Schools Use ‘Smart’ Uniforms to Track Students

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By The Blaze. Nearly a dozen schools in southern China have adopted “smart” uniforms to track students’ whereabouts, Agence France-Presse reported.

The move to use chip-powered clothing is reportedly aimed as a way to reduce truancy and boost school attendance, according to state media.

The technology has the ability to monitor students as they enter the building and when they leave. That information is sent automatically to school officials and teachers.

“When students enter the school, the smart uniforms help take a photo or video of them,” Ran Ruxiang, an elementary school principal in Guizhou province, told the AFP.

Ran said his school started using smart uniforms last November and now more than half of the students are wearing them. The school has about 1,400 students enrolled. (Read more from “Schools Use ‘Smart’ Uniforms to Track Students” HERE)

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Chinese Schools Monitor Students Activities, Targeting Truancy With ‘Intelligent Uniforms’

By The Global Times. Schools in China are promoting “intelligent uniforms” to better monitor students’ attendance and whereabouts.

More than 10 schools in Southwest China’s Guizhou Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region have adopted the uniforms.

If students wear the uniforms, the school authorities receive recorded accurate timing of their entry and exit and automatically send the data to parents and teachers, said Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou Province. . .

According to Guizhou Guanyu Technology Company that provides the technology behind the “intelligent uniforms,” an automatic voice alarm activates if students wearing intelligent uniforms walk out of school without permission.

Two chips are inserted in the shoulders of uniforms and can endure up to 150 C and 500 washes, Yuan Bichang, the company’s project manager, told the Global Times. (Read more from “Chinese Schools Monitor Students Activities, Targeting Truancy With ‘Intelligent Uniforms'” HERE)

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ISIS Video Allegedly Showing Murder of Student Is Likely Authentic

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By Fox News. A video that has been circulating across social media purportedly showing the killing of a Scandinavian university student in a remote part of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains is likely authentic, Norwegian police said Friday.

Officials said they were investigating the footage that appeared to show a woman yelling while a man decapitated her with a knife, Deutsche Welle reported. There wasn’t any immediate evidence to conclude the video was inauthentic, Norway’s National Criminal Investigation Service said in a statement. . .

Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark, and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway, were murdered while camping in the Atlas mountains. The women were found in and outside their tent, located about two hours walking distance from the village of Imlil. Deutsche Welle reported the two women were found decapitated by tourists. . .

Four men have been detained in Morocco, and authorities consider the killings of the two women to be a terrorist act. Moroccan authorities said the four men pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. Morocco is generally considered safe for tourists but has been rooting out Islamic extremists for years. (Read more from “ISIS Video Allegedly Showing Murder of Student Is Likely Authentic” HERE)

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Bodies of Murdered Scandinavian Hikers Flown Back From Morocco

By AFP. The bodies of two women from Denmark and Norway murdered by suspected jihadists while hiking in the High Atlas mountains in Morocco were flown back to Scandinavia on Friday.

The remains of Danish student Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, and 28-year-old Norwegian Maren Ueland were put on a plane that left Casablanca for the Danish capital, a police spokesman said.

Moroccan authorities said Thursday that four suspects arrested following the murder of the two tourists had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) group.

The bodies of the two women were found Monday after they had pitched their tent at an isolated mountain site two hours’ walk from the tourist village of Imlil.

One of them was beheaded, according to a source close to the investigation. (Read more from “Bodies of Murdered Scandinavian Hikers Flown Back From Morocco” HERE)

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China Forcibly Aborts Third Child; Forced Abortion Continues Under Its Two-Child Policy

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By Life Site News. The Chinese Government, operating under the Two-Child Policy, has forcibly aborted a woman’s third child, according to NPR and Radio Free Europe reports.

The woman, an ethnic Kazakh, was a widow with two children, living in the Xinjiang region. She married a Kazakh citizen, living in Kazakhstan, across the border. She was told that, in order to cancel her Chinese citizenship to become a citizen of Kazakhstan, she would need to return to China.

On this return trip, Chinese cadres invited her to the hospital for a “health check-up.” They discovered that she was pregnant and demanded an abortion, because this third pregnancy violated the Two-Child policy – even though she told them, “my husband is a Kazakh citizen and I am carrying a Kazakh citizen.” . . .

The fact that forced abortion continues under China’s Two-Child Policy is further documented in the Population Control section of the 2018 Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Report, which states that regulations “include provisions that require couples to be married to have children and limit them to bearing two children…Officials reportedly continued to enforce compliance with family planning policies using methods including heavy fines, job termination, detention, and abortion.” (Read more from “China Forcibly Aborts Third Child; Forced Abortion Continues Under Its Two-Child Policy” HERE)

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‘They Ordered Me to Get an Abortion’: A Chinese Woman’s Ordeal in Xinjiang

By NPR. When the 37-year-old Chinese woman stepped over China’s border into Kazakhstan last July, she felt free. . .

