According to the World Health Organization, 2.1 billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. Many of them rely on wells and streams, making testing the water for bacterial contamination of crucial importance. However, cheap and reliable testing equipment is often not available or not affordable. Scientists in Britain and elsewhere are working on a simple, paper-based test that can confirm that water is safe in a matter of seconds. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Month: January 2018
North Korea shipped coal to Russia last year which was then delivered to South Korea and Japan in a likely violation of U.N. sanctions, three Western European intelligence sources said.
The U.N. Security Council banned North Korean exports of coal last Aug. 5 under sanctions intended to cut off an important source of the foreign currency Pyongyang needs to fund its nuclear weapon and long-range missile programs.
But the secretive Communist state has at least three times since then shipped coal to the Russian ports of Nakhodka and Kholmsk, where it was unloaded at docks and reloaded onto ships that took it to South Korea or Japan, the sources said.
A Western shipping source said separately that some of the cargoes reached Japan and South Korea in October last year. A U.S. security source also confirmed the coal trade via Russia and said it was continuing.
“Russia’s port of Nakhodka is becoming a transhipping hub for North Korean coal,” said one of the European security sources, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of international diplomacy around North Korea.
Russia’s foreign ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment sent on Jan 18. Russia’s mission to the United Nations informed the Security Council sanctions committee on Nov. 3 that Moscow was complying with the sanctions.
Two lawyers who specialise in sanctions law told Reuters it appeared the transactions violated U.N. sanctions.
Reuters could not independently verify whether the coal unloaded at the Russian docks was the same coal that was then shipped to South Korea and Japan. Reuters also was unable to ascertain whether the owners of the vessels that sailed from Russia to South Korea and Japan knew the origin of the coal.
The U.S. Treasury on Wednesday put the owner of one of the ships, the UAL Ji Bong 6, under sanctions for delivering North Korean coal to Kholmsk on Sept. 5.
It was unclear which companies profited from the coal shipments.
Russia urged to ‘do more’ on sanctions
North Korean coal exports were initially capped under a 2016 Security Council resolution that required countries to report monthly imports of coal from North Korea to the council’s sanctions committee within 30 days of the end of each month.
Diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Russia had not reported any imports of North Korea coal to the committee last year.
The sanctions committee told U.N. member states in November that a violation occurs when “activities or transactions proscribed by Security Council resolutions are undertaken or attempts are made to engage in proscribed transactions, whether or not the transaction has been completed.”
Asked about the shipments identified by Reuters, Matthew Oresman, a partner with law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman who advises companies on sanctions, said: “Based on these facts, there appears to be a violation of the U.N. Security Council resolution by the parties involved.”
“Also those involved in arranging, financing, and carrying out the shipments could likely face U.S. sanctions,” he said.
Asked about the shipments, a U.S. State Department spokesman said: “It’s clear that Russia needs to do more. All U.N. member states, including Russia, are required to implement sanctions resolutions in good faith and we expect them all to do so.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The independent panel of experts that reports to the Security Council on violations of sanctions was not immediately available for comment.
North Korea has refused to give up the development of nuclear missiles capable of hitting the United States. It has said the sanctions infringe its sovereignty and accused the United States of wanting to isolate and stifle North Korea.
An independent panel of experts reported to the Security Council on Sept. 5 that North Korea had been “deliberately using indirect channels to export prohibited commodities, evading sanctions.”
Reuters reported last month that Russian tankers had supplied fuel to North Korea at sea and U.S.
President Donald Trump told Reuters in an interview on Jan. 17 that Russia was helping Pyongyang get supplies in violation of the sanctions.
The U.S. Treasury on Wednesday imposed sanctions on nine entities, 16 people and six North Korean ships it accused of helping the weapons programs.
Two routes
Two separate routes for the coal were identified by the Western security sources.
The first used vessels from North Korea via Nakhodka, about 85 km (53 miles) east of the Russian city of Vladivostok.
One vessel that used this route was the Palau-flagged Jian Fu which Russian port control documents show delivered 17,415 tons of coal after sailing from Nampo in North Korea on Aug. 3 and docking at berth no. 4 run by LLC Port Livadiya in Nakhodka. It left the port on Aug. 18.
The vessel had turned off its tracking transmitter from July 24 to Aug. 2, when it was in open seas, according to publicly available ship tracking data. Under maritime conventions, this is acceptable practice at the discretion of the ship’s captain, but means the vessel could not be tracked publicly.
Another ship arrived at the same berth — No. 4 — on Aug. 16, loaded 20,500 tons of coal and headed to the South Korean port of Ulsan in Aug. 24, according to Russian port control documents.
Reuters was unable to reach the operator of the Jian Fu, which was listed in shipping directories as the China-based Sunrise Ship Management. The Nakhodka-based transport agent of the Jian Fu did not respond to written and telephone requests for comment. LLC Port Livadiya did not respond to a written request for comment.
The second route took coal via Kholmsk on the Russian Pacific island of Sakhalin, north of Japan.
At least two North Korean vessels unloaded coal at a dock in Kholmsk port in August and September after arriving from the ports of Wonsan and Taean in North Korea, Russian port control data and ship tracking data showed.
The Rung Ra 2 docked in Kholmsk three times between Aug. 1 and Sept. 12, unloading a total of 15,542 tons of coal, while the Ul Ji Bong 6 unloaded a total of 10,068 tons of coal on two separate port calls — on Aug. 3 and between Sept. 1 and Sept. 8, according to the official Russian Information System for State Port Control.
The coal did not pass Russian customs because of the UN sanctions taking effect, but was then loaded at the same dock onto Chinese-operated vessels. Those vessels stated their destination in Russian port control documents as North Korea, according to a source in Sakhalin port administration who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Reuters has seen the port control documents which state the destination of the coal as North Korea. But the vessels that loaded the North Korean coal sailed instead for the ports of Pohang and Incheon in South Korea, ship tracking data showed.
The Chinese commerce ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Treasury on Wednesday included the owner of the Ul Ji Bong 6 under sanctions for delivering North Korean coal to Kholmsk after the sanctions took effect.
It was unclear which companies profited from the coal shipments.
Asked about the shipments, a South Korean foreign ministry official said:c“Our government is monitoring any sanctions-evading activities by North Korea. We’re working closely with the international community for the implementation of the sanctions.”
The official declined to say whether the ministry was aware of the shipments reported by Reuters.
The Japanese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The European security sources said the route via Russia had developed as China, North Korea’s neighbour and lone major ally, cracked down on exports from the secretive Communist state.
“The Chinese have cracked down on coal exports from North Korea so the smuggling route has developed and Russia is the transit point for coal,” one of the European security sources said.
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The excitement of a run for the White House by media mogul Oprah Winfrey has come to an anticlimactic end.
Winfrey tells InStyle magazine that running for president is not in her DNA.
