US Secretary of State Colin Powell says Washington won't send home Chinese Muslims held by the US military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- a decision that could anger Beijing.
Human-rights groups say 22 members of China's Uighur ethnic minority believed to have been detained in Afghanistan are being held at the base and could be tortured or killed if returned to China.
"The Uighurs are not going back to China, but finding places for them is not a simple matter," Powell said on Thursday at a news conference in Washington with Japanese journalists, according to a transcript released by the State Department. "We are trying to find places for them and, of course, all candidate countries are being looked at."
The decision could anger Bei-jing, a supporter of the US anti-terrorism campaign, which wants its nationals caught in Afghanistan to be repatriated to face possible terrorism charges.
Uighurs are from China's remote northwest, where the government says it is fighting an Islamic separatist movement linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network -- a claim that few outsiders believe.
Foreign experts and diplomats say most violent incidents cited by Beijing aren't related to separatists.
The Uighurs are among some 600 prisoners from 40 countries being held as terrorism suspects at the US enclave at Guantanamo.
China says that as many as 300 Uighurs trained by al-Qaeda were captured fighting for Afghanistan's former Taliban government. The US hasn't confirmed that.
US military officials deny accusations by human-rights groups that Uighurs at Guantanamo have been subjected to mistreatment.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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