MovieMonday: The Call of the Wild

This movie has a lot going for it:  A noble dog named Buck who is kidnapped, sold and sent to work as a sled dog during the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s; gray-bearded Harrison Ford playing Thornton, the prospector who befriends Buck, and a beautiful and remote setting that few of us ever will see. 

Unfortunately, none of it lives up to the story told in the book with the same title.  

For starters, as many have noted, Buck is a computer-generated dog whose facial expressions and reactions feel more human than canine.   In fact, all the animals in the film are CGI creations.  

Second, the violence inflicted on Buck by men and another dog are dialed way back, and Buck's strong character is established by more sentimentally appealing behavior -- rescuing a woman who has fallen into the ice, chasing down another dog that that has killed a cute snow bunny, etc.  In addition, Thornton is given a very sad backstory that Buck understands intuitively and addresses several times in a non-canine fashion.

Third, the beautiful setting isn't real.  Most of the movie was shot on film sets, and the outdoor backgrounds were stitched in later.  This makes for some unintentional humor.  When characters talk outside in the icy cold, there is no condensation on their breath.  After Buck and Thornton go down a waterfall in their canoe, Buck's fur is dripping wet, but Thornton's shirt is dry.   (This is known in the industry as bad continuity.) There is also a missed opportunity to show the dog shudder to get himself dry, which is very doglike and fun. 

Fourth, Thornton and Buck settle into an abandoned prospector's shack that just happens to be next to a river with -- surprise! -- many, many gold nuggets on the riverbed.  How many abandoned shacks could there have been, especially in spots near rivers where nuggets of gold must have been found by earlier prospectors?  (Bear in mind also that 100,000 fortune-hunting prospectors trekked up to the previously unpopulated Yukon after gold was discovered there in 1895.)

Fifth, the plot seems to have been tweaked to appeal to post-millennial values.  Women characters are added in roles which would have been very unlikely at that time and in such a location.  A Native American group whose actions would be unflattering has been replaced by a sloppy and effete prospector whose distinguishing characteristic is greed.  Meanwhile Thornton throws many of his gold nuggets back into the river because he has "enough gold for groceries for life."  (Maybe the book Thornton was reading early on was Das Kapital, or maybe he was a very early Bernie Bro.)

This film was made at considerable cost -- $100 million or more -- and directed by animation specialist Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo and Stitch, etc.) It seems clearly to have been aimed at a family audience.  The question is why it wasn't made as straight-up animation, which would have been much less expensive and possibly more coherent.  

Honestly, the Jack London book that inspired this film deserves more attention than the movie.  If you read it in grade school, why not pick it up again?




More Questions

Harrison Ford not only plays the prospector who met Buck when the dog got off the boat Skagway, but he also narrates the story, starting with Buck's early life as a pampered dog at a judge's home in California.  Ford has an appealing voice and it is understandable that the filmmakers would want to make use of it, but there is no possible explanation for how he would know anything about Buck's life before they met.

Also in the early part of the story, Buck's kidnappers rip off his name collar and leave it on the ground in California when they force him into the box and onto the train to Seattle, from which he sent by boat the port at Skagway.  How, then, did anybody in Alaska know the dog's name was Buck?  

These are the sorts of things that keep me awake at night.

MovieMonday: Sonic the Hedgehog

Background

If you are not a longtime videogamer, you may be unfamiliar with Sonic the Hedgehog, who will celebrate his 30th birthday next year.  He is a smart-alecky teenage superhero who appeared on the planet Mobius in 1991 as the Sega company's answer to Nintendo's popular Mario.  Sonic is known for his blinding speed, his blue fur and his iconic red shoes.  He has appeared in 66 games, a comic strip and a cartoon series of limited distinction.

Before

Over the years, Sonic has gathered a durable fan base that is heavily invested in its understanding of the hedgehog and his personality. 

This group blew its stack last April when film previews showed a similarly colored but somewhat more animal-like Sonic who, worst of all, had TEETH.  The objections were so strong that the film's planned November 2019 release was cancelled so animators could extract Sonic's teeth and give him his familiar, stylized look. 



Sonic the Movie

The Sonic redesign seems to have satisfied the critics.  It opened last week, and sales were very good indeed --- even better than last year's opening weekend for Pokémon: Detective Pikachu.  (For context, let's note that the Pikachu movie was ranked 19th in North American sales for 2019, just ahead of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.)

