BAKKACIMA BLOG

  The big-tech giant(Twitter) has locked the account of China’s embassy in the United States for a social media post that defended China’s policies towards Muslim Uighurs in the Xinjiang region, which the platform said violated the firm’s policy against “dehumanisation”. The Chinese Embassy account, @ChineseEmbinUS, posted a tweet this month that said that Uighur women were no longer “baby making machines,” citing a study reported by state-backed newspaper, China Daily. The tweet was removed by Twitter and replaced by a label stating that it was no longer available. Although Twitter hides tweets that violate its policies, it requires account owners to manually delete such posts. The Chinese embassy’s account has not posted any new tweets since January 9. The suspension of the embassy’s account came a day after the Trump administration, in its final hours, accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang, a finding endorsed by the incoming Biden administration. Although t he new adm...

  The Chinese government has faulted Pope Francis over a passage in his new book in which he mentions the suffering of China’s Uighur Muslim minority group, saying his remarks have “no factual basis at all”. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a daily news briefing in Beijing on Tuesday that  “People of all ethnic groups enjoy the full rights of survival, development, and freedom of religious belief.” But  Zhao made no mention of the camps in which more than a million Uighurs and members of other Chinese Muslim minority groups are reported to be held. Other governments,  human rights groups and The  United States, says the prison-like facilities are intended to separate Muslims from their religious and cultural heritage, forcing them to declare loyalty to China’s ruling Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping. China, after initially denying the existence of the facilities, says they are centres intended to provide job training and preven...

  Alibaba Group Holding, the  Chinese e-commerce giant   said orders made during its Single's Day mega-shopping festival had exceeded $56bn by Wednesday morning, as consumers sought to cash in on a deluge of discounts. Alibaba launched the annual online blitz early this year, with two primary discount periods taking place from November 1 through November 3 and again on November 11. The company will calculate gross merchandise volume - GMV over the full 11-day period, as opposed to the usual 24 hours. As of 12:30am local time (16:30 GMT) on November 11, the campaign’s GMV had surpassed 372.3 billion Chinese yuan ($56.3bn) with the order rate hitting a record peak of 583,000 per second, Alibaba said. Alibaba, Asia’s largest company, blew past last year’s record $38bn at the beginning of Singles’ Day. Homebound consumers turned grocery delivery into the industry’s hottest arena, anchoring an unprecedented surge in online activity during the nationwide lockdown. Domestic trav...

  Relations between China and Canada grew worse after Canadian police arrested Huawei Technologies Chief Financial Officer and  the daughter of the founder of Chinese tech giant Huawei,  Meng Wanzhou,  at Vancouver's airport in late 2018. A court in China has sentenced a Canadian to death for transporting and manufacturing drugs, the second Canadian in just two days to receive the death penalty for narcotics. The Intermediate People's Court of Foshan City in Guangdong Province said Ye Jianhui was given the death sentence for "the crime of transporting and manufacturing drugs," according to a court statement released on Friday. Ye Jianhui, a Canadian national, was sentenced after a trial in the southern city of Foshan, the Foshan Intermediate People's Court said in a notice on its website on Friday. Authorities found 218 kilograms (480) pounds of amphetamine in a room the court said was used by the defendant. A smaller amount of the drug was seized in a bag and res...

India's first domestic candidate to get the green light from the government's drug regulator to proceed with  human trials of  COVID-19 vaccine is  Bharat Biotech International Ltd. The Drug Controller General of India has approved the company's application to conduct a Phase I and II clinical trial of Covaxin, which was developed along with the Indian Council of Medical Research's National Institute of Virology, the company said in a statement on Monday. Human clinical trials are scheduled to start across the country in July for the vaccine, which was developed and manufactured in Bharat Biotech's facility at Genome Valley in Hyderabad, India. More than 16,000 people have died from the disease since the first case in India in January - low when compared with countries with similar numbers of cases. But experts fear hospitals in the densely populated nation will be unable to cope with a steep rise in cases,  as cases surge in a country with more than 1.3 billion peo...

In China, a  new flu virus has been found in pigs which has now  become more infectious to humans and needs to be watched closely in case it becomes a potential "pandemic virus", a new study has found. A team of Chinese researchers looked at influenza viruses found in pigs from 2011 to 2018 and found a ("G4" strain of H1N1) with "all the essential hallmarks of a candidate pandemic virus", according to the paper, which was published in the US journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS. This is because workers on pig farms showed elevated levels of the virus in their blood, the authors said, adding that "close monitoring in human populations, especially the workers in the swine industry, should be urgently implemented.

A Video footage from inside a Christian church in China shows officials raiding, violently dragging out members mid-service. ChinaAid, a Christian watchdog group on persecution in the most populous nation, posted the story this week from the church in the southeastern Fujian province. Xingguang Church attendees were seen in the video, attempting to block the entrance as police "officers confiscated phones and used brutal force against some Christian women as well," the group reports.