“It’s not something that interests me,” she said in an interview published Thursday. “I met with someone the other day who said that they would help me with a campaign. That’s not for me.”
Speculation of a presidential bid by the 63-year-old actress and media executive soared after her stirring speech at the Golden Globe awards against sexual harassment and racism.
Her words had all the trademarks of a political campaign-style speech.
President Donald Trump said he would welcome running against Winfrey in 2020 and that he would beat her.
But a recent poll showed Winfrey would defeat Trump by a landslide.
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Some parents thought they were misinterpreting the doctor’s techniques. Others assumed their children were lying or mistaken.
But as more details emerged, the mothers and fathers had to face an awful truth: A renowned sports doctor had molested their daughters.
These parents, many fighting back tears, confronted Larry Nassar during his long sentencing hearing, lamenting their deep feelings of guilt and wondering how they could have missed the abuse that sometimes happened when they were in the same room.
“I willingly took my most precious gift in this world to you, and you hurt her, physically, mentally and emotionally. And she was only 8,” Anne Swinehart told Nassar. “I will never get rid of the guilt that I have about this experience.”
Many of the young athletes had come to Nassar seeking treatment for gymnastics injuries. He was sentenced Wednesday to up to 175 years in prison after admitting sexually assaulting athletes under the guise of medical treatment while employed by Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body, which also trains Olympians.
He counted on his charm and reputation to deflect any questions. He was so brazen that he sometimes molested patients in front of their parents, shielding the young girls with his body or a sheet. His clinic on the university campus was decorated with signed photos of Olympic stars, bolstering his credentials to star-struck athletes and their families.
Parents who voiced concern say Nassar dismissed their questions. The mother of one 12-year-old victim said she questioned Nassar about not wearing gloves and he “answered in a way that made me feel stupid for asking.”
“I told myself, ‘He’s an Olympic doctor, be quiet,”’ the woman said. “The guilt that I feel, and that my husband feels, that we could not protect our child, is crippling.”
Some victims said they were so young that they did not understand they had been abused until they were adults, so did not tell anyone.
What’s more, coaches told the parents that Nassar was the best and could help their daughters achieve their dreams.
Paul DerOhannesian, a former prosecutor in New York who has written a book on sexual assault trials, said abusers in positions of authority often hold “tremendous power” over both children and parents. Some parents also fear what will happen to their child if they report abuse, and children often have difficulty talking to parents about anything sexual.
“It shouldn’t turn into a situation where we blame parents,” DerOhannesian said.
But even when Nassar’s abuse was reported to coaches and law enforcement authorities, many of them did not believe Nassar had done anything wrong, causing many parents and girls to second-guess themselves.
Donna Markham recounted how her then-12-year-old daughter Chelsey began sobbing in the car as they were headed home after a session with Nassar.
Her daughter said, “Mom, he put his fingers in me and they weren’t gloved,” then begged her mother not to confront Nassar, fearing it would derail her gymnastics career.
The next day, Donna Markham told her daughter’s coach, who did not believe it. Markham said she also asked other mothers if their daughters had mentioned inappropriate touching by Nassar. “They gave me a look like, ‘You’re lying to me,'” she told the judge, choking back tears.
Chelsey Markham quit gymnastics not long afterward and entered a “path of destruction” and self-loathing and eventually committed suicide.
“It all started with him,” Markham told the judge. “It has destroyed our family. We used to be so close. … I went through four years of intense therapy trying to deal with all this, until I could finally accept the fact that this was not my fault.”
Some parents did not believe their daughters at first, finding it incomprehensible that the man they trusted could have done anything wrong.
Kyle Stephens, whose family was close with Nassar’s, said he repeatedly abused her from age 6 to 12 during family visits to his home near Lansing, Michigan. But her parents did not believe her when she finally told them and made her apologize to Nassar.
Years later, her father realized she was telling the truth, and she blamed his 2016 suicide partly on the guilt he felt.
“Perhaps you have figured it out by now, but little girls don’t stay little forever,” Stephens told Nassar. “They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world.”
Dancer Olivia Venuto, who said Nassar abused her from 2006, when she was 12, until 2013, said her parents did not believe her at first and sent Nassar messages of support after a 2016 Indianapolis Star investigation revealed the abuse.
Swinehart said that when her 15-year-old daughter, Jillian, told her she had been abused, “I tried to believe that there was some medical necessity for this treatment,” she said. “The alternative was just too horrific, to think that I had let this happen to my child when I was sitting right there.”
Police in Michigan investigated Nassar twice. One inquiry from 2004 concluded that his actions were medically appropriate. Another investigation in 2014 and 2015 did not result in charges.
Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who sentenced Nassar, told parents not to feel guilty. “The red flags may have been there, but they were designed to be hidden,” she said.
Swinehart said other people can’t know how they would have reacted in the same situation.
“Quit shaming and blaming the parents,” she said. “Trust me, you would not have known. And you would not have done anything differently.”
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Grocery shopping went a little nuts in France when a supermarket chain deeply discounted jars of Nutella.
Aficionados of the chocolate hazelnut spread jostled and fought each other when the Intermarché supermarkets offered the treat at a 70 percent discount.
“They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand,” one customer told French media.
Videos posted on social media showed huge crowds gathered around pallets of Nutella, with people grabbing as many jars as they could carry.
In some stores, including in Ostricourt in northern France, police had to be called as scuffles broke out between customers.
In L’Horme, an employee told a newspaper that he saw a customer with a black eye in the crowd. “We were trying to get in between the customers, but they were pushing us,” he said.
France is the second-biggest consumer of Nutella, eating around 100 million jars per year, behind Germany.
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When the White House asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting from New York’s Guggenheim Museum, the request was denied. Instead, curator Nancy Spector, offered another piece of art: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet.
The toilet was used as a temporary interactive exhibit in one of the museum’s public bathrooms. The piece, titled “America,” has been described as satire mocking excessive wealth.
President Donald Trump and first lady Melania had asked to borrow Van Gogh’s “Landscape with Snow,” for display in their private living quarters.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Spector had emailed the White House to say the museum could not accommodate a request to “borrow” the painting, but she said the artist who created the toilet, Maurizio Cattelan, “would like to offer it to the White House for a long-term loan.”
“It is, of course, extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care,” she said in the email, The Post reported.
Sarah Eaton, a Guggenheim spokeswoman, confirmed that Spector wrote the email Sept. 15 to Donna Hayashi Smith of the White House’s Office of the Curator.
The White House did not respond to The Post’s inquiries.
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Los Angeles musician William Close holds the world record for the longest stringed instrument, a device he invented and has played around the world called the Earth Harp.
Close uses resin-coated gloves to demonstrate the instrument at his Malibu studio, with strings stretched from the instrument to metal stakes in an adjacent hillside that overlooks the coastline.
