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Thursday, October 08, 2020
TikTok, WeChat bans by US and India broke WTO rules, China says
At a meeting of the Council for Trade in Services, China said action taken by the US and India to ban Chinese apps broke World Trade Organization (WTO) rules
Experts warned that if China was to pursue such a case, it would likely be countersued because of its blocks on foreign apps and websites
Finbarr Bermingham
Published: , 5 Oct, 2020
Beijing has accused India and the US of flouting WTO rules with their bans on Chinese apps. Photo: AFP
At a closed-door meeting at the World Trade Organization (WTO), China has accused the United States and India of breaking global trading rules over bans on Chinese-made apps, including TikTok and WeChat.
China took to the floor at the Council for Trade in Services meeting on Friday to accuse the pair of taking measures that are “clearly inconsistent with WTO rules, restrict cross-border trading services and violate the basic principles and objectives of the multilateral trading system”, according to a Geneva trade official who was privy to the discussions.
US President Donald Trump has targeted the popular apps with a series of orders that aim to ban US entities from doing business with them or downloading them from American app stores. In addition, the Trump administration wants to force the sale of
TikTok to a US buyer by November 14.
Washington has claimed the apps collect data that “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information – potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage”.
India pointed to China’s own record on foreign investment and foreign apps and websites, saying that “China should first reflect on its own transparency record, as well as on its long-standing reluctance to fully open to foreign trading services”, according to the official.
Experts said that while the US and Indian policies might flout the rules, either nation would likely counter-sue if China were to bring a formal action because of its use of the
Great Firewall, an elaborate internet censorship system that blocks foreign websites.
However, Beijing’s success in a recent WTO case over Trump’s Section 301 tariffs may have emboldened it to bring a case nonetheless.
At the meeting, China said that “it is does not prohibit foreign apps and websites in its territory on a blanket basis”, the official said.
It’s a new era and I think there’s an interest for the WTO, and its members, to clarify the scope and boundaries of national securityJulien Chaisse
“[China] not doing anything is also risky. And China did take action against the US on tariffs and did win,” said Julien Chaisse, a trade professor at City University of Hong Kong. “These national security exceptions were never used for years. It’s a new era and I think there’s an interest for the WTO, and its members, to clarify the scope and boundaries of national security.”
The US has cited national security for numerous trade policies in recent years, including the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium producing countries, for which a WTO Panel was established in January 2019, sponsored by Mexico and joined by 30 other members, including China, Taiwan and the European Union. After the US eliminated the duties, the case was mutually withdrawn.
After the US eliminated the duties on steel and aluminium, the case was mutually withdrawn.
Bryan Mercurio, a trade law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said it was “surprising that the US and India had not yet filed a case against China in this regard”.
India is absolutely right to question China’s own transparency – and if it is not a blanket ban on foreign apps, what’s the reason for it?Bryan Mercurio
“Maybe they will see what China’s arguments are here and if China brings a case they’ll bring the exact same case against China,” he said. “India is absolutely right to question China’s own transparency – and if it is not a blanket ban on foreign apps, what’s the reason for it? I am guessing China would also go to a national security argument in defence.”
Alex Capri, a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore, said China’s rhetoric in Geneva fed into an “ongoing massive public relations campaign for its form of techno-diplomacy, because Chinese tech companies are in an existential crisis”.
“China continues to play the multilateral card, at least in terms of the optics. It is a similar tone to the one Xi Jinping struck at the UN, in which China is painted as the main sponsor of the multilateral system,” Capri said. “However I agree with India, China is not a market economy.”
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: App bans breaches global trade rules, China says Banning Chinese apps ‘breaks global trading rules’
Finbarr Bermingham has been reporting on Asian trade since 2014. Prior to this, he covered global trade and economics in London. He joined the Post in 2018, before which he was Asia Editor at Global Trade Review and Trade Correspondent for the International Business Times.
At a meeting of the Council for Trade in Services, China said action taken by the US and India to ban Chinese apps broke World Trade Organization (WTO) rules
Experts warned that if China was to pursue such a case, it would likely be countersued because of its blocks on foreign apps and websites
Finbarr Bermingham
Published: , 5 Oct, 2020
Beijing has accused India and the US of flouting WTO rules with their bans on Chinese apps. Photo: AFP
At a closed-door meeting at the World Trade Organization (WTO), China has accused the United States and India of breaking global trading rules over bans on Chinese-made apps, including TikTok and WeChat.
China took to the floor at the Council for Trade in Services meeting on Friday to accuse the pair of taking measures that are “clearly inconsistent with WTO rules, restrict cross-border trading services and violate the basic principles and objectives of the multilateral trading system”, according to a Geneva trade official who was privy to the discussions.