Then she met the man who changed her life. Like her, he was an ethnic Kazakh. Unlike her, he was a citizen of Kazakhstan, from across the border. . .

The couple’s life together as husband and wife was established. The only thing left for the woman to do was to complete the paperwork to cancel Chinese citizenship for her and her children, so that they could become Kazakh citizens. For this, she had to return to her hometown in China. . .

“I thought they wanted to interrogate me again,” she says. “But they took me to the hospital instead. They administered another health check, and then they told me I was pregnant.” . . .

She was six weeks along. Before she could share the news with her husband, local authorities returned to her house the next day. “They ordered me to get an abortion,” she says. . .

“The police and local officials came and took me and my brother to a government building,” the woman says. “They made my brother sign a document saying that if I don’t get an abortion, he would suffer the consequences. I knew this meant he’d be detained in a camp. I’d do anything to protect my brother, so I agreed to the abortion.” (Read more from “‘They Ordered Me to Get an Abortion’: A Chinese Woman’s Ordeal in Xinjiang” HERE)

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Iran Will Be the Big Winner of U.S. Syria Withdrawal

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Defense Secretary Mattis never wavered on continuing the Obama administration’s short-sighted “only ISIS” strategy in Syria. And now Iran will emerge as the big winner of the Trump administration’s decision to fully withdraw troops and personnel from Syria.

On Wednesday morning, the Trump administration announced that the United States has almost completed its mission against the Islamic State terrorist group and will now “transition to the next phase of this campaign,” which appears to be a full withdrawal from Syria.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to observers of the U.S. strategy in Syria, headed by Defense Secretary James Mattis, which entirely ignored Iran’s expansion into the region. The “only ISIS” strategy pursued by the Defense Department under both the Obama and Trump administrations essentially paved the way for Iran and allowed the terrorist regime to connect its land and air bridge from Tehran to Beirut.

ISIS’ “caliphate” has indeed been obliterated. The jihadi group struggles to hold the large swaths of territory it controlled when President Trump came into office. Over the course of the year, the narrow focus of the U.S. strategy in Syria has largely failed to protect U.S. strategic interests in the region and has only emboldened other adversarial actors such as Turkey and Russia.

In recent months, there were signs of momentum for a strategic recalibration before the president pulled the plug on the Syria mission. In September, national security adviser John Bolton highlighted the important mission of denying the nuclear-aspiring Iranian regime’s expansion throughout the Middle East.

“We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,” Bolton proclaimed while in New York for the U.N. General Assembly. This came on the heels of statements from Secretary of State Pompeo stressing the need to counter Iran.

Yet Secretary Mattis dismissed the idea shortly thereafter, reiterating his stance that U.S. troops were in Syria with the sole mission to take out ISIS.

“Right now our troops inside Syria are there for one purpose, and that’s under the U.N. authorization about defeating ISIS,” Mattis responded.

Secretary Mattis continued to strongly insist that the U.S. must remain in Syria in perpetuity until ISIS is completely defeated, which is largely an impossible logistical task. This approach created the groundwork for another endless engagement in a foreign war zone akin to the war in Afghanistan. And it was Mattis’s narrowly focused articulation of the war that ultimately led to the withdrawal of the U.S. presence in Syria. President Trump was told that we were there solely to defeat ISIS. He then concluded, given the approach presented to him by Mattis, that ISIS’ downfall can now allow us to withdraw from the region.

The Mattis-led U.S. strategy in Syria empowered Iran, Russia, and Turkey at the expense of our allies. A full withdrawal from the country will now accelerate that process. The Department of Defense and the bipartisan foreign policy class are infuriated by the decision to withdraw from Syria, but given their failed strategic approach to the region, they only have themselves to blame for the president’s decision to end the mission. (For more from the author of “Iran Will Be the Big Winner of U.S. Syria Withdrawal” please click HERE)

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If China Can Ever Bully the United States Like It Is Canada, We’re in Serious Trouble

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The United States started a trade war with China. The Justice Department requested Canadian authorities to arrest Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of China’s telecom giant Huawei, on allegations that she had violated sanctions against Iran by committing financial fraud.

China hasn’t taken Meng’s arrest very well. It viewed Meng’s arrest as a politically driven “kidnapping” aimed at curbing China’s technological ambition and forcing China to make trade concessions. Beijing feels it has lost face internationally and in front of its domestic, nationalistic audience. Therefore, Beijing has been in revenge mode. However, its main target so far has been not the United States, but Canada.