WATCH: Musician Pushes Boundaries with Earth Harp
The harp’s strings in this configuration are 30 meters (98 feet) long, and he says the idea in this or longer configurations is “to turn the earth into an instrument.”
He built his first Earth Harp in 2000.
“I set it up on one side of the canyon and ran the strings to the other side,” he recalls.
Since then, he has performed with a troupe of musicians and performance artists at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Shanghai’s Grand Theatre, the Colosseum in Rome, the Burning Man Festival in Nevada and other venues. At each location, he rigs expanses of metal strings to the instrument’s soundboard.
“I’ve strung it to the top of skyscrapers,” he says of the instrument, “from the base of a skyscraper 52 stories straight up.” That was for a 2014 performance in Singapore that earned the Guinness world record for longest stringed instrument, with the strings strung aloft nearly 300 meters (985 feet).
The musician has invented almost 100 instruments, from a hybrid that combines two Western guitars and Indian sitar to a percussion device with dozens of drum heads. He says some devices work better than others, but all, like the Earth Harp, push musical boundaries.
Close says the Earth Harp, which is his signature invention, has a symphonic sound with more high-end harmonics than those from a smaller instrument.
And the harp resonates with audiences. With strings towering overhead, he says listeners have the sense that they are inside the instrument as they hear musical compositions ranging from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man.
“I think it’s really emotional for people,” says Close, who suggests that the experience for audiences is “encompassing.”
He says the Earth Harp, although related to the harp, violin and cello, creates a distinctive kind of music powered by open spaces and Mother Earth.
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Melinda Gates has launched a high-level international commission to spark new thinking on how developing countries can best harness new technologies to reduce poverty. The wife of Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates spoke at the launch of the commission in Nairobi on Thursday.
The 11-member commission aims to promote use of technology to fight poverty across Africa and provide opportunities for the poor.
Melinda Gates, co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the newly launched commission would create opportunities for everyone.
“Let us unleash the opportunity here of all the amazing entrepreneurs, because they are the ones. The markets then will scale these great ideas and so we want to make sure that part of this world we are thinking about everybody, not just the people in the capital cities,” she said.
The commission will be co-chaired by Mrs. Gates, former Indonesian finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and Zimbabwean philanthropist Strive Masiywa.
The team with the help of researchers will deliberate new ideas like robotics, 3D printing, nanotechnology and blockchain to reduce poverty. They will also push for policy recommendations to help government navigate the ever changing technology.
According to the United Nations, half of the world poorest people live in Africa, and by 2030 about 400 million people in Africa will be poor.
The United Nations estimates 10 million people in Africa every year enter the job market. Experts note the continent needs more economic growth and employment to bring poverty down.
Strive Masiyiwa, who is founder of Econet Group, a telecommunications company, says Africa will have to create a better environment to benefit from the opportunities presented by technology.
“If we create the right incentives, we can begin to create African venture capitalists who support entrepreneurs on the ground, but they will require incentives, the entrepreneurs themselves need support we need to open our markets constantly deregulate. Deregulation must be a continuous process,” says Masiyiwa.
The everyday use of technology has spread in Africa, marked by an increase in mobile money marking and greater use of the internet.
But some experts question whether this progress has enhanced economic growth and improved people’s lives.
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U.S. President Donald Trump has questioned whether peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians will ever resume.
He made the remarks in a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he accused the Palestinians of disrespecting the United States by refusing to meet with Vice-President Mike Pence during his recent visit to the region.
Trump threatened to cut aid money to the Palestinian territories.
“That money is on the table and that money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace. Because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace, and they’re going to have to want to make peace too or we’re going to have nothing to do with it any longer,” he told reporters.
WATCH: Trump on Palestinians
Atlantic ties
Earlier, Trump rejected what he called ‘false rumors’ of differences with British Prime Minister Theresa May and promised to boost trade after Britain’s EU exit.
“I look forward to the discussions that will be taking place are going to lead to tremendous increases in trade between our two countries which is great for both in terms of jobs,” he said, adding that Britain and the United States are “joined at the hip when it comes to the military”.
There is nervousness that Trump’s “America First” diplomacy is about to shake-up the global system that underpins the Davos summit. Denmark’s Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said many Europeans are hoping for a positive message.
“I hope he will send a message, of course it will be ‘America First’, but if he could add on ‘But not alone’, or ‘But America First and we need cooperation with the rest of the world’ or whatever, that could be nice, because I think everybody needs to realize, whether you are a leader from a small or medium-sized or big countries that you can’t achieve what you want on your own. The world is faced with a lot of challenges, which can only be solved with close international cooperation,” Rasmussen said Thursday.
Wealth distribution questioned
The general mood in Davos is upbeat, with the IMF forecasting synchronized global growth across 2018. But behind the many closed doors, there is talk of danger ahead. The background report to the WEF summit is titled “Fractures, Fears and Failures”, a reflection of growing global tension, says Inderjeet Parmar, professor of international politics at City University London.
“Even though international wealth and the wealth of states and the levels of economic growth and the GDPs of states have grown, the inequality of the distribution is having large scale political effects.”
The fortunes of the world’s wealthiest 500 billionaires rose by a quarter last year, while the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population did not increase their income. Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima, in Davos for the summit, says it’s time for action.
“I’m here to tell big business and politicians that this is not natural, that it’s their actions and their policies that have caused it, and they can reverse it.”
Donald Trump is due to give the closing speech to the conference Friday.
“President Trump will be speaking to two audiences, the ones assembled in front of him, and his voter base at home. And I have a strong feeling that he is going to give some strong words in order to show people back home that he has gone to the belly of the beast itself, of globalization, and told them that he stands for America and the American people,” says analyst Parmar.
Davos is braced for what could be a dramatic finale Friday.
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After several near misses and heaps of outrage, this could finally be hip-hop and R&B’s year at the Grammy Awards on Sunday where rappers Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar dominate nominations for the top prizes on the biggest night in music.
Rap is now officially the biggest music genre in the United States after surpassing rock in 2017, but the odds are historically stacked against a hip-hop artist winning album of the year at the Grammys.
“Hip-hop and black music in general has really had its finger on the pulse of the American temperament for the last few years,” Ross Scarano, vice president of content at Billboard magazine, told Reuters.
“There is a sense that maybe this year some of the wrongs will be righted. I think people are looking to Kendrick and to Jay to do that,” Scarano said.
In the 60-year history of the most prestigious honors in music, only two hip-hop albums have ever won album of the year; Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1999 and Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2004.
Lamar, 30, whose fusion of jazz, poetry and blues with social themes and love songs has made him one of the most innovative rappers of his generation, missed out in 2016 with his critically acclaimed album “To Pimp a Butterfly.”
This year, he is back with album of the year nominee “Damn.” and record of the year entry “Humble.”
A year ago, British pop star Adele’s “25” swept aside Beyonce’s influential “Lemonade,” a win that stunned even Adele.