If only the filmmakers had managed to devise a marginally interesting story, Sonic the Hedgehog might merit all the attention it has received.   But it comes up way short.

The plot: Sonic uses one of his magic rings to leave his home island and escape nasty predators.  He arrives in Green Hills, Montana, where he spends 10 years hiding from the locals and growing very lonely.  One evening, after playing a solo baseball game -- being supersonic means he can play pitcher, batter, fielder and catcher -- Sonic inadvertently sets off a power surge that causes the Joint Chiefs of Staff to call in the creepy and evil Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey,) a longtime foe in the Sonic oeuvre, to deal with the problem.  Meanwhile, Sonic is discovered and befriended by Green Hills cop Tom Wachowski (James Marsden,) and the shock of their introduction causes Sonic to lose his bag of rings, which he must get retrieve.  Cop and creature become a buddy team and set out for San Francisco, each for his own reason.  Along the way they are pursued and menaced by Robotnik.   

This is an unusual effort.  Sonic is a computer-generated character amid human characters, including Robotnik, who is played by a human but whose authority and vehicles and weaponry clearly belong in some branch of the cartoon world.  To be fair, the movie would be impossible without a mega-villain like Robotnik, and it is difficult to imagine anyone but Jim Carrey in the role.

That said, there are many weak spots.  Midway along, the plot reveals a Sonic superpower that would have spared him the need to leave his island home.  His magic rings allow Sonic to go only to one place except when they don't.  After his 10 years in Green Hills, he has figured out how to read, write, play popular games and make idiomatic jokes (like calling his policeman friend the "donut lord,")  but he's still surprised by new terms.  A scene set in a theoretically typical Montana redneck bar is just as unrealistic as Robotnik's technological weaponry.  All the characters are two-dimensional at best. 

The result is a thin mess that seems to be aimed at young audiences while the most loyal Sonic devotees range in age from their late teen years to their 40s.  These groups want different things in movies.  For the kids, there are family themes and really nice people who prevail in the end.  For the older set it has many knowing references that kids will not understand.  For both it has Jim Carrey doing the floss dance.   

The worst of it is this: Children deserve better.

MovieMonday: Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey

Here's a very well-made superhero(ine) movie in the new style:  Its leading character is not exactly heroic. 

The "hero" here is Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie,) the Joker's girlfriend from the much-hated 2016 Suicide Squad film.  As the story begins, Harley has been dumped by the Joker.  She comforts herself and satisfies her inner anarchist by bombing a huge Gotham chemical factory.  The flames and explosions delight her.

Harley has a backstory rendered quickly in an opening cartoon.  Her irrationality seems to trace to an unhappy childhood, her training and work as a psychiatrist and the influence of the Joker,  who does not make an appearance here.   To be fair, not many superhero fans go to these movies for the character development, but here we are.

Anyway, without Joker to protect her, HQ is vulnerable to the predations of bad guys, particularly Gotham thug Roman Sionis (Ewan McGregor.)  Fortunately, Harley is good at fighting.

In one set piece, she takes down every cop in a police precinct, then does the same to a pack of jail guards and, finally, body slams a bunch of prisoners whose cells have come unlocked.  This allows her to free a teenage pickpocket who has an item that Harley needs. 

(Imagine Harley as the Halle Berry character in this Casablanca fight in last year's Parabellum -- but without the help of guns or  dogs or John Wick, and you'll get the idea.   Chad Stahelski, who directed the John Wick movies, helped choreograph the many stunt fights in Birds of Prey.)

Over time, Harley gathers unto herself a squad of other tough women.  These include Dinah Lance/Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Bell) whose talents include free-range fighting and a superpower that derives from her fine singing voice; unappreciated police detective Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez) whose nontraditional sexual preference is not much discussed, and Cassie Cain (Ella Jay Basco) the teenage thief who lives with terrible foster parents.  Toward the end, another tough gal, good with a crossbow, shows up in time to be included in the expected sequel.

Margot Robbie, a fine actress, camps it up as a gleeful Harley.  Her lipstick and eyeshadow are perfect, and she has a really nice pet hyena named Bruce.  It may be that Robbie is in the production for the money, rather as Scarlet Johannson has been doing Marvel movies that have built her nine-figure net worth. 

In short, this is a hugely stylized and overstuffed comic book story -- did I mention that it is really overstuffed? -- with a wafer-thin plot in which every male character turns out to be a terrible person.  But, again, it's a comic book story, just like those comic books in which superhero men fight to protect themselves from terrible women.  Oh, wait.

