China’s biggest Lunar New Year TV show has been accused by viewers of racism for including performers in blackface to look African.
During a performance titled ‘African Song and Dance’, Chinese dancers appeared on stage wearing outfits that approximated African clothing and had darkened their skin with make-up.
Since the pandemic started, China has promoted various narratives on its possible origins. First, the country’s top scientists blamed a Wuhan market selling wild animals, which was rapidly cleaned up and all the samples kept secret. Then officials suggested the devastating disease might have come from outside the city, even pointing the finger at a possible laboratory leak — from a United States military base in Maryland rather than within their own borders. More recently, following the slaughter of infected mink at farms in Europe, prominent figures focused on these furry mammals as hosts of the virus, while pushing hard with another theory that Covid might have been imported on chilled or frozen food.
When the invite-only app Clubhouse was launched last April, it was envisaged as the online equivalent of Soho House: an exclusive space where the well-connected could gather.
But for a few days, it became something else: a tiny gap in Beijing’s “great firewall”, allowing millions in China a glimpse of an unfiltered, uncensored internet. A place where people could openly discuss issues like the treatment of the Uighur minority, the crackdown in Hong Kong, and relations with Taiwan, which Beijing considers a breakaway province.
On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” World Health Organization adviser Jamie Metzl criticized the organization’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus for not taking a serious enough look at the possibility of an accidental lab leak and saying that “the actual investigation was done by Chinese authorities. And so, the W.H.O. investigators were basically receiving reports from the Chinese officials.”
Bing Su, a Chinese geneticist at the state-run Kunming Institute of Zoology, recently inserted the human MCPH1 gene, which develops the brain, into a monkey. The insertion could make that animal’s intelligence more human than that of lower primates. Su’s next experiment is inserting into monkeys the SRGAP2C gene, related to human intelligence, and the FOXP2 gene, connected to language skills.
Has nobody in China seen Planet of the Apes?
Or maybe they have. “Biotechnology development in China is heading in a truly macabre direction,” writes Brandon Weichert of The Weichert Report in an article posted on the American Greatness website.
The head of Canada’s spy agency said today Canadian companies in almost all sectors of the economy have been targeted by hostile foreign actors — and named Russia and China as two of his main sources of concern.
“The threat from hostile activity by state actors in all its forms represents a significant danger to Canada’s prosperity and sovereignty,” said David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in his first public speech in three years.
“Our investigations reveal that this threat has unfortunately caused significant harm to Canadian companies.”
Russia and China are certainties but how could he forget to include Trudeau’s Liberals?
Martin Ravallion of Georgetown University, who used to be director of research at the World Bank, has an interesting new working paper out that tries to estimate how much Mao Zedong and Maoism cost China in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction.
How China would have done without Maoism depends on what would have replaced it. Ravallion suggests that could have been “political capitalism” à la Taiwan and South Korea, two societies not dissimilar to China’s, with their “Confucian philosophical roots,” strong work ethics, reverence for learning, central importance of family, and so on. In 1950, after decades of regional and world conflict, all three countries were very poor, China poorest. But then the other two took off and China didn’t.
WHO scientists sent on a coronavirus fact-finding mission to China have today thrown their weight behind Beijing – dismissing theories the virus leaked from a lab wile backing theories that the virus was imported on frozen meat.
Peter Embarek, leader of the WHO team, said that ‘further research’ into the imported meat theory – which is being pushed by Beijing – is needed, along with studies looking at early cases of Covid reported outside of China.
At the same time, he dismissed theories that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, saying the possibility is ‘extremely unlikely’ and does not need to be investigated further – despite US government officials calling it ‘the most credible’ theory just a few weeks ago.
Canada’s inept Liberal government is on the B list when it comes to vaccine deliveries. The United States is vaccinating 1.7 million people per day, while Canadians are being told that six million doses will be delivered by the end of March. Maybe.
Trudeau was acting to protect the interests of Canada’s China class, like them he sold us out.
Top officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) secretly criticised China for not providing information about the novel coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic, leaked audio files have revealed.
The recordings, published by Indian TV channel WION, purportedly showed how WHO executives complained about Beijing’s refusal to release critical data in January last year.
But in the same month, the WHO’s Director-General publicly lauded Chinese President Xi and his government for their effort to battle against the disease.
Their silence makes the WHO complicit.
If there’s another pandemic, the West could be dependent on Beijing for vaccine development
Deborah Green1 has just made a life-or-death decision — and she isn’t happy about it. “We have two cancer drugs in development and we had to choose which one would move up to the next level,” she says. “We made our choice, but you can’t help wondering how many lives might have been saved by the other one.”
Chinese authorities have blocked domestic access to the audio-only social media app Clubhouse after it attracted untold numbers of Chinese people to uncensored, cross-border discussions on political and human rights subjects.
The invitation-only US app, which only works on iPhones and was released in April 2020, allows users to listen in to discussions and interviews in quasi conference-call style online rooms. It suddenly became popular last week – particularly in China, where people seized the opportunity to discuss taboo topics including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the persecution of Uighurs.
On Monday evening Chinese users reported the platform was no longer available, ending a short-lived period of free political expression in a country where the government goes to extraordinary lengths to suppress it.
Chinese police own a company that collects details of people applying for visas to Canada and numerous other countries, giving Beijing security services a direct stake in the processing of private information provided by people planning travel outside China.
Beijing Shuangxiong Foreign Service Company, which operates the Canadian visa-application centre in the Chinese capital, is owned by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, a Globe and Mail investigation has found. And at least some of the people working inside the centre are members of the Communist Party, recruited from a school that trains the next generation of party elite.
(Use Incognito)
More than a dozen federal lawmakers from all parties are calling for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be moved outside China, citing a “genocidal campaign” by its government against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
An open letter signed by 13 MPs, a half−dozen Quebec politicians, and others warns that participating in the Beijing Olympics would serve to validate a regime they say is perpetuating crimes against humanity within its own borders.
Oh Great. Now you’ve made Justin cry.
Two Canadian government scientists escorted from the National Microbiology Laboratory amidst an RCMP investigation and internal review have been let go from the Public Health Agency of Canada, CBC News has learned.
“The two scientists are no longer employed by the Public Health Agency of Canada as of Jan. 20, 2021,” Eric Morrissette, chief of media relations for Health Canada and PHAC, confirmed in an email late Friday.
“We cannot disclose additional information, nor comment further, for reasons of confidentiality.”
Sources say members of the lab’s special pathogens unit were called to a meeting on Thursday and told that Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, will not be returning to work. They were not given an explanation.