US President Donald Trump has targeted the popular apps with a series of orders that aim to ban US entities from doing business with them or downloading them from American app stores. In addition, the Trump administration wants to force the sale of
TikTok to a US buyer by November 14.
Washington has claimed the apps collect data that “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information – potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage”.
In June, India banned TikTok and more than 50 other Chinese-made apps, including WeChat and Baidu Maps, after its military clashed with Chinese soldiers at their disputed border in the Himalayas. New Delhi claimed the apps were “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorised manner to servers which have locations outside India”.
The growing tech saga sparked a lengthy exchange at the council, during which China said there was no evidence to support the pair’s claims and that TikTok’s data collection was standard practise for thousands of apps worldwide.
The US said at the meeting its action against Chinese apps was in defence of its national security. The WTO’s General Agreement on Services allows for such action in cases “relating to the supply of services as carried out directly or indirectly for the purpose of provisioning a military establishment”.
However, China argued that Washington’s actions were a “clear abuse” of the relevant articles.
The growing tech saga sparked a lengthy exchange at the council, during which China said there was no evidence to support the pair’s claims and that TikTok’s data collection was standard practise for thousands of apps worldwide.
The US said at the meeting its action against Chinese apps was in defence of its national security. The WTO’s General Agreement on Services allows for such action in cases “relating to the supply of services as carried out directly or indirectly for the purpose of provisioning a military establishment”.
However, China argued that Washington’s actions were a “clear abuse” of the relevant articles.
India pointed to China’s own record on foreign investment and foreign apps and websites, saying that “China should first reflect on its own transparency record, as well as on its long-standing reluctance to fully open to foreign trading services”, according to the official.
Experts said that while the US and Indian policies might flout the rules, either nation would likely counter-sue if China were to bring a formal action because of its use of the
Great Firewall, an elaborate internet censorship system that blocks foreign websites.
However, Beijing’s success in a recent WTO case over Trump’s Section 301 tariffs may have emboldened it to bring a case nonetheless.
At the meeting, China said that “it is does not prohibit foreign apps and websites in its territory on a blanket basis”, the official said.
It’s a new era and I think there’s an interest for the WTO, and its members, to clarify the scope and boundaries of national securityJulien Chaisse
“[China] not doing anything is also risky. And China did take action against the US on tariffs and did win,” said Julien Chaisse, a trade professor at City University of Hong Kong. “These national security exceptions were never used for years. It’s a new era and I think there’s an interest for the WTO, and its members, to clarify the scope and boundaries of national security.”
The US has cited national security for numerous trade policies in recent years, including the imposition of tariffs on steel and aluminium producing countries, for which a WTO Panel was established in January 2019, sponsored by Mexico and joined by 30 other members, including China, Taiwan and the European Union. After the US eliminated the duties, the case was mutually withdrawn.
After the US eliminated the duties on steel and aluminium, the case was mutually withdrawn.
Bryan Mercurio, a trade law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said it was “surprising that the US and India had not yet filed a case against China in this regard”.
India is absolutely right to question China’s own transparency – and if it is not a blanket ban on foreign apps, what’s the reason for it?Bryan Mercurio
“Maybe they will see what China’s arguments are here and if China brings a case they’ll bring the exact same case against China,” he said. “India is absolutely right to question China’s own transparency – and if it is not a blanket ban on foreign apps, what’s the reason for it? I am guessing China would also go to a national security argument in defence.”
Alex Capri, a senior fellow at the National University of Singapore, said China’s rhetoric in Geneva fed into an “ongoing massive public relations campaign for its form of techno-diplomacy, because Chinese tech companies are in an existential crisis”.
“China continues to play the multilateral card, at least in terms of the optics. It is a similar tone to the one Xi Jinping struck at the UN, in which China is painted as the main sponsor of the multilateral system,” Capri said. “However I agree with India, China is not a market economy.”
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: App bans breaches global trade rules, China says Banning Chinese apps ‘breaks global trading rules’
Finbarr Bermingham has been reporting on Asian trade since 2014. Prior to this, he covered global trade and economics in London. He joined the Post in 2018, before which he was Asia Editor at Global Trade Review and Trade Correspondent for the International Business Times.
Add your name: Defund police. Invest in community services instead.
Ocasio-Cortez
Oct 6, 2020
Friend, right now, most major cities in America are channeling huge war-chests of money into police departments – but a rising tide of people are demanding concrete, bold solutions that can save lives. We want you with us.
From the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Damian Daniels, Tony McDade, and more — just in the last few months — we are reminded once again just how badly change is needed.
That’s why momentum to defund the police is growing. The message is simple: Drastically reduce funding for police. Invest in community services that help us instead. Do it now.