It's nicely done, yes, but better for audiences with short attention spans.  I'm not signing up for the sequel.



Notes

This movie, written and directed skillfully by women, was the only big movie opening last weekend.  People who know about these things expected initially that it would gross nearly $50 million in North America, but it was not to be.  Sales were in the low 30s.

There is a bit of a theme here.  The female Ghostbusters was unpopular, and so was last year's The Hustle, a female remake of a popular male-staffed comedy.  Same with last year's much-praised Booksmart, which had been pitched as a chick version of Superbad.

Meanwhile, Hustlers, a film that featured JLo doing more of what she did at the Superbowl halftime show, sold well.  So did the 2017 story of strong, kind, noble Wonder Woman.

There seems to be a relatively narrow range of leading roles that work for top-billing actresses.   If the times are changing, they are changing slowly.

-----

Feb. 10, 2020:  The original title of this movie was "Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.)"   Perhaps because the word "fantabulous" was labored and obnoxious, the title was changed in the week after its weak opening.

The official title is now "Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey."  

Actually, the title switch probably had nothing to do with the made-up modifier.  It most likely  was an effort to attract audiences who might remember the main character's name from previous movies or comic books.

MovieMonday: Dear Basketball

If link fails, try this

This is the animated short film that won Kobe Bryant an Academy Award two years ago.  Appropriately, it is dubbed here in Italian, the language he learned when his family lived in Italy and his father played basketball for the Italian league. 

Bryant wrote and narrated the words, which he posted first on a Players Tribune website at the end of his 20-year NBA career.   The very good animation and musical score turn a poem that, in lesser hands, might have veered toward corny but instead is a genuine reflection on a dream realized and remembered.   

The story is sincere.  Bryant conceived his wish to play for the Los Angeles Lakers when he was a boy, and from that time until he retired from basketball in 2016, he "embodied hard work," as a young friend told me.

Here's how Bryant put it in an interview with Jay Williams, a Chicago Bulls alum:  "I wanted you to know that it doesn’t matter how hard you work, that I’m willing to work harder than you."

The results are remarkable: Five Lakers championships, two Olympic gold medals, two times the NBA finals MVP, 18 years an NBA All-Star, six 60-point games and one 81-point game. 

His single-mindedness could be off-putting in Bryant's early career, but he grew into a thoughtful and generous adult.  His death last week revealed a reservoir of good will among athletes in other sports, fans on three continents, young athletes inspired by his drive and people touched by his charity work.   He also was proud of being a "girl dad" raising four daughters with his wife, Vanessa.  If there is a Kobe Bryant family photo in which he doesn't have great big grin, well, I haven't seen it.

Besides Bryant and his daughter, Gianna, seven other persons died in last week's helicopter crash, each leaving friends and family to mourn.  It is only fair to name them here. 

-- Alyssa Altobelli, Gianna's teammate, and her parents, Keri and John Altobelli; they are survived by Alyssa's older sister, Alexis, and brother, JJ.

-- Payton Chester, another teammate, and her mother, Sarah Chester; they are survived by Payton's father, Chris, and her two 16-year-old brothers, Hayden and Riley

-- Christina Mauser, a basketball coach at Gianna's school, who is survived by her husband, Matt Mauser, and their children Penny, 11, Tom, 9, and Ivy, 3.

-- Ara Zobayan, the helicopter pilot whose family information has not been revealed but who was respected in his field and for years was Bryant's preferred pilot.

My China Boycott

Last year, I stopped buying products made in China -- clothes, furniture, office supplies, everything.

It wasn't about Muslims in concentration camps.  It wasn't about live prisoners' bodies being carved up for organ donations.  It wasn't about intellectual property theft.  It wasn't about illegal shipments of fentanyl to our shores.  It wasn't about trying to quell free speech in Hong Kong or the United States.  It wasn't about the coronavirus, which we only learned about this year.

It was about all of it. 

This is not a personal condemnation of everything Chinese.  I have met many Chinese people, and I like them.  I am happy to have immigrant Chinese friends.

And I do not hold myself out as a foreign policy expert.  I expect our country to continue to work with China on various issues.  It would be folly not to engage with a nation of 1.4 billion people.

But for me, at least for this moment, too much is enough.  

-----

1.  Here is a roundup of the scope of "re-education camps" now detaining Uyghur citizens in Xinjiang province.

2.  This is the official release of an international investigation into China's use of prisoners' organs for transplants.   More detail can be found here.