This year, Jay-Z, 44, was nominated for album of the year for “4:44,” in which he examines the infidelity that was so scathingly detailed by his wife Beyonce in “Lemonade.”
Scarano said the fact of Jay-Z “getting down on his knees, so to speak, and baring his soul really resonate in a year where we’ve seen a lot of men taken to task for really objectionable behavior.”
Jay-Z goes into Sunday’s ceremony in New York with a leading eight nominations followed by Lamar (7), Bruno Mars (6) and Childish Gambino, the alter ego of actor Donald Glover, with 5.
Ed Sheeran was snubbed in the album, song and record of the year categories despite his romantic pop album “Divide” being the biggest seller of 2017. That omission leaves only New Zealand-born singer-songwriter Lorde’s album “Melodrama” and the Latin global hit single “Despacito” to mount a serious challenge in the top races.
However, the Grammys aren’t just about the winners. In a three-hour live show where careers can be made or damaged, performers include Miley Cyrus, Elton John, U2, Sting, Kesha, Rihanna, Sam Smith, SZA and Broadway star Ben Platt.
The Grammy Awards, hosted by James Corden, will be broadcast live from New York’s Madison Square Garden on CBS television on Sunday starting at 7:30 pm ET.
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U.S. and Mexican unions will formally complain to the U.S. Labor Department on Thursday that Mexico continues to violate NAFTA’s weak labor standards, a move that they hope will persuade U.S. negotiators to push for stronger rules.
The AFL-CIO told Reuters that it and Mexico’s UNT were filing the complaint with the U.S. office that oversees the labor accord attached to the North American Free Trade Agreement as U.S., Canadian, and Mexican negotiators met in Montreal to try to modernize the 1994 trade pact.
The complaint, seen by Reuters, argues that Mexico’s proposed labor law amendments to implement constitutional reforms will violate the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation. It seeks efforts from the United States to prevent the measures from being implemented and to demand changes to bring Mexico into compliance.
“Simply by promoting this bill, which aims to undermine the constitutional reforms, the government of Mexico brazenly violates the central obligations of the NAALC – namely to ‘provide high labor standards’ and to ‘strive to improve those standards,’” the AFL-CIO and Mexico’s UNT National Workers Union said in the complaint.
Talks to overhaul the trade deal have been dogged by U.S. threats to withdraw from the pact, but the foreign ministers of Mexico and Canada on Thursday struck an upbeat note on future negotiations.
A key complaint is that NAFTA has failed to lift chronically low Mexican wages that have steadily drawn U.S. and Canadian factories and jobs to Mexico.
The trade pact has also allowed lower health and safety standards in Mexican factories to persist, but violations of the NAFTA labor cooperation agreement are not enforceable through trade sanctions.
The U.S. Trade Representative’s office has made steep demands on automotive content to reverse job migration, but its labor proposals have disappointed unions and many Democratic Party lawmakers. The proposals stuck largely to language that Mexico and Canada previously agreed to in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal the Trump administration has abandoned.
“What the USTR put on the table is not acceptable and won’t get the job done,” said Celeste Drake, the AFL-CIO’s trade and globalization policy specialist.
She said past complaints to the Labor Department regarding Mexico’s violation of the labor cooperation pact have not led to major change and this one may be no different, but it aims to influence the negotiations by drawing attention to Mexico’s weak record on worker rights as negotiators discuss labor issues in Montreal.
“It gives ammunition at the negotiating table to U.S. and Canadian negotiators to say, ‘Your violations on NAFTA are not in the past, they’re not over with.’”
A USTR spokeswoman could not be immediately reached for comment.
Thus far, Canada led the call for higher labor standards in the talks, including making a proposal that the United States revise its so-called right-to-work laws in many southern states that help to limit the spread of unions in manufacturing.
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A Syrian refugee will be cooking dishes from Damascus and Aleppo for VIP guests at the opening of the Berlinale International Film Festival next month.
The choice of Malakeh Jazmati reflects the mission of the festival, which was set up in 1951 to showcase films that address urgent social and political issues in the world.
The festival devoted its program to refugees and migration in 2016 after Europe’s politics were convulsed by the arrival of more than a million refugees from the Middle East and Africa, including Jazmati herself.
At the Berlin film festival opening reception in February, the 30-year-old chef, who runs a catering business in the German capital with her husband, will be cooking for more than 400 guests attending the opening reception.
“When I went and saw it’s not just any film festival but the Berlinale, I was more than happy,” she said of her reaction on learning she had been chosen. “It’s like getting to fulfill your dreams.”
She will be working under the management of Berlinale’s chef Martin Scharff and cooperating with the Lebanese-American cook Barbara Massaad, known for her Syrian cookbook. Her menu will range from Aleppo stuffed aubergine to a Damascene “Syrian pasta”, seasoned with tamarind sauce and pomegranate molasses.
“People think about our food that we only have falafel and hummus, but after that they see it’s a very big kitchen,” Jazmati told Reuters TV.
The festival will open on February 15 with the world premiere of Wes Anderson’s animated film “Isle of Dogs,” staring Hollywood actors such as Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton.
Puerto Rico’s governor submitted a revised fiscal plan overnight Thursday that estimates the U.S. Caribbean territory’s economy will shrink by 11 percent and its population drop by nearly 8 percent next year.
The proposal doesn’t set aside any money to pay creditors in the next five years as the island struggles to restructure a portion of its $73 billion public debt. The original plan had set aside $800 million a year for creditors, a fraction of the roughly $35 billion due in interest and payments over the next decade.
The five-year plan also assumes Puerto Rico will receive at least $35 billion in emergency federal funds for post-hurricane recovery and another $22 billion from private insurance companies.
Some analysts view that assumption as risky given that the U.S. Treasury Department and U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency recently told Puerto Rico officials that they are temporarily withholding billions of dollars approved by Congress last year for post-hurricane recovery because they felt the island currently had sufficient funds.
A spokesman for Gerardo Portela, director of the island’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority, said he was not immediately available for comment.
The plan does not call for layoffs or new taxes. Instead, Gov. Ricardo Rossello once again called for labor and tax reforms and the privatization of the island’s power company to help generate revenue and promote economic development amid an 11-year recession. He noted that nearly half of the island’s 3.3 million inhabitants lived in poverty prior to the hurricane and that Puerto Rico still faces an 11 percent unemployment rate. Nearly half a million people have fled for the U.S. mainland in the past decade in search of jobs and a more affordable cost of living.
“We must work as a government to prevent this from happening, and that’s what we’re focused on,” he said.
Rossello said an original $350 million cut to the island’s 78 municipalities will not be immediately imposed as they struggle post-hurricane. Instead, he said they will receive more money than usual in upcoming years.
