China fired back Thursday at US criticism of its human rights record, issuing a report that denounced the US for offenses ranging from allowing crime and poverty at home to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The report -- issued annually in response to the US State Department global human rights survey -- accused the American military of committing "wanton slaughters," killing thousands of foreign civilians and torturing detainees.
"The atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the infringement of human rights of foreign nationals by the US," said the report released by the press office of China's Cabinet.
The US State Department survey released Monday accused China's communist government of persecuting dissidents and religious activists, and said prison inmates were tortured and mistreated.
Washington is likely to again seek censure of China next month at the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva. Past such motions to censure have been killed by China's allies on the commission.
The Chinese report accused the US of hypocrisy in condemning conditions in foreign nations while staying silent on its own.
"In 2004, the atrocity of US troops abusing Iraqi POWs exposed the dark side of human rights performance of the US. The scandal shocked humanity and was condemned by the international community," the report said.
"It is quite ironic that on Feb. 28 of this year, the State Department of the US once again posed as the `world human rights police,"' it said.
The report cited the case of Zhao Yan, a Chinese woman who was beaten and attacked with pepper spray by a US border guard during a visit to Niagara Falls. The guard has been charged with battering her.
In other criticism, the report said racism was deeply entrenched in the US. It said politics were manipulated by the wealthy and dismissed the US electoral system as a "contest of money."
The report cited census bureau figures saying numbers of Americans living in poverty had been rising for three straight years to 35.9 million in 2003. It also said Americans were threatened by "rampant violent crime," and civil rights abuses by law enforcement.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
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German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) yesterday faced a regional election battle in Rhineland-Palatinate, now held by the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD). Merz’s CDU has enjoyed a narrow poll lead over the SPD — their coalition partners at the national level — who have ruled the mid-sized state for 35 years. Polling third is the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which spells a greater threat to the two centrist parties in several state elections in September in the country’s ex-communist east. The picturesque state of Rhineland-Palatinate, bordering France, Belgium and Luxembourg and with a population of about 4 million,
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