3.  This 2019 piece describes increasing numbers of U.S. deaths ascribed to fentanyl.  This one and this one describe how Chinese fentanyl winds up in the U.S.

A third report, published in California last week, said this:

The number of heroin and fentanyl overdose deaths in San Francisco more than doubled in 2019, according to the city’s medical examiner’s office statistics . . . .  Officials said 290 deaths involved fentanyl and heroin last year compared to 134 in 2018. Fentanyl was involved in 234 deaths, up from 90 in 2018.

4.  This December document from a federal court describes the case against a Chinese man charged with shipping 40-foot containers of counterfeit "Nike" and "Louis Vuitton" sneakers to ports in New York and New Jersey over a period of six years.  This 2018 news story describes a different prosecution involving 27,000 pairs of "Nike Air Jordans" shipped to the same two ports.
           But catching two shippers of counterfeit sneakers at two American ports is nothing in the broader scheme.
           This story suggests that e-commerce, including goods sold on Amazon, is a growing channel for Chinese counterfeiters.  
          This post, from a security company, says the scope of counterfeiting runs from fashion to toys to pharmaceuticals and that 88 percent of the fake stuff comes from China.
          As a practical matter, not buying Chinese products is getting more difficult, even on Amazon.  Last year, Chinese products were shipped to Vietnam, relabeled and then sent to the U.S. to avoid tariffs.

5.  China has tried to build its scientific and military credibility on the cheap, with bribes and outright theft.  Last week, a prominent Harvard chemist whose lab did work for US defense agencies was arrested for lying for years about his affiliations with a university in Wuhan, apparently for money.  This 2017 article describes other examples of stolen technology.
       Even the Russians are steamed about Chinese theft of their military research.

6.  Huawei, a theoretically private Chinese company, is a particularly troubling outfit.
        A story last summer described its rewards program for employees who steal other companies' intellectual property, plus its flat-out theft of a Texas company's product design and subsequent marketing of the same product under the Huawei name.
        Also last summer, Huawei was reported to be helping set up citizen-surveillance systems for governments in Uganda and Zambia and possibly other countries on the continent -- rather as the Chinese government keeps track of its own citizens.
       (In fact, China is active in Africa.  A 2018 story reported African Union leaders' charges that monitors and bugs were incorporated into a new $200 million Chinese-built AU headquarters in Ethiopia.)
       At the moment, a senior Huawei official is facing an extradition hearing in Canada.  The US wants to prosecute her for fraud -- effectively using sham corporate identities to violate US-Iran trade sanctions, plus stealing US communications technology.  The Chinese have denied all the charges and retaliated by detaining two Canadian citizens for more than a year.

-----

There is much more that could be said, but I believe I have made my point.

My primary objection is based on human rights, and my reasoning is this:  If a company in my town discriminated against people of any group, I wouldn't do business there. 

I can't do anything personally about the damage in matters from defense to commerce.  It took centuries for countries and companies to build webs of trust in their dealings with each other.  Now those systems are being undermined by a government whose only ethical construct seems to be that it's perfectly fine to do anything as long as you can get away with it.  I find that troubling, but I'm not in a position to do anything about it.  

Mostly I do not want to feel complicit anymore.

I don't think I'm the only one.

Updates

9/23/19 -- Verified footage of Chinese soldiers averting terrorism by escorting hundreds of handcuffed Uyghur men, heads shaved and blindfolded, through a train station.

2/10/20 -- Four Chinese military members were arrested and charged with a 2017 cyber-theft that netted the personal information of 147 million Americans.  You may remember it: The Equifax hack.  My credit card was cancelled and a new card sent to another address last month; the bank said the fraudsters used information from that hack.  

2/11/20 -- More than half the products sold on Amazon come from third party sellers, and much of that merchandise is counterfeit.

2/13/20 -- The U.S. Department of Justice added three new charges against four additional Huawei subsidiaries to its RICO (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Operation) prosecution of the Chinese tech giant.

2/13/20 -- A Chinese diplomat floats the idea that the American military brought Covid-19 to Wuhan.

3/15/20 -- The world accepted uncritically the Chinese report of a "donated" double-lung transplant from a brain-dead patient to a Covid-19 patient whose lungs had failed.  The European human rights journal Bitter Winter is skeptical.

3/18/20 -- A Wuhan doctor says Chinese officials silenced her coronavirus warnings in December, costing thousands their lives.