Rossello also called for reducing several taxes, including an 11.5 percent sales-and-use tax to 7 percent for prepared food. More than 30 percent of power customers remain in the dark more than four months after Hurricane Maria, forcing many to spend their dwindling savings on eating out.
A federal control board overseeing Puerto Rico’s finances has to approve of the plan, which it envisions doing by Feb. 23.
“The Oversight Board views implementing structural reforms and investing in critical infrastructure as key to restoring economic growth and increasing confidence of residents and businesses,” Natalie Jaresko, the board’s executive director, said in a statement Thursday. “Our focus in certifying the revised plans will be to ensure they reflect Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane realities.”
Just two days before its scheduled release in Russian theaters, a tongue-in-check black comedy about Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, “The Death of Stalin,” has been banned by the Kremlin’s Culture Ministry.
In Park City, Utah, however, where British director Armando Iannucci and several cast members are still presenting the film, a slight optimism still pervades.
While many Russians are doubtful the film could screen prior to upcoming presidential elections, Iannucci, creator of “Veep,” HBO’s serial political satire, told VOA that his team had done a lot of preparatory work for the filming, reading archives and talking with historians, and that no one should take offense to the film’s satirical treatment.
“We are very respectful of what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in the 1950s, to the people, and we do not hide that in the film,” Iannucci said an interview with VOA’s Russian Service. He said Russians who had seen the film said “two things” to him: “It’s very funny and it’s true.”
Stalin’s allies
Chronicling the backstabbing and infighting among the Soviet leader’s closest allies as they vie for power immediately after Stalin’s death, the film, which has earned accolades in Britain, was slated for release in advance of the 75th anniversary of the end of the 200-day Battle of Stalingrad, which is observed nationwide on Feb. 2.
“This is an obvious imposition and an insult to our civil and national feelings,” Yuri Polyakov, head of the Culture Ministry’s public advisory board, was quoted in news reports. “Everyone said that, from the professional point of view, this is a very bad film, absolutely false. This is a model of ideological struggle with our country.”
Commenting on the decision, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky said in a statement on the ministry’s website: “We don’t have censorship. We’re not afraid of critical or hard-hitting assessments of our history. In this department, we could give anyone a run for their money. But there’s a moral boundary between the critical analysis of history and pure mockery.”
In Russia, where the film was privately viewed only by Culture Ministry officials and a coterie of advisers, the audience felt it would pose a grievous affront to Russia’s World War II veterans whom they credit with overcoming fascism.
According to one of the film’s main Russian detractors, former State Duma deputy Pavel Pozhigailo, the film, based on a graphic novel of the same name, portrays Georgy Zhukov, Stalin’s deputy commander-in-chief, as a buffoon.
Actor Jason Isaacs, who played Zhukov, is not surprised by such a reaction from members of Russia’s political elite.
For Isaacs, however, the reaction of his Eastern European friend — whose mother’s entire family was deported by Stalin to the gulag — is much more important.
“They’re desperate to see it,” he told VOA. “One of the ways they kept sane [during that time] was by laughing. At the time, people lived in absolute terror, [so] they circulated joke books about Stalin just to keep a sense of identity.”
“I think comedy is only funny if you really believe it’s true,” said actress Andrea Riseborough, who plays Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, whom many Americans know as “Lana Peters.”
“So, weirdly, when you are inside the comedy, it’s incredibly dramatic,” Riseborough said. “That’s why it’s funny.”
Black satire
For Riseborough, whom Variety recently called “the breakout star of Sundance [2018]” — with no less than four films debuting in festival’s the opening weekend — it was Alliluyeva’s sheer grit that leavened some of the film’s blacker satire.
“It’s amazing that she was so resilient, she was incredibly resourceful,” Riseborough told VOA, adding that she looked to Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan’s “Daughter of Stalin,” published in 2015, for character insights.
“That she survived for as long as she did… I can’t imagine what the emotional toll is to have a father like Stalin,” she said. “That was probably the hardest thing about playing her part, just spending time imagining what that would be like.”
Emmy-nominated composer Chris Willis, who has worked on the seven seasons of “Veep,” said that, at first, he tried unsuccessfully to recreate the music of Shostakovich and Weinberg to portray the era of the 1950s USSR.
“With this kind of comedy, the key thing is really to stay in character like the actors — not really to wink, not really to make any jokes,” he said. “Just a slight sense that all the music is a little too pompous and extreme, and that kind of invites you to laugh. But mostly there is no laughs in the music. The music is playing very straight.”
For director Iannucci, the film’s overall tone is so vastly nuanced that its negative reception in the Kremlin, he suggested, may be limited to Communist Party stalwarts. The film’s political character composites, he added, draw from well beyond Kremlin leaders.
“The reason I made this film is I detected in a lot of politicians — not just [President Vladimir] Putin, but we see [U.S. President Donald] Trump as well, [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan in Turkey, and even [Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi as was in Italy,” he said. “This sense of a strongman in the center who has complete control and complete authority.”
Large-scale discussion
In Russia, Wednesday’s Culture Ministry decisions has triggered a large-scale discussion. Among those dissatisfied with the ban is the film critic Anton Dolin, editor-in-chief of the Moscow-based Art of Cinema journal.
“Those who initiated or supported the ban on the comedy ‘The Death of Stalin’ at the state level, thereby confessed, aloud and unequivocally: ‘Yes, we are Stalinists,’ ” read a post on Dolin’s personal Facebook page. “So that there is no misunderstanding: the Stalinists are those who consider Stalin a hero and a role model (in all its variations or in some, it does not matter), and find laughing at him unacceptable.”
Yelena Drapeko of the parliament’s culture committee told Moscow-based RBK news that she had “never seen anything so disgusting in my life.”
The film, she added, contains “extremist” elements.
“The Death of Stalin” is scheduled to be released in the U.S. theaters on March 9.
Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry says it has placed the ancient colossus of famed pharaoh Ramses II at the entrance of a museum under construction near the country’s famed pyramids outside the capital Cairo.
Thursday’s placement of the colossus, which weighs over 80 tons and is some 12 meters (13 yards) high, occurred amid a great deal of fanfare and in the presence of Western and Egyptian officials.
The colossus, which dates back some 3,300 years, will be on display at the entrance of the Grand Egyptian Museum, which will house some of Egypt’s most unique and precious ancient artefacts, including some belonging to famed boy King Tutankhamun.
Another 87 artifacts will be placed at the museum’s entrance, Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani said. The first phase of the museum will be inaugurated later this year.
…
Southern rock icons Lynyrd Skynyrd will kick off their final tour May 4 in West Palm Beach, Florida, more than 40 years after the band’s debut album was released.
The Rock `N’ Roll Hall of Famers announced Thursday that the farewell tour will also feature Kid Rock, Hank Williams Jr., Bad Company, the Marshall Tucker Band and 38 Special.
