
Where do you draw the line?




New Zealand on Wednesday said the defence force will now oversee the country’s quarantine facilities and strengthen border requirements, after a slip up allowed two people with coronavirus to move around the country.
New Zealand on Tuesday lost its COVID-free status when two women who had been given permission to leave quarantine early on compassionate grounds after arriving from Britain tested positive for the coronavirus.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she was appointing the Assistant Chief of Defence, Air Commodore Digby Webb, to oversee all quarantine and to manage isolation facilities, including the processes of exiting people from these facilities.
Ardern said Webb can seek access to military logistics, its operational expertise and, if needed, personnel, for running of the quarantine facilities.
During a press conference, Dr. Jacques Girard, who heads the Quebec City public health authority, drew attention to a case where patrons at a bar were ordered to wait until their COVID-19 tests came back, but disregarded the command and left the premises before the results came back positive.
This led to them being deemed “uncooperative” and forcibly interned in a quarantine facility.
“[W]e may isolate someone for 14 days,” Girard said during the press conference. “And it is what we did this morning…forced a person to cooperate with the investigation…and police cooperation was exceptional.”


Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women.
The nurse, Dawn Wooten, was employed at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company. The complaint was filed with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.
Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.
The new Mulan movie is facing a barrage of criticism—and promises to boycott—for filming near Chinese concentration camps and then thanking the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the privilege.
The film—a live-action version of the 1998 Disney cartoon by the same name—is based on Chinese folklore about a young woman (Hua Mulan) who pretends to be a boy so that she can fight in her father’s place when he is conscripted into the Chinese army. In a sense, it’s a tale about cleverness, bravery, and familial love helping to overcome hardships brought about by a violent and overbearing government.
That’s makes Disney’s filming location—Xinjiang—an extra slap in the face. Xinjiang is where China has been holding Uighurs in concentration camps and subjecting them and other Muslim minorities to horrible human rights abuses.
THE ONGOING PERSECUTION by the Chinese government of Uyghur Muslims is far from a distant problem. Recent reporting has identified Uyghur forced labor in the supply chain of major global brands, including BMW, Ralph Lauren, Samsung, and Sony.
Now, as school districts scramble to obtain electronic devices for a school year that may be primarily virtual, some children may end up using computers assembled by Uyghurs working in inhumane conditions. Shipping records show that since the start of the pandemic, Lenovo has imported an estimated 258,000 laptops from a Chinese manufacturer that has participated in a troubling labor scheme and been singled out by the U.S. government for violating human rights. The revelations serve as a reminder of how much of the supply chain is tied to forced labor and how many products that will aid us through the Covid-19 pandemic may be manufactured under duress.
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