Chinese professor, despite no remorse, to return home after guilty plea in Huawei theft case

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A Chinese professor accused of stealing American technology to benefit China's Huawei Technologies Co plans to return to his home country after being sentenced on Monday for lying to the FBI.

Despite expressing no remorse, Bo Mao was sentenced to time served by U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen in Brooklyn, following his Dec. 4 guilty plea. Prosecutors, who supported the sentence, dropped a more serious wire fraud conspiracy charge.

Mao had been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Arlington when he was arrested in August 2019. He is scheduled to return to China on Wednesday.

Prosecutors said Mao agreed with a California technology company, later shown to be Silicon Valley's CNEX Labs, to obtain its circuit board ostensibly for academic research, but ultimately shared proprietary information with Huawei.

Chen said that while Mao pleaded guilty only to lying, his criminal conduct was "much broader and far worse," and that "he might even be considered a patriot" at home.

The judge also noted Mao's lack of expressed remorse. "I am disappointed by that, quite frankly," she said.

Chen nonetheless said Mao's role was minor and he appeared to benefit only indirectly, including through possible career advancement.

Mao, a married father of two who teaches at Xiamen University, said through an interpreter that his family had undergone "a lot of stress" and looked forward to returning home quickly.

His arrest came amid a Department of Justice crackdown on suspected Chinese influence at American universities, including through spying and intellectual property theft.

The U.S. government in 2018 charged Huawei and its finance chief, Meng Wanzhou, with misleading banks about the company's ties to Iran. In February it charged Huawei with racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.

Huawei pleaded not guilty. Meng has been fighting extradition from Vancouver to face wire and bank fraud charges, which she denies. Her case has strained ties between the United States, China and Canada.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/chinese-professor-despite-no-remorse-180420495.html

Getting ready to show the world, that it wasn't a joke? Kenya bound?

Barack Obama Trolls Donald Trump With Birther Joke

Former President Barack Obama poked fun at President Donald Trump’s false and racist birther attacks on him in a preview of an interview that will air in full on Tuesday’s episode of “The Daily Show.”

In the teaser clip released online Monday, host Trevor Noah asked Obama if he’d “be more careful going forward about who you roast.”

“You roasted Donald Trump, he ran for president, you roasted Kanye West, he ran for president,” said Noah. “So, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you have an ability to inspire people to run for the highest office in the land with some of the jokes you tell about them.”

“I should roast people I admire more. I’ll start roasting you man. Who knows?” Obama responded to the South Africa-born comedian.

Then came the trolling of Trump:

“Although you weren’t born here, so. But, look, I was able to get away with it apparently. Who knows?” said Obama, with a wry smile and chuckle.

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/barack-obama-birther-joke-donald-trump-trevor-noah-092648259.html

Half a million Muslims forced to pick cotton as scale of Chinese slave labour exposed

China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities to pick cotton by hand in the western region of Xinjiang, a key source of the world’s cotton, according to a report by a Washington-based think tank.

Rights activists have estimated that Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uighurs and other, mostly Muslim, minorities in detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing denies that Uighurs’ rights are abused and says re-education centres provide vocational training to help people gain employment, and are necessary to curb extremism.

Now, information from Chinese government documents and state media reports provides evidence that at least half a million people have been forced to pick cotton through a coercive state-mandated labour transfer and poverty alleviation scheme, the Center for Global Policy says.

In 2018, three majority-Uighur areas within Xinjiang alone mobilised at least 570,000 people to pick cotton through the scheme, according to the think tank report published Monday.

It estimates that the total number of people from ethnic minorities sent to pick cotton “likely exceeds that figure by several hundred thousand”.

Cotton pickers are transferred in tightly supervised groups, and on site are watched by government officials and, at least sometimes, by police officers, the report says. Some areas put Uighur children and elderly people into “centralized care” while working-age adults are away picking cotton. Supervisors also administer “political indoctrination sessions” to the workers.

“While not directly related to the campaign of mass internment, these labour transfers can include persons who have been released from internment camps,” says the report, which was written by independent researcher Dr Adrian Zenz, who has studied Beijing’s internment campaign in Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is a major global hub for the cotton industry. It produces 85 percent of China’s and 20 percent of the world’s cotton, and relies heavily on manual labour to do so, particularly for higher quality cotton.

The report recommends that companies be required to thoroughly investigate the role of Chinese cotton in their supply chains, while “governments must also be proactive in related monitoring procedures”.

The main cotton producer in Xinjiang, the paramilitary Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, has already been called out by the United States for using forced Uighur labour.

Earlier this month, U.S. customs authorities issued an order to block its cotton products from entering the country “based on information that reasonably indicates the use of forced labour”.

At that time, China expressed anger at the order, with foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying that workers of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang choose work “according to their own will and sign labour contracts of their own volition”.

“It must be noted that helping people of all ethnic groups find stable employment, and ‘forced labour’, are completely different concepts,” she said.

The Center for Global Policy report said that while the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps produces a third of the cotton from the region, “it is very likely that a major share of cotton production in Xinjiang is tainted with forced labour”.

The U.S. Congress is already considering legislation that would declare all goods made in Xinjiang the products of forced labour, meaning they would be blocked from entering the country.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/half-million-muslims-forced-pick-111142219.html