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The truth of what happened here is already being heavily suppressed in China but it certainly looks like a deadly high-rise fire that killed at least 10 people in Xinxiang China could not be put out quickly in part because of zero-COVID lockdowns which have been in place in the region for months.The fire happened Thursday night in Urumqi the capital of Xinjiang. Firefighters weren’t able to get their trucks close to the building, allegedly because streets were blocked by parked cars. This video shows a jet of water from a fire truck that isn’t quite reaching the burning building.Urumqi,...

Republicans & Democrats have united to punish China. They've passed a bill to ban all goods that are made through forced labour of Uighur Muslims. Which brands could this bill spell trouble for? Versachi, Vuitton, etc.

A human rights group focused on exposing China’s slow-motion genocide of the Uyghur people and others in Xinjiang is moving videos from YouTube to another platform after YouTube repeatedly blocked some of its videos for ostensibly violating the company’s terms of service. In one case, YouTube claimed the videos promoted violent criminal organizations, echoing the Chinese Communist Party’s attacks on dissenters. “There is another excuse every day. I never trusted YouTube,” Serikzhan Bilash, one of the founders of the human rights group Atajurt, told Reuters. “But we’re not afraid anymore, because we are backing ourselves up with LBRY. The most...

Nike and Coca-Cola are among the major companies and business groups lobbying Congress to weaken a bill that would ban imported goods made with forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region, according to congressional staff members and other people familiar with the matter, as well as lobbying records that show vast spending... The bill, which would prohibit broad categories of certain goods made by persecuted Muslim minorities in an effort to crack down on human rights abuses, has gained bipartisan support, passing the House in September by a margin of 406 to 3. Congressional aides say it has the backing to...

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday decried the U.S.-enacted limits on importing cotton, apparel, hair products, and other goods from companies reasonably believed to be engaging in slave labor in China, calling the sanctions a “naked act of bullying.” The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in tandem with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), announced five new Withhold Release Orders on products from Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, believed to be home to over 1,000 concentration camps. China has imprisoned as many as 3 million Muslims, most of ethnic Uyghur descent, in the camps, where survivors say they...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States accused China on Friday of putting well more than a million minority Muslims in “concentration camps,” in some of the strongest U.S. condemnation to date of what it calls Beijing’s mass detention of mostly Muslim Uighur minority and other Muslim groups. More at link above..... Is there a down side here?

The Chinese government has drawn wide international condemnation for its harsh crackdown on ethnic Muslims in its western region, including holding as many as a million of them in detention camps. Now, documents and interviews show that the authorities are also using a vast, secret system of advanced facial recognition technology to track and control the Uighurs, a largely Muslim minority. It is the first known example of a government intentionally using artificial intelligence for racial profiling, experts said. The facial recognition technology, which is integrated into China’s rapidly expanding networks of surveillance cameras, looks exclusively for Uighurs based on...

China has passed a new law that seeks to "Sinicize" Islam within the next five years, the latest move by Beijing to rewrite how the religion is practised. China's main English newspaper, Global Times, reported on Saturday that after a meeting with representatives from eight Islamic associations, government officials "agreed to guide Islam to be compatible with socialism and implement measures to Sinicize the religion." The newspaper did not provide further details or the names of the associations that agreed to the decree.

URUMQI, China—This city on China’s Central Asia frontier may be one of the most closely surveilled places on earth. Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks. Police use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted chat apps, politically charged videos and other suspect content. To fill up with gas, drivers must first swipe their ID cards and stare into a camera. China’s efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic...

Muslims in Xinjiang region can no longer use names such as Mecca, Imam and Saddam. Chinese authorities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang have banned dozens of baby names with religious meanings that are widely used by Muslims elsewhere in the world. Sources in Hotan, in the southern part of the region, had previously detailed a list of banned names in 2015, but the ban now appears to have been rolled out region-wide, Radio Free Asia reported. Islam, Quran, Mecca, Jihad, Imam, Saddam, Hajj, and Medina are among dozens of baby names banned under ruling Chinese Communist Party's "Naming Rules...

