Day: March 14, 2024

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washington — Chinese drone maker DJI is expanding in the U.S. with its first flagship store in New York City amid allegations of links to human rights abuses and ties to China’s military.

DJI’s “first concept” North American store on New York’s Fifth Avenue welcomes customers into a futuristic, minimalist space to shop. The company describes itself on its website as “the world’s leader in civil drones and creative camera technology.”

“We continue to see growing consumer demand throughout North America as we expand our consumer product portfolio,” said Christina Zhang, senior director of corporate strategy at DJI.

Headquartered in Shenzhen, China, the company was founded in 2006. DJI, also known as Da Jiang Innovations, has become the world’s largest drone maker, having achieved global dominance in less than 20 years. The company now supplies 70% of the world’s consumer drones and nearly 80% of U.S. consumer drones.

Abuse allegations

On March 5, the day of DJI’s official store opening in New York, the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), a Washington research and advocacy group, released a report titled Surveillance Tech Series: DJI’s Links to Human Rights Abuses in East Turkistan.

The report accuses DJI of being involved in mass surveillance and rights violations against Uyghur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and other Muslim communities in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which the group calls East Turkistan.

“DJI is directly involved in mass surveillance schemes in East Turkistan and has supplied public security agencies with tools to surveil and target Uyghurs, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz people,” the UHRP report said. “Xinjiang public security departments entered into seven procurement orders with DJI that were worth nearly US$300,000 between 2019 and 2022.”

The report stated that DJI sells drones to Xinjiang’s paramilitary organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which the U.S. government sanctioned because of its “connection with serious rights abuses against ethnic minorities” in Xinjiang.

“Other documents show tenders worth US$47,000 for DJI drones for the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps,” the UHRP report stated.

The report also said that a DJI drone captured footage of dozens of individuals, seemingly Uyghur prisoners, blindfolded and shackled at a train station in southern Xinjiang. The video, first released on YouTube in 2019, garnered widespread media attention.

“It’s unethical to support a company that knowingly engages in egregious rights violations,” Nuzigum Setiwaldi, the report’s author, told Voice of America.

The U.S. and several Western parliaments have accused China of genocide in Xinjiang, targeting Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim populations. The U.N. human rights office released a report saying the human rights violations in Xinjiang may amount to crimes against humanity. China criticized Western nations for spreading “lies” about human rights in Xinjiang and Tibet.

A spokesperson from DJI told VOA the company has not engaged in any activities, including sales distribution and product development, that violate or abuse human rights.

“Like other manufacturers, we do not have control over how our products are used as they are available off the shelf,” wrote a DJI spokesperson in an email response. “However, we have demonstrated – through years of investments in product safety and security initiatives – that our products are developed for peaceful and civilian use only.”

Chinese military company or not?

In 2022, The Washington Post reported that DJI obscured ties to Chinese government funding.

In the same year, the U.S. Department of Defense classified DJI as a “Chinese military company.” As of January, DJI remains on the list of such companies operating in the United States. The department said it maintains companies on the list to counter China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy, which supports the modernization of the Chinese army.

Reuters reported that former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who ran the U.S. Justice Department from 2015 to 2017 and is now with the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison law firm, wrote a letter to the Defense Department last July on behalf of DJI, urging the removal of her client from the Pentagon’s Chinese military companies list.

In her letter, Lynch cited the importance and urgency of such a move because of the wide use of and dependence on DJI products by a variety of U.S. stakeholders.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in January that Chinese-made drones posed “significant risk” to U.S. national security and critical infrastructure.

“[T]he PRC’s 2017 National Intelligence Law compels Chinese companies to cooperate with state intelligence services, including providing access to data collected within China and around the world,” CISA said in its cybersecurity guidance on Chinese manufactured drones or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).

However, DJI’s spokesperson told VOA that DJI “is not a Chinese military company.”

According to DJI, the company remains one of the few drone companies that clearly “denounce and actively discourage” the use of drones in combat.

“We do not pursue business opportunities for combat use or operations. Our distributors, resellers and other business partners globally have also committed to following this policy when they sell and use our products,” DJI spokesperson said.
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Malawi has embarked on trials of genetically modified maize aimed to curb recurrent hunger and pests like fall armyworms and caterpillars. The trials come amid concerns about the possible effects genetically modified organisms have on health and the environment. Lameck Masina reports from Lilongwe.
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BOCA CHICA, Texas — SpaceX’s Starship, a futuristic vehicle designed to eventually carry astronauts to the moon and beyond, was poised for a third uncrewed test launch Thursday that Elon Musk’s company hopes will carry it farther than before, even if it ends up exploding once again in flight.

The spacecraft, mounted atop its towering Super Heavy rocket booster, was due for liftoff as early as 8 a.m. EDT from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site on the Gulf of Mexico near Boca Chica, Texas.

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration just granted a license for the test flight on Wednesday afternoon.

Unlike the first two test flights last year, aimed mainly at demonstrating that the spacecraft’s two stages can separate after launch, the third test flight will involve an attempt to open Starship’s payload door and reignite one of its engines in space.

Each of the previous flights were routed toward a planned crash landing near the Hawaiian islands in the Pacific, while the latest flight is targeting a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean.

Even if it achieves more of its test objectives than before, SpaceX acknowledges a high probability that Starship’s latest flight will end up like the first two, with the vehicle blowing itself to bits before its intended trajectory is complete.

Regardless of how well it performs on Thursday, all indications are that Starship remains a considerable distance from becoming fully operational.

Musk, SpaceX’s billionaire founder and CEO, has said the rocket should fly hundreds of uncrewed missions before carrying its first humans. And several other ambitious milestones overseen by NASA are needed before the craft can execute a moon landing with American astronauts.

Still, Musk is counting on Starship to fulfill his goal of producing a large, multipurpose next-generation spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the moon later this decade, and ultimately flying to Mars.

Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in company’s commercial launch business that already lofts most of the world’s satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.

For Thursday, SpaceX is aiming to at least exceed Starship’s performance with its Super Heavy booster during their inaugural test launch together last April, when the spacecraft exploded over the Gulf less than four minutes into a planned 90-minute flight.

That flight went awry from the start. Some of the Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines malfunctioned on ascent, and the lower-stage rocket failed to separate as designed from the upper-stage Starship, leading to termination of the flight.

The second test flight in November made it farther than the first, and managed to properly achieve stage separation, but the spacecraft exploded about eight minutes after launch.

SpaceX’s engineering culture, considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry’s more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.

NASA, SpaceX’s biggest customer, has a lot riding in the success of Starship, which the U.S. space agency is giving a central role in its Artemis program, successor to the Apollo missions that put astronauts on the moon for the first time more than 50 years ago.

While NASA Administrator chief Bill Nelson has embraced Musk’s frequent flight-testing approach, agency officials in recent months have made clear their desire to see greater progress with Starship’s development as the U.S. races with China to the lunar surface.
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The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would force short-video app TikTok, used by about 170 million Americans, to separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban. VOA Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson says the Senate may not approve the bill.
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