3/28/20 -- Observations on the ground suggest the CCP has drastically understated the number of Covid-19 deaths in Wuhan.

4/5/20 -- An Australian newspaper challenges Beijing's statements about Covid-19.

4/7/20 -- The UK ordered millions of antibody tests from China, but has concluded the tests don't work.

4/1/20 -- Short- and long-term historical perspective from a former US National Security Advisor.

4/15/20 -- While the world is distracted by SARS-Cov-2, China has stepped up its activity against Hong Kong and Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

4/23/20 -- Canada refuses to use a million faulty KN 95 masks purchased from China, following a 60,000-flimsy mask purchase by Toronto.  Similar complaints from Spain, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Turkey.

5/7/20 -- The US Food and Drug Administration finds only fourteen of the previously approved Chinese mask contractors' products are reliable enough for importation.

5/11/20 -- A university professor in Arkansas was charged with wire fraud, presumably related to shared research from his US-funded High Density Electronics Center; reports say the professor received more than $5 million for his work in China. 

5/11/20 -- A medical researcher  and former professor in Georgia pled guilty to tax fraud for not declaring $500,00 in income relating to his unrevealed affiliation with two Chinese universities over six years.  The professor received NIH funding in the US for large-animal research. 

5/20/20 -- An Australian university prosecutes a student for speech that is critical of China.  

China.

6/13/20 -- More than 1,300 Chinese medical device companies, in reports to the FDA, report the same false US address, a brick house in Delaware whose tenants and landlord knew nothing about any of the companies.

5/20/20 -- After hand-to-hand battle along the Himalayan border with China leaves 20 Indian soldiers dead, the Times of India finds that 87 percent of Indian citizens want to boycott products made in China.

6/25/20 -- After lifting its one-child restriction on Han Chinese families, China is forcing sterilizations and birth control on its Uyghur population.

6/26/20 -- ASEAN members claim China has ignored a 1982 treaty in actions in the East China Sea,

7/1/20 -- China tightens down on Hong Kong.

7/2/20 --  Foreign Affairs
                Hong Kong has been absorbed into Mainland China.

7/2/20 -- US customs officials in New York/New Jersey seize  13 tons of human hair shipped from China's Xinjiang province, where more than 1 million Muslim Uyghurs are held in concentration camps. 

7/5/20 -- Wall Street Journal
             "HONG KONG—Internationally peer-reviewed journals published more than 100 scientific research papers from China-based authors that appear to have reused identical sets of images, raising questions about the proliferation of problematic science as institutions fast-track research during the coronavirus pandemic.
             "The cache of 121 papers, credited to researchers from hospitals and medical universities across roughly 50 cities in China, all shared at least one image with another—a sign that many were likely produced by the same company or “paper mill,” said Elisabeth Bik, a California-based microbiologist and image-analysis expert who identified the trove."

7/8/20 -- The Times of London
               Uyghur representatives present evidence of Chinese genocide and crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court.

7/8/20 -- MIT Technology Review
                New laws from Beijing restrict Hong Kongers' internet access and assure greater surveillance, plus punishments for thoughtcrimes.

7/16/20 -- It's not just banks.  Techcrunch reports that VPN operators are planning to relocate servers out of Hong Kong.

7/19/20 -- New York Times
                 China is using Uyghur labor (presumably forced) to produce face masks that are marketed in the United States and other countries.

7/20/20 -- Daily Mail
                 Description of daily life for Uyghurs in Xinjian concentration camps.  (Not advised for the faint of heart.)

7/21/20 -- New York Times
                 U.S. officials have charged two Chinese researchers of working with Chinese security agencies to hack into American efforts to develop a  SARS-Covid-19 vaccine.  This follows by a similar charge two weeks ago about Russian efforts to hack similar research.