Formed in Jacksonville, the band behind hits like “Free Bird,” “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Simple Man,” was struck by tragedy when a plane crash in 1977 killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, backup singer Cassie Gaines and several members of the road crew. The lineup now includes Gary Rossington and Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s brother.
…
The young woman, new to the grind of Chinese factory life, knew the man who called himself Kalen only by the photo on his chat profile. It showed him with a pressed smile holding a paper cup in a swank skyscraper somewhere late at night.
Yu Chunyan and her friends didn’t know what to make of him. Some thought his eyes were shifty. Others said he looked handsome in a heroic sort of way.
Yu was among the doubters. The daughter of factory workers, Yu paid her way through college by working in factories herself. She and thousands of other students had toiled through the summer of 2016 assembling iPhones at a supplier for Apple Inc., but they hadn’t been paid their full wages.
Kalen was offering to help – and asking nothing in return.
This struck Yu as suspicious. If there was one thing she had learned in her 23 years it was this: “There’s no free lunch.”
Disputes like these often don’t go well for workers in China. But over the years, suicides and sweatshop scandals have pushed some companies, like Apple, to reconsider their approach to workplace fairness.
Today, a growing number of brands, including Apple, Nike Inc., Gap Inc., Levi Strauss & Co., and the H&M Group prioritize transparency and take public responsibility for conditions throughout their global supply chains. Labor rights groups like the one Kalen worked for, China Labor Watch, can play a useful watchdog role for these companies, by helping them understand what’s really going on at their suppliers.
But not everyone has embraced this new approach.
When China Labor Watch confronted Ivanka Trump’s brand with charges of labor abuses at its Chinese suppliers, her company refused to engage. It made no public effort to investigate the allegations: forced overtime, pay as low as $1 an hour, and crude verbal and physical abuse – including one incident in which a man was hit in the head with the sharp end of a high-heeled shoe.
Ivanka Trump, who still owns but no longer closely manages her namesake brand, stayed silent. Neither she nor her brand would comment for this story.
Unlike Apple, her brand doesn’t publish the identities of its manufacturers. In fact, its supply chains have only grown more opaque since the first daughter took on her White House role.
But as the summer of 2016 was ending, Yu Chunyan had no idea she was about to get an education in geopolitics and corporate social responsibility. She wanted one thing only: her wages. And she saw one way to get them: The stranger with the odd English name.
Kalen and China Labor Watch would link Yu not just to Apple, but ultimately, to the daughter of the President of the United States. Their intersecting stories highlight the contrasting approaches Apple and Ivanka Trump’s brand have taken to workplace fairness – and the impact those decisions have had on the ground in China.
It would take Yu more than a year to discover who Kalen really was.
No help came
When Yu was still a baby, her parents went to work at a factory in one of the southern boomtowns of Guangdong province. As a child, entire years passed without a visit from her mother or father.
This was an ordinary enough fate in China, and Yu grew up bouncing between her grandparents’ homes in central China’s Henan province.
The first extraordinary thing that happened to Yu was her high school entrance exam. She aced it, despite her middling grades, scoring even higher than the known overachievers in class.
The shock of her accomplishment gave Yu a soaring sense of her own potential. She raced to tell her mother.
“Oh,” was her mother’s stony response.
Yu’s test score opened the possibility, unsettling to her parents, that she would not marry young, produce grandchildren and start earning money for the family.
Her parents regarded aspiration warily: Excellence would only lead to inflated expectations. Just the sort of thing, her parents feared, that could crush a person. Better to remain where you are, bound by a certain, riskless horizon.
Yu did not agree. “As long as I want something, I will get it,” she decided.
Her parents let her stay in school, but if Yu wanted to go to college, she would have to pay her own way.
And so she did. She enrolled in a college in Henan province. Ultimately, she wanted to do something creative, like design; in the meantime factory jobs weren’t a bad way to make money.
In July 2016, Yu took her place on the assembly line at Jabil Inc.’s Green Point factory in Wuxi, a city near Shanghai. She spent her 12-hour shift snapping the back cover of the iPhone 7 into a mold and passing it down the line.
“It seems simple,” Yu said. “But if you work the whole day doing this your hands will be really tired. Normally, it’s a job for a man.”
Her group’s production quota kept going up, climbing from 2,000 to 50,000 units a day, Yu said. She got dizzy. Her hands hurt. She thought: “When will it be over?”
In August 2016, she quit, ignoring admonitions that her pay would be docked 500 yuan ($79, at today’s rates) for leaving early.
Yu made the 12-hour train trip back to school in Henan and on Sept. 10, her final paycheck hit her bank account. It was an ugly surprise. She was 1,100 yuan short of the 4,930 yuan she expected. Her salary was supposed to cover her tuition. Now it didn’t.
“I was furious,” she said. “I thought that no matter what I would get my money back.”
She called the factory and the labor broker who had gotten her the job only to be informed of a range of surprising fees, some legitimate, others not.
Yu called the labor union at Green Point for help. “Useless,” she said. She called the local labor bureau, but no one picked up.
On Chinese social media, Yu found a chorus of despair as other students – the children of farmers, factory and construction workers – vented about being stiffed on WeChat, QQ and Weibo.
“Everyone had an attitude like, ‘Well, it has nothing to do with me,'” said Zhuang Huaqian, an electrical engineering student at Hunan University of Technology, who spent the summer assembling iPhones in a moon suit of dust-free clothing.
The head of one of the labor brokers in the dispute, Ding Yan, said his company had done nothing wrong. “Wages are our bottom line. We will never underpay them,” he said. “I wouldn’t risk this brand.”
Frustrated, the students took their case to the press. A few articles appeared detailing their complaints, but Yu and another student said postings began to disappear. Were they being censored, they wondered?
The local government published an article on an official Weibo account that said authorities acted swiftly and more than 2,100 students had been repaid. The post included complaint hotlines workers could call.
Chen Jianbin, head of Wuxi’s labor security supervision unit, said his team had to sort through verbal contracts, informal intermediaries and fake complaints apparently lodged by people paid to smear competing labor agencies.
“We were trying our best to help,” said Chen. “Those students’ lives were not easy.”
But many students hadn’t gotten their money back.
Beneath their fury was growing desperation. Every lever of redress they had tried failed them. They had appealed for help to forces they thought they could believe in – society, the government – but no help came.
‘The world is full of good people’
There was, however, one guy, who did offer help. He called himself Kalen.
Kalen had worked in a phone factory himself, 13 years earlier, polishing cheap landline phones for a Chinese brand at a factory in Shenzhen. Back then, he didn’t realize he was being underpaid until he wandered into the office of a local labor rights group one day and learned that he wasn’t earning the legal minimum wage.
That knowledge electrified him. He devoured books about labor rights in the group’s reading room as he prepared his case. Two months later, he won 3,000 yuan in back pay through a local arbitration panel.