We need you to step up right now. Help support our communities by joining Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and our grassroots movement to demand that cities everywhere defund police – and reinvest in community services.
Add your name now
It is not enough to paint slogans. We need systemic change.
If you agree, add your name to join Alexandria and our movement in demanding that cities everywhere defund police and invest in community services.
If enough people speak up now, we can help build a dramatically different world together. A world that is not based on racist, violent policing, but instead that supports our communities to thrive.
In solidarity,
Team AOC
Paid for by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress
DISARM, DEMILITARIZE, DEFUND, THE COPS
THEIR DEMOCRACY AND OURS ANGELA DAVIS/JACOBIN
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Paying for the Recovery We Want. BROADBENT INSTITUTE
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With most Canadians agreed that we need a bold recovery from the pandemic, It's time to break the silence about how we pay for it. Today, as part of our Essential Solutions Project, we published a significant new paper Paying for the Recovery We Want. The pandemic has laid bare the deep cracks in our systems, from education and health to employment standards and income supports. We have been forced to face up to longstanding inequities and injustices that Indigenous people, women, Black people, and other racialized groups have borne for years. They have suffered some of the worst impacts of the virus. We need a transformative change in the way our economy and our society works, and we will only get it with robust public investment and leadership.
This paper makes the case for a debt-financed recovery in the short to medium term, followed by a comprehensive revision of our tax system; including a wealth tax, income tax reform, ending corporate welfare, a sovereign wealth fund for green recovery, and reviewing consumption taxes and social security premiums. Read the Paying for the Recovery We Want report on our website. And if you think a wealth tax is a good idea, please send an email to your local MP telling them you would like to see them support it too. Thanks, help us get the word out by forwarding this email to your networks, or share it via social media. Katrina Miller P.S. If you think our work is making an impact, please consider supporting it by making a contribution to the Institute. |
CRISPR CRITTERS
Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded for 'genetic scissors' discoveryChemical scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna have been awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their research into genome editing and the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 "genetic scissors."
Chemical scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday, becoming only the sixth and seventh women ever to win the award in over a century.
The pair's research concerned "the development of a method for genome editing." Charpentier of France currently works in Germany and Doudna, an American, discovered the CRISPR-Cas9 "genetic scissors" in 2012, a breakthrough that "has taken the life sciences into a new epoch," the Nobel Committee said.
"This year's prize is about rewriting the code of life," the committee said. The tool the scientists developed can be used to change the DNA of animals, plants and microorganisms with extremely high precision.
Charpentier is head of the Max Planck Insitute for the Science of Pathogens in Germany. Doudna is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Read more: Will 'Prime Editing' make genetic scissors more precise?
Only seven women have won the prize, including Marie Curie
Rewriting the code of life
CRISPR is a molecular tool that allows scientists to make extremely precise changes to the genetic code of organisms that are still alive. It stands for "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats," patterns in DNA discovered already in 1987, but which remained mysterious for years until evidence emerged in the mid-2000s that they belonged to the antivirus defense system of bacteria. What was happening was the bacteria were taking sections of the DNA of viruses and building them into their own genome.
The enzyme used by the bacteria has the codename Cas, and this is where the key breakthrough came. In 2012, teams in the US and Europe led by Doudna and Charpentier showed how the Cas system could be turned into a universal 'cut and paste' tool for editing gene sequences.
Read more: ECJ judgment: Is CRISPR-Cas9 "genetic engineering" at all
Practical applications
Lennart Randau, of Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, called CRISPR-Cas9 one of the "most beautiful examples we have of how basic research can revolutionize the entire science world."
Randau heads the prokaryotic RNA department at Philipps University and told DW that we are now "at a point where we can cleave human DNA very specifically and faster than ever before. We can take a gene that causes disease and correct it. This is the great impact of the CRISPR-Cas9 discovery for humanity."
There are companies all over the world testing this technology in clinical trials right now, Randau added, saying that it was "very possible that the method could be used in approved medical procedures within the next two years."
An application of CRISPR is particularly useful in altering the DNA of various plants and animals so they can withstand certain blights or viruses.
Lingering concerns
CRISPR has also been the subject of widespread controversy.
Indirectly addressing the ethical questions brought about by the discovery of genetic scissors, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, Claes Gustaffson, warned that the technology must be "used with great care."
A scientist in China was imprisoned in 2019 for creating the world’s first "gene-edited babies." He Jiankui had announced to the world in the fall of 2018 that he had used CRISPR-Cas9 technology to produce human embryos that were immune to HIV. The experiment involved a woman who had already successfully given birth to genetically manipulated twins.
