccinations.

Speaking at the Downing Street press conference hours after the details of the new post-lockdown-lockdown were revealed to the country, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made clear to the nation that there was no reasonable hope of lockdown ending soon, saying merely that there was “reason to hope” that spring would see an end of “this era of restrictions”.

Given the United Kingdom’s regime of lockdowns began in March 2020, it stands to reason that the Prime Ministers remarks confirm that the nation’s lockdown will be in place with varying degrees of intensity for at least a full calendar year.

As England emerges from the so-called second lockdown running into early December and heads straight into tighter-than-before tiered regional lockdowns, the Prime Minister also teased that things stand to get worse before they improve. Johnson said: “to get there we must first navigate a hard winter, when the burden on our NHS is heaviest, and cold weather favours the virus… If we ease off now, we risk losing control all over again.” . . .

Yet subsequent comments by the science experts flanking the Prime Minister at Thursday’s conference made clear that the arrival of a vaccine would not necessarily herald the end of Covid-19 as repeat vaccinations may, in the eyes of the government, be required in return for allowing society to re-establish itself. (Read more from “UK Govt: Lockdown Likely to Last 12+ Months, ‘Hard Winter’ Coming, Repeated Vaccinations May Be Required” HERE)

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Chinese President Pushes for Global Tracking System

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Chinese President Xi Jinping is pushing for a global tracking system using QR codes to monitor people and any potential exposure to the coronavirus, which originated in China.

“China mandated the widespread use of QR-based health certificates earlier this year. The system, which uses an electronic barcode to store a person’s travel and health history, has been credited with helping to curb the spread of the virus,” CNN reported. “The code issues users with a color code based on their potential exposure to the novel coronavirus. The colors are like traffic lights — green is safest, then amber and finally red.”

Xi, who has religious minorities locked up in concentration camps, made the remarks at the virtual G20 leaders’ meeting on Saturday, saying [emphasis added]:

While containing the virus, we need to restore the secure and smooth operation of global industrial and supply chains. We need to reduce tariffs and barriers, and explore the liberalization of trade of key medical supplies. We need to further harmonize policies and standards and establish “fast tracks” to facilitate the orderly flow of personnel. China has proposed a global mechanism on the mutual recognition of health certificates based on nucleic acid test results in the form of internationally accepted QR codes. We hope more countries will join this mechanism. We also support the G20 in carrying out institutionalized cooperation and building global cooperation networks to facilitate the flow of personnel and goods.

(Read more from “Chinese President Pushes for Global Tracking System” HERE)

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State Department Says Anti-American Educators Undermine U.S. Efforts to Counter China

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The United States’ ability to counter the rise of China is being undermined by anti-American attitudes in the education system, according to a new State Department report outlining a longterm strategy to compete with China.

The agency said Americans need to be educated about the strategic threat that Beijing poses to U.S. interests and called for government officials and the public to have access to English translations of Chinese Communist Party speeches. Such an effort, according to the State Department, could be undermined by high school and college systems that are hostile to America’s founding principles and history.

“America’s grade schools, middle schools, high schools, and colleges and universities have to a dismaying degree abandoned well-rounded presentations of America’s founding ideas and constitutional traditions in favor of propaganda aimed at vilifying the nation,” the paper reads. “In the face of these polarizing forces, the United States must reclaim its own legacy of liberty.”

Rachelle Peterson, a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, called the State Department’s assessment of American education “spot on.” Young people raised with a “biased, disfigured teaching of our own history” will be “receptive to Chinese propaganda,” according to Peterson.

“For years, students have been taught American history as an unbroken chain of violated promises, ignoring the groundbreaking work Americans have done to advance the cause of personal liberty and individual responsibility,” Peterson said. “Is it any wonder that students, convinced America is inherently bigoted, find Chinese propaganda persuasive?” (Read more from “State Department Says Anti-American Educators Undermine U.S. Efforts to Counter China” HERE)

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Terrorists Turn to New, High-Tech Weapon for Attacks

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Middle East terrorists are turning to drones, making the technology a “clear security threat around the world.”

The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported Israel has intercepted repeated attempts by terror factions to fly drones into its air space.

“But that doesn’t mean its adversaries have given up on using the tool, or that they aren’t further developing their drone attack capability,” the report said.

The Israel Defense Forces handle threats from outside the nation while the police respond to drone threats from inside.