A prefecture in China’s far western Xinjiang region is requiring all vehicles to install satellite tracking systems as part of stepped-up measures against violent attacks. Traffic police in Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture announced the regulation on Sunday, shortly after thousands of heavily armed police paraded in the Xinjiang capital and ruling Communist Party officials vowed to ramp up their campaign against separatists and Islamic militants. The vehicle-tracking program in Bayingolin will utilize China’s homegrown Beidou satellite system, launched in recent years to reduce China’s reliance on U.S.-based GPS providers for sensitive applications. Authorities said they will also track cars using...

Chinese President Xi Jinping says that China must be on guard against nefarious religious influences from abroad. His comments over the weekend follow a tightening of religious space that has seen bans on the wearing of veils and beards in the predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang and the removal of church crosses in eastern China. “We must resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringement by extremists,” Xi said at a Beijing conference on religions attended by top leaders, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. …

China said Saturday that it will not renew press credentials for a French journalist, effectively expelling her following a harsh media campaign against her for questioning the official line equating ethnic violence in China's western Muslim region with global terrorism. Expecting the move, Ursula Gauthier, a longtime journalist for the French news magazine L'Obs, said late Friday night that she was prepared to leave China. ...

Authorities in northwest China’s restive Xinjiang region have killed three people and jailed two others from an ethnic Uyghur family during a three-month operation targeting suspected terrorists, according to state media and a relative of one of those killed. A verdict issued by the Purchaqchi township court in Hotan (in Chinese, Hetian) prefecture’s Hotan county in late March announced that Tursun Hoshur, 52, and his daughter Maynur Tursun, 24, were sentenced to 12 and eight years in prison, respectively, for harboring “terrorists,” state media reported. The two had been recovering from wounds sustained after being fired on by authorities during...

Iraqis Identify Prisoner as Chinese Islamist Fighter By EDWARD WONG SEPT. 4, 2014 An image taken from YouTube shows what appears to be the first known Chinese jihadist, called Bo Wang, fighting with rebels in Syria. Credit via YouTube BEIJING — The Iraqi Defense Ministry has posted on its Facebook page photographs that it says show a captured Chinese man who was fighting on behalf of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni jihadist group. Iraqi officials have not released further details, but the photographs, if confirmed, would be the first visual evidence of a Chinese citizen fighting...

BEIJING (AP) — Students and civil servants in China's Muslim northwest, where Beijing is enforcing a security crackdown following deadly unrest, have been ordered to avoid taking part in traditional fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

At least six people have been confirmed dead and another six were injured after a blast triggered by liquid nitrogen occurred late Monday night in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The Xinjiang regional bureau of work safety said on Monday that the blast happened at around 11:30 p.m. in a plant owned by Xinjiang No. 8 Steel Structure Co. Ltd. The source said that five workers were killed on the spot. One of the seven injured died in hospital. The cause of the blast is still under investigation.

BEIJING (AP) -- A tense minority region in China's far west erupted in violence Friday for the second time in three days, barely hours after the government called the earlier unrest a "terrorist attack" and raised the death toll to 35. State media gave few details in a brief dispatch about Friday's unrest, saying it was "a violent attack" that took place on a pedestrian street in Hotan, a city in Xinjiang, a region that has seen China's minority Uighurs clash with the ethnic Han majority. No details on casualties were released.

China has detained and intimidated dozens of ethnic Uighurs in the far western region of Xinjiang for speaking out on rights abuses following riots in the regional capital three years ago, Amnesty International said. In July 2009, the capital city of Urumqi was rocked by violence between majority Han Chinese and minority Uighurs that killed nearly 200 people. Many of the Muslim Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language and call Xinjiang home, chafe at Beijing's rule. Since then, China has executed nine people it accused of instigating the riots, detained and prosecuted hundreds and ramped up spending on security, according...

FBI on the lookout for 2 Arab women ISLAMABAD, June 05 (PNS): A special team of United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is searching for two Arab women in the federal capital, who are believed to be wives of detained Al-Qaida men, who could provide useful information about Osama Bin Laden and other Al-Qaida fighters. Investigation carried out by PNS revealed that FBI had recently detained two fugitives of Al-Qaida from Chinese province of Sinkiang and Karghiztan. During investigation, both Al-Qaida men informed FBI about the presence of their wives some where in Islamabad. Well-informed sources disclosed that...