Since Meng’s arrest, China’s foreign minister has summoned the Canadian ambassador to China, John McCallum, multiple times, to lodge a “strong protest” and tell him Meng’s arrest caused “serious damage to Sino-Canada relations.” Beijing demanded the immediate release of Meng, or Canada would face “grave consequences” for Meng’s arrest. The same Chinese foreign ministry also summoned the U.S. ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, a day after meeting the Canadian ambassador, to protest Meng’s arrest as being “unreasonable.” In diplomatic language, the U.S. ambassador was treated with kid gloves.

The Canadian government has tried very hard to explain to Beijing that Meng’s arrest was not politically driven and its timing, which took place on the same day as the President Trump and Chinese President Xi Xinping’s meeting at the G20 in Argentina, was pure coincidence. The Justice Department launched a criminal probe into Huawei’s dealings in Iran in April 2017. The arrest warrant for Meng was issued in August by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and Meng was charged with “conspiracy to defraud multiple international institutions.” To U.S. authorities, arresting Meng in Canada was a natural choice, because Meng stopped traveling to the United States in 2017, but she does travel to Canada regularly as a legal resident there. . .

Last week, Beijing arrested two Canadians on charges of “endangering national security.” One is Michael Kovrig, a former diplomat and now a senior adviser with the International Crisis Group (ICG). According to ICG’s website, Kovrig “conducts research and provides analysis on foreign affairs and global security issues in North East Asia, particularly on China, Japan and the Korean peninsula.” China declared that ICG is not a legally registered non-governmental organization (NGO) in China. Thus, Kovrig might have also violated China’s notorious foreign NGO law, which gives Beijing the ability to prevent international organizations it doesn’t like, such as human rights organizations, from operating legally in China. (Read more from “If China Can Ever Bully the United States Like It Is Canada, We’re in Serious Trouble” HERE)

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North Korea Issues Scary Statement About U.S. Sanctions

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. . .On Dec. 10, the U.S. Treasury Department announced that it would be placing sanctions on three high-ranking North Korean officials “in response to the North Korean regime’s ongoing and serious human rights abuses and censorship.” These officials included Minister of State Security Jong Kyong Thaek, Director of the OGD (North Korea’s censorship department) Choe Ryong Hae, and Director of the PAD (the Propaganda and Agitation Department) Pak Kwang Ho.

“Today’s actions shine a spotlight on North Korea’s reprehensible treatment of those in North Korea, and serve as a reminder of North Korea’s brutal treatment of U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier, who passed away 18 months ago,” the statement said. Warmbier, 22, was an American college student who died after being held in North Korean custody. . .

An editorial by the North Korean government in the state-run news service KCNA threatened that “DPRK-US relations back to the status of last year which was marked by exchanges of fire.” It also said that “added sanctions pressure will block the path to denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula forever – a result desired by no one.” The editorial also claimed that the sanctions were put into place to punish North Korea for a “non-existent ‘human rights issue.'” . . .

While North Korea may blame these recent sanctions for a breakdown in progress, satellite evidence suggests that they had never been fully committed to denuclearization. Several separate reports, from multiple news agencies as well as the United Nations, have suggested that North Korea has been continuing to run and actively improving its nuclear test sites. (Read more from “North Korea Issues Scary Statement About U.S. Sanctions” HERE)

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Mexico Has a Plan to Deter Illegal Aliens From Flocking to the United States. Here’s What It Entails.

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Over the next five years, the Mexican government plans to spend $30 billion on Central American development. Their goal is simple: to keep illegal aliens from heading north towards the United States border, USA Today reported.

According to Mexican Foreign Ministry Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico “will change its migration policies to respond to the needs required in the south of our country and Central America,” although it’s unclear exactly how those funds will be spent.

“We’re going to guarantee that the rights of migrants in our territory are respected,” Newly-elected Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrado told reporters on Dec. 5. “About how to resolve the problem, we’re putting together a proposal to invest in productive projects and job creation. And, not only that, in work visas as well for Mexican and for the United States.”

The decision comes after multiple migrant caravans filled with illegal aliens made their way across Central America, through Mexico and to the United States-Mexico border. Those on the caravan hoped to file for asylum but quickly found out they would have to wait months to have their case heard. Now, they’re sitting in Mexico, waiting. (Read more from “Mexico Has a Plan to Deter Illegal Aliens From Flocking to the United States. Here’s What It Entails.” HERE)

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U.S. Takes a Stand Against Global Compact on Refugees, Promotion of Abortion at the United Nations

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By Townhall. The United States took a lonely stand Monday against the United Nation’s General Assembly in a vote on the Global Compact on Refugees and on concerns about language related to abortion.

Hungary was the only country to join the United States in voting against an annual resolution on the work of the U.N. refugee agency which included approval of the compact on refugees. The resolution was approved with 181 countries voting in favor and three abstaining.