Kalen wondered how many other workers out there were like him, ignorant of their rights. He quit his factory job and dedicated himself to teaching workers how to use China’s laws to protect themselves.
Kalen brought his evidence-based approach to China Labor Watch, a group many of the students had never heard of before. He told them about the group’s past work with Apple suppliers and taught them how to calculate what they were owed. He admonished them to be honest as he gathered details about working hours and pay from over 200 workers.
“Seek truth from facts,” he wrote them on QQ.
In September, China Labor Watch asked Apple to intervene. The company sent a local team to investigate, reporting that 2,501 students had received back wages.
But many said they still hadn’t been fully paid.
When Kalen asked for a volunteer to write a letter to Apple, Yu was torn: Could she get kicked out of school for speaking out?
“It was so hard for me to make this money,” she said. “As long as there was a little bit of hope left I wanted to try.” She stayed up past midnight writing down everything that had happened.
On Sept. 28, Li emailed Yu’s letter to Apple.
Five days later, Apple wrote back: It had done further investigation and would ensure workers got paid for their day of training and extra work during meal breaks.
“Jabil invested hundreds of hours of staff time to contact approximately 17,000 employees,” Eric Austermann, Jabil’s vice-president of social and environmental responsibility wrote in an email to AP. “Although often lacking an email address, phone number, or other standard contact information, Jabil located all but about 5 percent of these employees, all of whom have been paid in full.”
The workers received over 2.7 million yuan ($426,000, at today’s rates), according to Jabil Green Point and an October 2017 email from Apple to China Labor Watch.
Apple declined to the comment on the case.
The students’ payments came in a few hundred or thousand yuan at a time. This was money for school, for food, a way to stay out of debt. By the end of October, Yu had gotten back everything she was owed.
She was impressed. She amended the letter she had written for Kalen, turning it into a testimonial and a statement of personal intent. China Labor Watch posted it on its website.
“Due to this experience, I am confident that the world is full of good people, people who make selfless contributions,” Yu wrote. “I wish to join a public interest organization. I wish to help others.”
But China was changing. Hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists had been swept up in a crackdown against perceived threats to the ruling Communist Party. Those with foreign ties, like China Labor Watch, were viewed with particular suspicion.
Yu had yet to grasp the perils of her growing idealism.
It could have been me
After Chinese New Year, Yu moved to Shanghai, a city she had only seen in pictures, to take a job at an interior design company. In March 2017, five months after she’d received her back pay from the factory, Yu reconnected with Kalen on WeChat.
Kalen told her China Labor Watch might need people to work undercover.
China Labor Watch was closing in on factories that made Ivanka Trump merchandise, including Ganzhou Huajian International Shoe City Co.
But the thought of returning to the grind of factory life was more than she could stomach.
“I needed to push myself forward,” she said. She wanted to learn English, dress better, lose weight.
China Labor Watch ultimately sent two men to work undercover. The group obtained a video of a manager berating a worker for apparently arranging shoes in the wrong order.
“If I see them f—ing messed up again,” the manager yells, “I’ll beat you right here.” Another worker was left with blood dripping from his head after a manager hit him with the sharp end of a high heeled shoe, according to three eyewitnesses who spoke to the AP.
The Huajian Group, which runs the factory in Ganzhou, denied all the allegations as “completely not true to the facts, taken out of context, exaggerated.” In April, China Labor Watch laid out its initial findings in a letter to Ivanka Trump at the White House.
She did not respond.
Over the years, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Gap Inc., Target Corp., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and other companies took China Labor Watch seriously enough to respond to criticisms or meet Li in person, according to emails and meeting notes reviewed by AP. Walt Disney Co. severed its relationship with at least one supplier after China Labor Watch exposed poor working conditions.
“We did an investigation on Apple because Apple is a big American company,” Li said. “If Apple changes, the other companies will follow. Now Ivanka is the most famous person among all these companies. If she can change, the other companies will too.”
But that plan backfired.
At the end of May, three China Labor Watch investigators were arrested, accused of illegally using secret cameras and listening devices.
One of them was investigator Hua Haifeng. Police had warned Hua to drop the Huajian investigation, but he pushed ahead anyway, Li said.
A wiry man not easily moved to alarm, Hua seemed to accept fear as the cost of his decision to live his life as an expression of his values.
In more than a decade working on labor rights in China, Hua had helped thousands of workers get back money they were owed, all the while half-wondering when he’d be forced to stop.
Now that he had, Hua, 36, was cut off from his wife and two young children.
Inside the Ganzhou City Detention Center, Hua shared a toothbrush with strangers. Locked in a cell so crowded there weren’t enough wooden boards to sleep on, Hua stretched out at night on a concrete floor next to a bucket that served as the toilet for around 20 men. The men added water and soap, hoping the bubbles might somehow take the stench out of human waste. It didn’t work.
It was the first time in China Labor Watch’s 17-year history that its investigators had been arrested. Police raided the group’s Shenzhen office and carried away computers and documents, Li said.
From his office in New York, Li worked frantically to get the men out of jail. He was convinced the shift in fortune was due to the target of their inquiry: a brand owned by the daughter of the U.S. president. But he had no proof.
Ivanka Trump – and her brand – said nothing about the arrests.
Where is Kalen?
Days after the arrest, Yu Chunyan took a new job at a design company in Shanghai, but something lingered from her experience at the Green Point factory. “I’d prefer work that can help more people,” she said.
She got a friend request from China Labor Watch’s Li Qiang. She messaged Kalen to check Li out.
Kalen never replied. She wondered what had happened to him.
On June 5, the U.S. State Department called for the immediate release of the three China Labor Watch investigators.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded that other nations “have no right to interfere with our judicial sovereignty.” State-owned media reported that the trio had tried to steal trade secrets and sell them overseas.
Li Qiang wrote to Ivanka Trump at the White House on June 6, describing what he called “extreme working conditions” in her supply chain. “Your words and deeds can make a difference in these workers’ lives,” he wrote.
He got no reply.
Her brand has called its supply chain integrity “a top priority,” but also maintains that its suppliers are overseen by licensees – companies it contracts with to make tons of Ivanka Trump handbags, shoes and clothes.
The brand said its shoes had not been produced at the Huajian factory since March, though China Labor Watch obtained an April production schedule for nearly 1,000 pairs of Ivanka Trump shoes due in May.
In late June, after 30 days in jail, the three China Labor Watch investigators were released on bail. Hua carried his son in his arms as he walked out of a police station in Ganzhou.
Hua declined to be interviewed for this story. His lawyer said police ordered him not to speak with the media. His bail conditions dictated that he must check in weekly with police and cannot travel without permission. That, plus the cloud of criminal suspicion that clung to him in his small hometown, made it hard to get a job.