Another concern regarding the technology is what it does to the genetic material being altered. A systematic investigation published in 2018 in the journal Nature Biotechnology documented significant mutations to both mouse and human cells treated with the CRISPR-Cas9 technique.
In some cases, the mutations were so extensive that the researchers concluded that the genetic damage ensuing could lead to potentially serious health risks.
Read more: Genetically edited babies: An ethical transgression
The flurry of attention (and controversy) that ensued in the wake of the CRISPR-Cas9 breakthrough, spanning academic areas from genetics to molecular biology and bioethics, was also overshadowed by a patent conflict.
Another US team beat them to a patent for applying the method on human cells, sparking a legal row over priority - and in February 2017, the US patent office ruled against Doudna and Charpentier. Despite this, they remain widely credited as the real pioneers of CRISPR by fellow scientists.
Asked at Thursday’s ceremony whether the Nobel committee considered including any other scientists in the 2020 prize, chemistry chair Claes Gustafsson said curtly that “this was a question we did not consider.”
The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish krona (about €950,000; $1.1 million).
As it did this year, the award has frequently honored work that led to practical applications in use today, such as last year's win for the brains behind the lithium-ion battery.
Most winners of the chemistry prize hailed from the US, the UK and Germany
Week of awards
On Monday, the committee awarded its prize for physiology or medicine to US scientists Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice as well as British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the hepatitis C virus. On Tuesday, three astrophysicists shared the award in physics for their research into black holes.
The other prizes awarded by the committee are for literature, peace and economics, most of which will be announced later this week. The winner of the peace prize will be announced on Friday.
The awards, handed out almost every year since 1901, come with a gold medal.
Martha McSally crashes and burns when repeatedly asks if she’s proud to support Trump
Published on October 7, 2020 By Alex Henderson, AlterNet
Published on October 7, 2020 By Alex Henderson, AlterNet
Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Martha McSally speaking at a "Keep America Great" rally in Arizona. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
Poll after poll has shown Republican Sen. Martha McSally losing to her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly, in Arizona’s 2020 U.S. Senate race. The incumbent senator tried to salvage her campaign this week during a debate with Kelly, but things did not go well for McSally when she was asked about her support for President Donald Trump and went out of her way to dodge the question.
The debate moderator asked McSally: are you proud of your support for President Trump? But McSally responding by attacking Kelly.
McSally accused Kelly of promoting “the most radical agenda that we’ve seen,” insisting, “Candidate Kelly says that he’s an independent and a moderate — and lots of platitudes here. But the stakes could not be higher. If you want your tax cuts, I’m your girl. If you want the largest tax increase in history, you’ve got somebody else over here.”
The moderator, however, reiterated his question, saying, “Senator, the question was: are you proud of your support for President Trump” — and her evasive response was, “I’m proud to be fighting for Arizona every single day.” Then, the moderator repeated his question once again, and McSally continued to dodge it.
It isn’t hard to understand why McSally didn’t want to defend her support of Trump during the debate. She is competing with Kelly in a swing state in which a centrist Democrat, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, won the state’s last U.S. Senate race in 2018. And polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is quite competitive in Arizona, a state which Trump won by only 3% in 2016.
A New York Times/Siena poll released on October 5 found McSally trailing Kelly by 11%. And a USA Today/Suffolk poll released three days earlier found Kelly with a 9% lead over the incumbent senator.
Poll after poll has shown Republican Sen. Martha McSally losing to her Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly, in Arizona’s 2020 U.S. Senate race. The incumbent senator tried to salvage her campaign this week during a debate with Kelly, but things did not go well for McSally when she was asked about her support for President Donald Trump and went out of her way to dodge the question.
The debate moderator asked McSally: are you proud of your support for President Trump? But McSally responding by attacking Kelly.
McSally accused Kelly of promoting “the most radical agenda that we’ve seen,” insisting, “Candidate Kelly says that he’s an independent and a moderate — and lots of platitudes here. But the stakes could not be higher. If you want your tax cuts, I’m your girl. If you want the largest tax increase in history, you’ve got somebody else over here.”
The moderator, however, reiterated his question, saying, “Senator, the question was: are you proud of your support for President Trump” — and her evasive response was, “I’m proud to be fighting for Arizona every single day.” Then, the moderator repeated his question once again, and McSally continued to dodge it.
It isn’t hard to understand why McSally didn’t want to defend her support of Trump during the debate. She is competing with Kelly in a swing state in which a centrist Democrat, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, won the state’s last U.S. Senate race in 2018. And polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is quite competitive in Arizona, a state which Trump won by only 3% in 2016.
A New York Times/Siena poll released on October 5 found McSally trailing Kelly by 11%. And a USA Today/Suffolk poll released three days earlier found Kelly with a 9% lead over the incumbent senator.
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