The U.S. explained its opposition to the compact, arguing that it represents “an effort by the United Nations to advance global governance at the expense of the sovereign right of States to manage their immigration systems in accordance with their national laws, policies, and interests.”

Reuters noted on Monday that the U.S. also “unsuccessfully tried to remove two paragraphs from a General Assembly resolution on preventing violence and sexual harassment of women and girls. It was the only country to vote against the language, while 131 countries voted to keep it in the resolution and 31 abstained.” (Read more from “U.S. Takes a Stand Against Global Compact on Refugees, Promotion of Abortion at the United Nations” HERE)

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US Left Isolated at UN Over Stance on Abortion and Refugees

By The Guardian. The United States has found itself isolated at the 193-member United Nations general assembly over Washington’s concerns about the promotion of abortion and a voluntary plan to address the global refugee crisis.

Only Hungary backed the United States and voted against an annual resolution on the work of the UN refugee agency, while 181 countries voted in favor and three abstained. The resolution has generally been approved by consensus for more than 60 years. . .

The US also failed in a campaign – which started last month during negotiations on several draft resolutions in the general assembly human rights committee – against references to “sexual and reproductive health” and “sexual and reproductive health-care services”.

It has said the language has “accumulated connotations that suggest the promotion of abortion or a right to abortion that are unacceptable to our administration”.

On Monday, Washington unsuccessfully tried to remove two paragraphs from a general assembly resolution on preventing violence and sexual harassment of women and girls. It was the only country to vote against the language, while 131 countries voted to keep it in the resolution and 31 abstained. (Read more from “US Left Isolated at UN Over Stance on Abortion and Refugees” HERE)

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This Is How Venezuelan Families Are Being Forced to Bury Loved Ones

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As the crisis in Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship deepens – gripped by mass hunger, starvation and a lack of medical supplies – there is no comfort even for the dead.

“What is happening is medieval. People are ‘renting’ caskets for a service, but giving them back. The same casket is being used over and over again because people cannot afford to buy one,” Venezuelan opposition leader Julio Borges, who has been living in exile in the Colombian capital of Bogota for the past nine months, told Fox News. “And then they have to wrap the body in plastic bags for the burial. Others don’t have money for a land plot, so they are burying loved ones in their back garden.”

Borges said the “really creepy” problem of how to properly bury the dead has become the norm rather than the exception. Other Venezuelans concurred, indicating the use of “common graves,” along with backyard burials, was becoming standard.

One Venezuelan, who asked his name not be published, described the sudden death of his father in the capital Caracas last week, which left the family without a vehicle to take the body to the morgue. It took more than a day for the body to be collected. . .

“Funeral services are too expensive. Coffins are expensive, as well as paying for a place in the cemetery and everything that comes with it: the chapel for the service, the plate,” Julett Pineda, a health journalist for Efecto Cocuyo in Caracas, told Fox News. “People cannot have a decent funeral.” (Read more from “This Is How Venezuelan Families Are Being Forced to Bury Loved Ones” HERE)

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DHS: 7-Year-Old Migrant Who Died Was Not Ill Upon Initial Screening

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By The Daily Caller. The Department of Homeland Security claimed in a statement Friday that the 7-year-old migrant girl who died in their custody was not ill upon an initial screening and was offered food and water.

The story of the young girl from Guatemala exploded on Thursday after The Washington Post reported that she died of dehydration shortly after Border Patrol took custody of her and her father, who entered the country illegally. WaPo’s headline suggested that Border Patrol bore responsibility in the child’s death, but the Department of Homeland Security is now disputing that characterization.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed that the child died last week approximately eight hours after she was taken into custody. Her father reportedly told Border Patrol agents that the child had not had anything to eat or drink in days.

The father and daughter, identified by a Guatemalan official as Nery Caal and Jakelin Caal, crossed the U.S. border into New Mexico in a remote location 90 miles from the nearest Border Patrol station.

The Washington Post’s initial report noted that they were not aware of any provisions offered to the family when they were first taken into custody. (Read more from “DHS: 7-Year-Old Migrant Who Died Was Not Ill Upon Initial Screening” HERE)

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7-Year-Old in Good Health, Border Agents Said; Then She Died

By AP. Just 7 years old, Jakelin Amei Rosmery Caal Maquin was picked up by U.S. authorities with her father and other migrants this month in a remote stretch of New Mexico desert. Some seven hours later, she was put on a bus to the nearest Border Patrol station but soon began vomiting. By the end of the two-hour drive, she had stopped breathing.

Jakelin hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for days, her father later told U.S. officials. . .

According to the form, the girl showed no sign of illness. She was not sweating, had no tremors, jaundice or visible trauma and was mentally alert. (Read more from “7-Year-Old in Good Health, Border Agents Said; Then She Died” HERE)

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