In July, Hua asked police for permission to take a family vacation in the Wudang mountains, three hours away. After articles came out in the foreign press quoting Hua, half a dozen plainclothes policemen appeared at a restaurant where Hua was having dinner with his family and tapped him on the shoulder. The next morning they escorted him home, leaving his wife, Deng Guilian, to wander through Taoist temples alone with the kids.
With her husband out of work, Deng got a job selling drinks and snacks at a local karaoke parlor from 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. After her shift, she heads to a nearby dormitory where she and a female co-worker share a bed with a Snoopy headboard.
She gets three days off a month to see her four-year-old son, Bo Bo, and seven-year-old daughter, Chen Chen.
“They seem accustomed to not having their mom,” Deng said, flashing an uneasy smile.
Each Monday morning after dropping his kids at school, Hua makes the short drive past weedy lots and a factory spewing thick white smoke to check in with the local police in Nanzhang County.
At first they lectured him: Change careers. Don’t speak out. Live a normal life. Now, he usually just signs his name, his wife said, but it is clear that missteps can quickly draw the wrath of local authorities.
Police in Nanzhang County, Ganzhou city and Jiangxi province did not respond to requests for comment.
In October, Li Qiang again wrote to Ivanka Trump and her brand.
He said he got no response.
Ivanka Trump’s actions show “that she does not care about these workers who are making her products, and is only concerned with making profits,” Li said in an email. “As a public figure, she has the ability and resources to not only work on labor conditions at her own brand’s factories, but also to help improve labor conditions of the global supply chain as a whole. However, she did not use her influence to do these things.”
An ordinary person
Shortly after 6 p.m. on an October evening, Yu Chunyan left her office and walked through Shanghai’s former French Concession, the wealthy heart of China’s most prosperous city. She passed rows of thick plane trees, black against a darkening sky, and stepped into a discreet tea house.
Yu slid open the wooden door of a private room and peeked inside with a wide, nervous smile at the AP journalists she had agreed to meet. A chunky, colorless sweater hung off her body and her stocking feet poked out of white sandals despite the cold.
Yu slipped off her shoes and took a seat at the sunken table, doing her best to avoid the list of fancy teas glowing from a scrollable iPad menu. She began to talk about Kalen, and pulled out her phone to flip to their exchanges on WeChat.
There, in his tiny profile photo, was a familiar face.
“Do you know him?” she asked, surprised.
AP had been writing about him for months.
Kalen was Hua Haifeng.
Yu had no idea that her Kalen was the same Hua Haifeng who had been arrested while investigating Ivanka Trump suppliers. She listened, still and silent, to news of interrogations and surveillance, his son’s sudden nightmares, the jail and the bucket of urine.
Her eyes welled. Elegant cakes lay untouched in front of her.
An hour later, she sent a WeChat message to Kalen.
“Do you have to take risks to work in your industry?” she asked.
Risks depend on politics, he wrote her, and the conditions of the country you live in. “From the beginning, I expected something like this could happen,” he told her. “So it’s not about bad luck. It was going to happen sooner or later.”
“If you had another chance, would you do the same thing?” she asked.
“Yes,” he answered. Hua told Yu that he had to live a life that embodied his values. He tried to be encouraging. “I am not saying that everyone has to pay that high a price.”
But Yu had a sense that Hua had run up against forces neither of them could fully grasp, much less defeat. In her mind, she was recalibrating the risks of idealism.
“I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Yu said.
In late November, she left Shanghai to go back and live with her parents.
“I want to be an ordinary person,” she said. “I don’t want to get involved with controversial things.”
A top economic adviser and trusted aid of Chinese leader Xi Jinping has promised that reforms are coming to China this year and adds that some could even “exceed expectations.”
Speaking at a forum on the Chinese Economy at the World Economic Forum, Liu He said China would take steps to open up the banking, finance and insurance sector as well as the manufacturing and service sector and other measures.
“Many of our foreign friends have asked, you’ve made so many promises, but when will they be carried out? I can responsibly say that we will carry out these promises one after the other, the sooner, the better,” Liu said.
China has long promised to open up its markets to the world, but the slow pace of reform in some sectors and a playing field that is tilted heavily in the favor of state owned enterprises and forces players to hand over technology in exchange for market access has increasingly been the focus of criticism from foreign firms in recent years.
It was unclear from his remarks how some of that might change, but analysts note that what Liu has to say is important. Late last year, he was elevated to a seat on the 25-member politburo of the Communist Party of China. He is also widely expected to become China’s next vice premier in March with a portfolio that focuses on the economy.
He said that as China marks 40 years of opening its markets up to the world, reform measures fitting to commemorate and celebrate that occasion would be unveiled.
“The best way to celebrate is by offering up new and even deeper reforms,” Liu said. “The central government is currently reviewing what those measures will be, and I can responsibly say that some of those measures could exceed the expectations of the international community.”
In his remarks, Liu He said China would focus on continuing to open up in four areas: finance, manufacturing and services, boosting intellectual property right protection and expanding imports.
For manufacturing, that would include shipping, rail transit and equipment manufacturing and reducing restrictions on foreign investment. On imports, Liu noted that last year China reduced tariffs on 187 products, cutting the average from 17.3 percent to 7.7 percent. He said such moves would continue.
In recent years, China has come under increasing criticism from the United States and other countries over its trade practices.
Automobile tariffs are one area of concern. Imported cars currently face a 25 percent tax coming into China, while Chinese automobiles that are shipped to the United States face a 2.5 percent tax.
In his speech Liu He repeated an earlier promise to gradually lower tariffs on imported automobiles, but gave no specifics on a possible timeline.
On the campaign trail, U.S President Donald Trump promised to put more pressure on China and as Beijing continues to delay on promised reforms, trade war clouds are looming.
Earlier this week, he announced heavy tariffs on solar panels and washing machines — a strike at China’s economy that some analysts argue is just the beginning.
Trump will speak on Friday at the meetings in Davos and here in China his appearance at the gathering is being used as a way of contrasting what some argue is a sharp difference in world views between the two countries.
A state-run Xinhua news agency commentary entitled “Shared Future or America First” argued that business leaders and policy makers at the meeting were facing a choice between a “Xi style collaborative approach” or Donald Trump’s “self-centered America First policy.”
The theme of this year’s meeting in Davos is “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.” Xinhua said that with Britain’s Brexit and Trump’s America First policy “the bandwagon of globalization and integration has been put into reverse.”
The communist party-backed Global Times echoed similar sentiment in a piece entitled “ Community with shared future has broader appeal.” In that article, the paper said Trump’s “America First” policy “actually brings out the charm of the Chinese proposal of a community with shared future.” Adding that, “however hard it will be to build such a community, this will garner more support than becoming a selfish power.”
The idea of a community with a shared future was put forward by China last year, when Chinese President Xi Jinping became the first head of state to attend the forum.
When he speaks on Friday, President Trump will be the first U.S. leader to speak at the meeting since former president Bill Clinton.