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Hugo Boss Vows to Buy Slave Cotton in Chinese After Denying Purchases in English

German fashion house Hugo Boss assured its Chinese buyers on Thursday that it will continue to “purchase and support” Xinjiang cotton, a product of Chinese state-supported slave labor by Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities, extensive reporting has revealed.

“Xinjiang’s long-stapled cotton is one of the best in the world. We believe top-quality raw materials will definitely show its value [sic]. We will continue to purchase and support Xinjiang cotton,” a verified Hugo Boss account wrote in a statement posted to the Chinese social media platform Weibo on March 25.

A Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) reporter reached out to Hugo Boss on Thursday for comment on its Weibo statement supporting Xinjiang cotton and received a contradictory response.

“[I]n an emailed response to HKFP, the brand linked to a statement on its website saying it has never used Xinjiang cotton: ‘So far, HUGO BOSS has not procured any goods originating in the Xinjiang region from direct suppliers,’” the luxury fashion house wrote on its official Western website.

“Hugo Boss did not respond to HKFP’s questions as to whether it is sending different messages to Chinese and Western customers,” the newspaper noted.

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Smartphones share our data every four and a half minutes, says study

Android handsets and iPhones share data with their respective companies on average every 4½ minutes, with data being sent back even when idle in a pocket or handbag, according to a new academic study.

The Trinity College Dublin research has raised fresh privacy concerns about smartphones, with the research claiming there was little difference between Apple and Google when it came to collecting certain data.

The study, which was published by Prof Doug Leith at Trinity’s Connect Centre, claimed iPhones offered no greater privacy than Google devices.

However, the study noted that Google handsets collected “a notably larger volume of handset data than Apple” with 1MB of data being sent from idle Google Pixel handsets every 12 hours, compared with 52KB sent from the iPhone.

Among the data potentially sent back by the handsets were the insertion of a SIM and handset details such as the hardware serial number, IMEI, Wifi MAC address and the phone number.

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Federal Bump Stock Ban Blocked by Divided Appeals Court

The federal ban on bump stocks—devices that increase the rate of fire for semiautomatic weapons—is likely unlawful and must be put on hold, a divided Sixth Circuit said Thursday.

Bump stocks harness a gun’s recoil energy to rapidly move the firearm back and forth, bumping the shooter’s stationary finger against the trigger. In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, in which a gunman using semiautomatic rifles with bump stocks killed 58 people, President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to quickly ban “all devices that turn legal weapons into machineguns.”

Federal law generally bans civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after May 1986, including any parts used to convert an otherwise legal firearm into an illegal machine gun. It defines a machine gun as a weapon which fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a rule reinterpreting the terms “single function of the trigger” and “automatically” to ban bump stocks.

The group Gun Owners of America and others sued, claiming the rule violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the Fifth Amendment’s takings clause, and the 14th Amendment’s right to due process.

A lower court should have granted the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction against the rule, because they’ll likely be able to prove that the bump stock ban is unlawful, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said.

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Biden: I Don’t Have Any of the Facts on Colorado, But We Definitely Need a Gun Ban

Speaking from the White House Tuesday afternoon, President Joe Biden admitted he doesn’t know or have all of the facts about the shooting that took place in Boulder, Colorado Monday night. Regardless, he called for additional infringement on the Second Amendment rights of law abiding Americans. 

“I want to be very clear. This is the one thing I do know enough to say on in terms of what’s happened there. While we are still waiting for more information regarding the shooter, his motive, the weapons he used, the guns, the magazines, the weapons, the modifications that apparently have taken place with those weapons involved here, I don’t need to wait another minute, let alone an hour, to take common sense steps to save lives in the future and to urge my colleagues in the House and Seante to act,” Biden said. “We can ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines in this country once again. I got that done when I was a Senator. It passed, it was the law for the longest time…we should do it again.”

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