Inside China's audacious global propaganda campaign
Beijing is buying up media outlets and training scores of foreign journalists to ‘tell China’s story well’ – as part of a worldwide propaganda campaign of astonishing scope and ambition.
By Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin
Beijing is buying up media outlets and training scores of foreign journalists to ‘tell China’s story well’ – as part of a worldwide propaganda campaign of astonishing scope and ambition.
By Louisa Lim and Julia Bergin
As they sifted through resumes, the team recruiting for the new London hub of China’s state-run broadcaster had an enviable problem: far, far too many candidates. Almost 6,000 people were applying for just 90 jobs “reporting the news from a Chinese perspective”. Even the simple task of reading through the heap of applications would take almost two months.
For western journalists, demoralised by endless budget cuts, China Global Television Network presents an enticing prospect, offering competitive salaries to work in state-of-the-art purpose-built studios in Chiswick, west London. CGTN – as the international arm of China Central Television (CCTV) was rebranded in 2016 – is the most high-profile component of China’s rapid media expansion across the world, whose goal, in the words of President Xi Jinping, is to “tell China’s story well”. In practice, telling China’s story well looks a lot like serving the ideological aims of the state.
Brazil's Amazon deforestation documented via massive satellite imaging
For 30 years, the Brazilian government has been monitoring the extent of logging in the world's largest rainforest. What began with huge photos on paper is now digital — and yet trees are still being felled.
Driving from south to north in Brazil one can observe how the landscape is changing. Where the Amazon rainforest increasingly begins to shape the landscape is also where destruction begins. The landscape alternates between dense canopies and bare, stony soil.
What the loggers leave behind is well documented. One day later, it appears on the screens of the National Brazilian Institute for Spatial Research (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, INPE), 2,000 kilometers further south, in Sao Jose dos Campos in the state of Sao Paulo. A whole team is in charge of documenting the deforestation.
Rojava survives for now
by Mireille Court & Chris Den Hond
Ilham Ahmed is a Kurd from Afrin and executive chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), the political arm of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which control all of Syria’s northeast. This Arab-Kurdish alliance is defending an experiment in self-rule, the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, or Rojava (‘west’ in Kurdish). Ahmed said: ‘We want tomorrow’s Syria to include autonomous regions. We want a new constitution that will have decentralisation written into it.’ We were talking in Ain Issa, a small town between Kobane and Raqqa, and the new administrative capital of Rojava.
Falling for “Les Fake News,” Trump Spreads Lie French Protesters Chant His Name
DONALD TRUMP is so vain he really thinks the protests in Paris are about him. As about 8,000 anti-government protesters wearing yellow safety vests dodged tear gas in the French capital on Saturday, the president of the United States fell for a social-media hoax, claiming that the demonstrators were chanting his name.
Writing on Twitter, the president claimed, falsely, that the protests had been inspired by his opposition to the Paris climate accord and the phrase “We want Trump” rang out on the streets.
Korean wartime labor rulings spark debate
BY PHILIP BRASOR
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
The 2017 South Korean film, “The Battleship Island,” has yet to receive a theatrical release in Japan, even though it’s set on Hashima, more commonly known as Gunkanjima, a former mining complex off the coast of Kyushu and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Given the current diplomatic tensions between Japan and South Korea sparked by two recent South Korean Supreme Court cases that ruled in favor of Koreans who sued Japanese companies they worked for during World War II, it probably won’t be released here anytime soon.
The movie is about an uprising of Korean mine workers during the final days of the war. Japanese media have described the movie’s depiction of starvation and hellish conditions as distortions. The film’s director, Ryoo Seung-wan, has said he had no intention of stirring anti-Japan feelings: It’s an action blockbuster, not a polemic. As in most Korean films that take place during Japan’s colonial rule, the main villains are Korean collaborators. The Japanese characters, though they sometimes do awful things, are marginal.
How money stokes divide of historic black community in Virginia pipeline battle
Neighbors and families are pitted against one another over a natural gas pipeline project in Union Hill. In the end, who stands to lose?
By Erik Ortiz
The battle at Union Hill began four years ago, when Dominion Energy fired the opening shot: Not only was Virginia's largest utility proposing that its multistate natural gas pipeline traverse this wooded countryside, but it also suggested that a sprawling gas-fired compressor station must be built nearby.
As Dominion sought the proper permits for the pipeline and the station, the historically black community of Union Hill in Buckingham County joined a growing number of environmental groups concerned about the health and climate risks — and critics who say projects like it disproportionately burden minorities and lower-income people.
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