https://archive.is/ZJNFd

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49095212

"We are in talks with South Africa, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and others," she added.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/42564292

A 22-year-old Chinese student in France, who was supposed to be starting a master's degree in anthropology at the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, has not returned from a summer visit to her family in Changsha, China.

Zhang Yadi has been missing while in Shangri-La, Yunnan, since 30 July. Several sources report that police officers took her away on charges of “endangering national security” after they discovered that she was @TaraFreesoul, one of the promoters of CYS4T – Chinese Youths Stand for Tibet, a group of students who took up Tibet's cause abroad beginning in May 2024, exposing its "hidden truth" in Chinese diaspora communities.

Zhang is one of the new faces of China’s dissident community, a member of the white sheet generation, a protest movement that came out in the open with anger over the extremely strict zero COVID-19 policy imposed during the pandemic.

She is also a sad confirmation of how widespread is the control imposed by Xi Jinping in the name of the "great renewal of the Chinese nation” even outside China, among young people studying and working in the West.

[...]

Just a few days ago, @Tarafreesoul posted the following on her X profile:

“The history of the ethnic groups of southwestern China is a bloody history of colonisation, brainwashing, slavery, intermarriage, and assimilation of the indigenous population by the Han people.

“Behind the slogan ‘building a strong Chinese national community’ lies the blood and tears of various ethnic groups. Their culture has been repressed and disappeared, their native language has been silenced and disappeared, and their history cannot be written by their own people.

“Everything is lightly masked by the four characters of 'Chinese nation,' as if nothing had happened, as if this land had been part of the Chinese Empire since ancient times.”

[...]

On 5 July, Zhang returned to Changsha to visit her family. Before she went missing on 30 July, she had been in close contact with friends and family, but then all communication abruptly ceased.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49056739

Manufacturers want to kill off EU rules that would better reflect pollution from plug-in hybrid vehicles

PHEVs emit almost five times the CO2 in the real world thatn official tests claim, the latest EU data shows.

The Dutch government says large-scale solar panel production is no longer viable, closing its SolarNL incentives to building- and vehicle-integrated products, heterojunction modules, and perovskite-silicon tandem panels.

In brief

• The first model of ESA’s reusable rocket demonstrator Themis is standing on its own legs at its launch pad in Kiruna, Sweden.
• Themis is set to be the first European demonstration of a full-scale vertical take-off and landing rocket element that uses cryogenic propulsion.
• This is the first time the rocket stage demonstrator has had its four legs installed, now the demonstrator is fully assembled.

Over 500 of the world’s leading cryptographers, security researchers, and scientists from 34 countries have today delivered a devastating verdict on the EU’s proposed “Chat Control” regulation. An open letter published this morning declares the plan to mass-scan private messages is “technically infeasible,” a “danger to democracy,” and will “completely undermine” the security and privacy of all European citizens.

Continue reading here.. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/danger-to-democracy-500-top-scientists-urge-eu-governments-to-reject-technically-infeasible-chat-control/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49054601

The Interior Ministry has told police prefects across the country to block mayors from flying the Palestinian flag on public buildings next Monday, 22 September – the day France will formally recognise the state of Palestine

Reform UK has received more than £2.3 million from oil and gas interests, highly polluting industries, and climate science deniers since December 2019, amounting to 92 percent of the party’s donations.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49055913

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49038271

A majority in the lower house of the Dutch parliament wants the Netherlands to follow the United States’ lead and designate the far-left Antifa movement as a terrorist organization.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/42547255

Archived

The top prosecutor for England and Wales has blamed an “evidential failure” for the collapse of a Chinese espionage case, raising questions of whether Whitehall officials backed away from labelling Beijing an “enemy”.

Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions [DPP], wrote on Thursday of his “disappointment and frustration” at the collapse of the trial of Christopher Berry, 33, and Chris Cash, 30, a former parliamentary researcher. Both men said they were entirely innocent and that the case, alleging the involvement of more than two dozen reports to Beijing intelligence, should never have been brought.

Parkinson linked the decision by prosecutors to offer no evidence against the pair with a requirement under the Official Secrets Act for information to have been collected and passed to an “enemy”.

This was a “limitation” that no longer existed in the National Security Act 2023, which replaced the Official Secrets Act and “under which any future offending will fall to be considered”, Parkinson said. He said prosecutors had correctly concluded there was sufficient evidence to prosecute when Cash and Berry were charged last April but that it now “no longer met the evidential test”.

[...]

His comments prompted questions about whether Whitehall security officials had changed their assessment of the threat from China in the 17 months between the charges being made and the cases collapsing. The government has been accused of softening its approach to Beijing in the hope of improving their economic relationship.

[...]

On Monday Philp had referred in the Commons to a case summary prepared for Berry and Cash’s initial court appearance in April last year. It detailed, Philp said, how a deputy national security adviser had provided a statement that assessed some of the information allegedly passed to a Chinese intelligence official to be “directly or indirectly, useful” to the Communist Party. The adviser’s assessment was that some material was “prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom”, Philp said.

Writing again to Parkinson on Thursday, Philp said his intervention still left a “huge unanswered question”, adding: “How could the evidential test be met in April 2024 but not in September 2025? What changed?

“In particular, given the CPS press notice confirming that a deputy national security adviser gave key evidence prior to April 2024, did they or anyone else give any further evidence after that and, if so, did the further evidence undermine the categorisation of China as an ‘enemy’?”

Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, said: “Why did the CPS think they stood a reasonable chance of prosecution in 2024, knowing about the ‘enemy’ problem, and not in 2025?”

[...]

This week the prime minister said he was disappointed the trial would not take place.

[...]

Op-ed by Alicja Bachulska, policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Ivana Karásková, research fellow and China team lead at the Association for International Affairs.

Archived

• Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, China places security above all other policy implications.
• The officially endorsed philosophy of the country’s statecraft heralds “great changes unseen in a century”. It assumes the decline of the West—but acknowledges continued American hegemony.
• In the international arena, this means that China’s relationship with Russia is its most important partnership as it faces off against the US.
• Win, lose or draw in Ukraine, Russia will continue to receive Chinese support. There is nothing in China’s strategic positioning to suggest Beijing would cease to extend this support to Moscow.
• No “reverse Nixon” policy by the West—to peel Russia away from China—is possible. Europeans should also resist any temptation to believe they can alter Chinese calculations vis-à-vis Russia. They must forge a new China policy on the basis that the country is deliberately prolonging war on their continent.