“A milestone incident underscoring the growing reliance on drones by radical actors came on Sept. 14, 2019, when a swarm of Iranian military attack drones crashed into Saudi oil installations, together with cruise missiles,” the report said. “Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil and natural gas company was forced to suspend 50 percent of its oil production in the aftermath. For the Islamic Republic, it was an exhibition of its new attack capabilities, and a message meant to cow Iran’s Sunni-Arab state rivals.” (Read more from “Terrorists Turn to New, High-Tech Weapon for Attacks” HERE)

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Mexican Ambassador: Let’s Restart Mass Migration Into U.S.

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The United States should reopen itself to migration, amnesties, refugee inflows, asylum seekers, and more temporary contract workers, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday.

The U.S. immigration system “has to be based on facts and realities,” Ambassador Martha Bárcena Coqui told a forum arranged by the National Immigration Forum (NIF). She continued: ‘The facts and realities is the need to protect the most vulnerable, the need to keep open the generosity towards refugees, the need to recognize the complementarity of labor markets and demographic profiles, the need for temporary workers in the United States.”

The United States should not view migration as a security threat, she said, adding, “If you conceptualize migration as a national security issue, if you [push for] securitization of migration, and what is even worse, if you criminalize migration, then your approach always be policing, contentious [and] reduction of migration. So what we need is really to conceptualize migration … as an economic and social and political phenomena.” . . .

“The Mexican ambassador is going to tell us what is in the best interest of Mexico,” responded Rosemary Jenks, policy director at NumbersUSA. “But that doesn’t mean we have to do it — we have to do what’s in the best interest of the United States. of American, of Americans and legal immigrants,” she told Breitbart News, adding:

You know we have the pandemic still raging, we have economic lockdowns still going on, we have unemployment way too high. We have underemployment way too high. We have American citizens hurting. We absolutely do not need to reopen mass immigration — and certainly don’t need to give amnesty and taxpayer benefits to people who came here illegally. If Mexico thinks its plan is to just open up its own southern borders in the hopes that America will open our southern borders, that’s just going to reignite the caravans. I hope that the Biden administration is planning for that because that’s not going to go well, and 2022 is not going to go well for Democrats.

(Read more from “Mexican Ambassador: Let’s Restart Mass Migration Into U.S.” HERE)

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Chinese Journalist Faces Prison Time Over Wuhan COVID Reporting

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Chinese authorities indicted a Shanghai-based citizen journalist for allegedly sending “false information” after she reported on the coronavirus outbreak in the city of Wuhan, China, early this year, a prosecution document released on Monday and seen by the Guardian revealed.

According to the indictment sheet, Zhang Zhan, 37, is accused of sending “false information through text, video and other media through the Internet media such as WeChat [Chinese messaging and social media app], Twitter and YouTube.”

“She also accepted interviews from overseas media Free Radio Asia and Epoch Times and maliciously speculated on Wuhan’s Covid-19 [Chinese coronavirus] epidemic,” the document stated.

A former lawyer, Zhang was arrested in May following months of continuous online reporting on Wuhan’s coronavirus outbreak via social media platforms. Her reporting was highly critical of municipal authorities’ handling of the outbreak. Authorities accused Zhang of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a crime regularly used to jail political dissidents in China. The charge carries a prison sentence of up to five years.

(Read more from “Chinese Journalist Faces Prison Time Over Wuhan COVID Reporting” HERE)

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Iran: ‘Golden Days Will Be Back’ With Biden Presidency

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Iran’s Islamic regime is looking forward to having a Democrat, Joe Biden, in the White House, because it means “golden days will be back.”

“It is unfortunate that Iran’s ruling mullahs view a possible victory of the Democrat Party in U.S. elections as a win for the Tehran regime, its proxies and militia groups,” wrote Majid Rafizadeh, a business adviser and political scientist who is a board member of Harvard International Review.

“President Rouhani has already called for restoring the nuclear deal. It could well be a loss for continuing peace in the region and for finally restoring the violated Iranian people’s hoped-for human rights,” he wrote in a column for the Gatestone Institute.

Rafizadeh, who also is president of the International American Council on the Middle East, said Iran’s leaders are “excitingly” promoting Biden’s claim to have won the 2020 election amid President Trump’s court challenges alleging vote fraud. . .

“The last three years has indeed been a nightmare for the Iranian regime and its proxies. No U.S. administration before the current one has imposed such a draconian pressure on the mullahs, their rogue state and their allies,” he said. (Read more from “Iran: ‘Golden Days Will Be Back’ With Biden Presidency” HERE)

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