7/30/20 -- Uyghurs for Sale
                 This dense but worthwhile report from the Australian Strategic Police Institute, an independent think tank, examines the redistribution of Uyghurs from Xinjiang province to work in factories in other parts of China and, to the extent possible, examines the degree to which forced labor is employed to manufacture products for Western companies. 
                   In one case, "... a factory in eastern China that manufactures shoes for US company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences and police guard boxes."
                   From the report:  "In all, ASPI’s research has identified 82 foreign and Chinese companies directly or indirectly benefiting from the use of Uyghur workers outside Xinjiang through potentially abusive labour transfer programs as recently as 2019: Abercrombie & Fitch, Acer, Adidas, Alstom, Amazon, Apple, ASUS, BAIC Motor, BMW, Bombardier, Bosch, BYD, Calvin Klein, Candy, Carter’s, Cerruti 1881, Changan Automobile, Cisco, CRRC, Dell, Electrolux, Fila, Founder Group, GAC Group (automobiles), Gap, Geely Auto, General Motors, Google, Goertek, H&M, Haier, Hart Schaffner Marx, Hisense, Hitachi, HP, HTC, Huawei, iFlyTek, Jack & Jones, Jaguar, Japan Display Inc., L.L.Bean, Lacoste, Land Rover, Lenovo, LG, Li-Ning, Mayor, Meizu, Mercedes-Benz, MG, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Nike, Nintendo, Nokia, Oculus, Oppo, Panasonic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, Roewe, SAIC Motor, Samsung, SGMW, Sharp, Siemens, Skechers, Sony, TDK, Tommy Hilfiger, Toshiba, Tsinghua Tongfang, Uniqlo, Victoria’s Secret, Vivo, Volkswagen, Xiaomi, Zara, Zegna, ZTE. Some brands are linked with multiple factories."

8/9/20 -- Associated Press

                   "Hong Kong authorities broadened their enforcement of a new national security law on Monday, arresting media tycoon Jimmy Lai, searching the headquarters of his Next Digital group and carting away boxes of what they said was evidence. . . . Lai, 71, is an outspoken pro-democracy figure who regularly criticizes China’s authoritarian rule and Hong Kong’s government."

8/10/20 -- New York Times

                   "Why Is China Coming After Americans Like Me in the U.S.?" by Samuel Chu.

8/12/20 -- Wall St. Journal: TikTok Tracked Users' Data with a Tactic Google Banned

                      "The tactic, which experts in mobile-phone security said was concealed through an unusual added layer of encription, wasn't disclosed to TikTok users."

                      Tik Tok employs more than 130 members of the CCP, China's ruling party.  Most of those CCP members work in management or technical positions.

August 17 --  Radio Free Asia: "Xinjiang Hospitals Aborted, Killed Babies Outside Family Planning Limits: Uyghur Obstetrician:"   

                      "Abdulla told RFA that hospital family-planning units carried out the operations, including for women who were 'eight and nine months pregnant,' adding that in some cases, medical staff would 'even kill the babies after they’d been born.'"

August 27 -- BuzzFeed News

                      "China has secretly built scores of massive new prison and internment camps in the past three years, dramatically escalating its campaign against Muslim minorities even as it publicly claimed the detainees had all been set free. "

September 1 -- New spy charges: Faculty and researchers at at UCLA, at Texas A&M, at the University of Virginia and at The Ohio State University, at the Cleveland Clinic and  NASA/University of Arkansas.

8/22/20 -- Reuters 

                         "More than 500,000 Tibetans have been transferred to Chinese training centers since the beginning of 2020, as an existing mass labor initiative expanded in the region. The figure accounts for roughly 15 percent of Tibet's total population." 

                       

8/29/20 -- Washington Post: 

                         "As repression mounts, China under Xi Jinping feels increasingly like North Korea" by  reporter who has visited both.  Also reflections on Xinjiang province then and now.

8/29/20 -- BBC News:  

                         China's most famous expat artist, Ai Weiwei:  "The West should really have worried about China decades ago. Now it's already a bit too late, because the West has built its strong system in China and to simply cut it off, it will hurt deeply. That's why China is very arrogant."

9/6/20 -- Reuters

                         Frozen raspberries from China were routed through New Zealand to Chile, relabeled as organic Chilean products and then sent to Canada over several years, where they may have caused a norovirus outbreak in Quebec.

12/1/20 -- Business Insider

                           Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple reportedly lobbied to weaken a Congressional bill aimed at preventing them from manufacturing products in China using forced Uighur labor.

12/4/20 -- Reuters

                            Virtually unheard of a decade ago, these Chinese players are ... routing cartel drug profits from the United States to China then on to Mexico with a few clicks of a burner phone and Chinese banking apps – and without the bulky cash ever crossing borders ....

                            Most contact with the banking system happens in China, a veritable black hole for U.S. and Mexican authorities.

12/4/20 -- Ready to invest in China?

                             I don't do US politics, but I follow numbers and finance.   This Shanghai speech is creepy, and a post from the Assange-supporting journalist puts it into context.

12/22/20 -- Reuters

                             A Hong Kong family leaves the only home they've known for Scotland, which they never have visited, to provide a better future for their children.