Funding for public security in Xinjiang will rise nearly 90 percent this year, state media said yesterday, following ethnic unrest that left nearly 200 people dead last year.
A budget proposal placed before Xinjiang’s legislature on Tuesday called for 2.89 billion yuan (US$423 million) to be spent on public security, up 88 percent, the China Daily reported.
“The July 5 riot in Urumqi … had an enormous impact on the Xinjiang people. It has severely damaged social stability in the region,” the paper quoted regional chairman Nur Bekri as telling the Xinjiang People’s Congress.
Bekri said the priority for Xinjiang security forces this year would be to crack down on the “three forces” of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism, which the government blamed for the unrest, the paper said.
China’s Turkic-speaking Uighurs have long complained of religious, political and cultural oppression by Chinese authorities — which China denies.
Tensions in the vast and remote region bordering on central Asia have simmered for years.
In July, 197 people were killed and more than 1,700 people were injured in violence between mainly Muslim Uighurs and Han Chinese in the regional capital of Urumqi, government figures showed.
So far 22 people, mostly ethnic Uighurs, have been sentenced to death for the violence, drawing sharp criticism from the West and rights groups concerned that the accused were denied fair trials.
Nine executions have so far been reported by state media.
New rules publicized in Xinjiang last week stipulated that governments down to the village level must step up identity checks on suspicious persons and monitor all religious activities, state press reports said.
Local governments must step up the registration of migrant workers and help set up a region-wide information-sharing network, it said.
The newly amended rules — which will come into effect on Feb. 1 — also stipulate that promotions of government leaders will be subject to their efforts to stamp out the “three forces.”
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
RSS