Saturday, April 23, 2022

CHINA AND APPLE'S TIM COOK'S CHINESE SLAVES - UK to Ban Health Supplies from Chinese Concentration Camp Xinjiang Region over Slave Labour

VICE News reports that despite Apple committing billions of dollars to fix California’s housing crisis, an encampment of homeless people living in RVs, shacks, and tents has taken over dozens of acres of undeveloped land owned by Apple in the center of Silicon Valley.

VIDEO:

Shanghai Locks Workers in Factories Amid Covid Scare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7DTSzMFYDk

Shanghai is not only locked down but locked in and locked out. Some residents are locked in their places of work. Others are locked out of their home. There's nowhere in Shanghai you want to be right now (and especially not in a quarantine camp) as supplies of everything are running low. And there doesn't seem to be an end to China's Covid zero in sight.

UK to Ban Health Supplies from Chinese Concentration Camp Xinjiang Region over Slave Labour

STR/AFP via Getty Images

KURT ZINDULKA

23 Apr 20220

3:48

The British parliament is set to ban the country’s socialised healthcare system from purchasing supplies and medical equipment from the concentration camp Chinese region of Xinjiang.

In an amendment tabled by the government to the upcoming Health and Social Care Bill, the National Health Service (NHS) will be barred from buying materials produced by or involving the use of modern slavery, as has been credibly and frequently alleged of the Xinjiang region of Communist China.

During the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, the British government reportedly sent some £150 million to companies connected to Xinjiang’s slave labour and internment programmes in exchange for personal protective equipment (PPE) and other medical supplies.

Beijing has been accused of orchestrating a genocide of its Uyghur minority, including by the British parliament, with up to three million ethnic minorities such as Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz people believed to have been interned in camps at its peak. Numerous camp survivors have testified about the sterilisation of women, as well as the use of torture, rape, and organ harvesting against those imprisoned in the camps.

The communist regime has denied this, maintaining that the camps were merely “vocational training centres” built to help minority groups succeed in the Chinese economy.

Celebrating the move to block the NHS from purchasing materials or services from Xinjiang, former Conservative party leader and prominent Beijing critic Sir Iain Duncan Smith said that he welcomed the decision, calling it a “breakthrough” for human rights standards.

“In unreservedly welcoming this move by the Health Department I urge all other government departments to do the same as quickly as possible,” Duncan Smith told The Telegraph.

“We will be sending the most powerful signal to those around the world that exploit and terrorise those weaker than themselves that the swords of justice are on their trail.”

While the move by the British government to block materials from Xinjiang was welcomed by campaigners, it remains to be seen how effective such a ban will be at “eliminating” the use of slave labour.

Though the use of slave labour in Xinjiang has been widely publicised, investigations have shown that ethnic minorities from the region have been systematically shipped to factories throughout the so-called Middle Kingdom, meaning that it may be difficult to determine which Chinese manufacturers are not using slave labour.

A study from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in 2020 claimed that Muslim Uyghurs have been used as slave labour in factories producing goods for at least 83 prominent global brands.

The ASPI estimated that over 80,000 Uyghurs were forcibly transferred from Xinjiang to work in factories throughout the country between 2017 and 2019 alone.

It is believed that as a part of the plan to stamp out the use of modern slave labour, the government will compile a “blacklist” of companies believed to be involved in the trade.

Luke de Pulford, chief operating officer of the anti-slavery charity Arise, said: “This is an extremely significant development, easily the most significant piece of supply chain regulation that we have around modern slavery in the UK.”

Questions still remain about how stringent the administration of Prime Minister Boris Johnson — who has described himself as a “fervent sinophile” — will be in cracking down on unethical trade with China, however, as the government is reportedly seeking to rekindle talks with Beijing for a post-Brexit trade deal after negotiations fell apart in 2018 amid a brutal anti-democratic crackdown on the former British colony of Hong Kong.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

It was while Joe Biden was vice-president that the flood gates opened and what was a domestic influence-peddling business expanded globally into Ukraine, China, Russia and Kazakhstan, among other nations. The layers of greed and unabashed willingness to sell access to the second-highest office in the country is mind-boggling. The most egregious examples are five deals with the Communist Chinese and the subsequent payments to Hunter Biden and the Biden family valued at $31 million.

Exclusive — FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr: Tim Cook’s Hypocrisy on Human Rights ‘Stunning’

Pool/Getty

SEAN MORAN

21 Apr 20220

3:29

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Brendan Carr told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement on Thursday that Apple CEO Tim Cook’s hypocrisy on human rights is “stunning.”

Cook delivered a keynote address at the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) conference in Washington, DC, last week. During the speech, he repeated a longstanding claim that Apple believes that privacy is a “fundamental human right.” He attacked a “data industrial complex built on a foundation of surveillance” and urged companies to improve their users’ privacy.

Carr said that Cook’s words rang hollow as he largely ignored the company’s own conduct in China.

Carr said that Cook’s words “in Washington founder upon the harsh reality of Apple’s conduct in China:”

Carr told Breitbart News in an exclusive statement that Cook’s hypocrisy is “stunning.”

“How Tim Cook did not get whiplash when he looked up from his speech and at his own operations in China is beyond me,” Carr remarked.

Apple CEO Tim Cook waves as he arrives for the Economic Summit held for the China Development Forum in Beijing on March 23, 2019. (NG HAN GUAN/AFP via Getty Images)

“We should no longer look the other way when global corporations stand shoulder to shoulder with authoritarian regimes,” he added. In his letter to Cook, Carr noted the many ways that Apple has enabled the Chinese government to censor apps and allowed the government to infringe upon Chinese citizens’ privacy:

… your company was continuing its well documented campaign in Beijing of aggressively censoring apps that the behest of the Communist Party of China. In fact, as the New York Times previously reported, “Mr. Cook often talks about Apple’s commitment to civil liberties and privacy. But to stay on the right side of Chinese regulators, his company put the data of its Chinese customers at risk and has aided government censorship in the Chinese version of its App Store. Or as the Asia director for Amnesty International once put it: “Apple has become a cog in the censorship machine that presents a government-controlled version of the internet …. If you look at the behavior of the Chinese government, you don’t see any resistance from Apple — no history of standing up for the principles that Apple claims to be so attached to.”
…
China is not becoming more open or bending towards freedom because Apple is doing business there. Far from it. Chian is cracking down on individual liberty at an accelerating clip. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Xinjiang. … Continuing to partner with brutal regimes like Communist China only provides them with tacit — if not explicit — support and emboldens those bad actors. It provides them with a veneer of openness and legitimacy, while allowing them to surveil individuals and limit their human rights.

Carr also slammed Apple for allowing China to censor the Voice of America app and demanded to know if Apple will allow Chinese citizens to have access to the app through its App Store in China.

Rachel Bovard, the policy director for the Conservative Policy Institute (CPI), said, “The companies who claim they must be immune from public policy so they can save use from China are actually in bed with China. Example eleventy billion.”

“Please stop listening to tech-compensated national security experts, tech-compensated think tanks, and anyone else who repeats this claim in farcical defiance of the factual record. It’s actually insulting they expect you to believe it,” she added.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.