A Chinese city on the border with Myanmar last week began testing thousands of residents for the coronavirus after two Myanmar migrants tested positive. In Ruili, a Yunnan province transit point on the porous 2,200-kilometer border, officials issued a lockdown order. Authorities rounded up many illegal migrant workers and sent them back to Myanmar. Medical worker in protective suit collects a swab sample from a woman for nucleic acid testing in the border city of Ruili, Sep. 16, 2020.Home quarantine for residents was scheduled to be lifted on Monday at 10 p.m. but cinemas, bars and internet cafes will remain shut, Reuters reported from the statement. That partial reopening will come a day after the Myanmar Health Ministry announced a stay-at-home order for the Yangon region effective Monday amid a record daily increase in new cases of COVID-19.  There are 44 townships in the Yangon region with a total population of more than 5 million people. On Monday, the health ministry said it had recorded 264 new coronavirus cases, with most of the recent new infections in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city and commercial center. Myanmar has reported a total of 6,151 COVID-19 cases and 98 deaths as of Monday, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center. The Ruili episode began on September 3, when a 32-year-old woman from Myanmar took her three children and two nurses across the border from Muse to Ruili and stayed at her sister’s home, according to one of China’s official news outlets, The Global Times.  Everyone in the sister’s residential area was tested, and all 1,185 results were negative. Authorities tracked down 190 close contacts and quarantined them, according to the report. 
 
While the virus appears to be under control in much of China, Myanmar has seen a recent spike in COVID-19 cases and the scare in Ruili resulted in the shutdown of all business operations and public transit with everyone required to wear masks in public places.  The lockdown made life difficult for many.  “Even though the border gate is not completely closed, there are very few trucks crossing the border,” Win Aung Khant, chairman of Muse Highway Truckers Association said. “Myanmar trucks are not allowed to enter or unload goods in … Ruili.  There are almost no Myanmar workers in Chinese side.”   Nang Aye Sein, spokesperson for the Lashio Chamber of Commerce, said agricultural and fishery export businesses were the most affected by the lockdown.  In a press conference on September 14, Yang Bianqiang, deputy director of the police department in Dehong Prefecture, where Ruili is located, said securing the border was difficult.  “There is no natural border between Ruili and Myanmar,” he said. “Citizens in Ruili and Myanmar speak the same language and visit each other very often. It is difficult to monitor their travels.”  The Myanmar and Yunnan border is infamous for its illicit activities in commodities such as jade, the number of illegal migrant workers who cross into China and the Chinese who cross into Myanmar to gamble in border town casinos.  In February, authorities on each side of the border in Ruili and Muse cooperated after five people believed to be infected with the coronavirus crossed from China into Myanmar.Wuhan Man, a Fugitive in Myanmar, Turns Himself in to Chinese PoliceUnidentified man who surrendered belonged to a group of five Wuhan residents who slipped across the border into Myanmar last week, according to authorities
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A retired Chinese real estate tycoon who criticized President Xi Jinping over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been sentenced to 18 years in prison on corruption charges.   An announcement Tuesday by Beijing No.2 Intermediate Court said 69-year-old Ren Zhiqiang was found guilty of embezzling as much as $16 million from the state-owned company he once headed, along with bribery and abuse of power that cost the company about $17 million in losses.   The court said Ren had confessed to all the charges and would not appeal his sentence.  In addition to his sentence, he was also fined over $600,000.Chinese flag flutters near the Chinese national emblem on Beijing No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court, Sep. 22, 2020.Ren was detained in March after publishing an essay slamming President Xi over a speech he delivered to 170,000 officials the month before about government efforts to respond to the outbreak, which was first detected in December 2019 in the central city of Wuhan. The ex-businessman said he “saw not an emperor exhibiting his new clothes, but a clown who stripped off his clothes and insisted on being an emperor,” although he did not mention Xi by name. He also criticized the conference for withholding information about the pandemic and failing to hold anyone responsible.   Ren was expelled by the Communist Party in July, and eventually accused by authorities in Beijing of misusing official funds on personal expenses. Ren has run afoul of the ruling party in the past after openly criticizing the party over a suppression of free speech and demands for complete party loyalty.   
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U.S. authorities have charged a Tibetan man serving as a New York police officer with espionage, accusing him of gathering information about the city’s Tibetan community for the Chinese government. The officer, who worked at a station in the Queens section of the city, was directed by members of the Chinese consulate in New York, according to the indictment released Monday. Through his contacts with the Tibetan community, the 33-year-old man gathered information between 2018 and 2020 on the community’s activities, as well as identified potential information sources. According to the indictment, the man, who is also an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, allowed members of the Chinese consulate to attend events organized by the New York Police Department. The Chinese authorities allegedly paid him tens of thousands of dollars for his service. The officer has been charged with four counts, including enlisting in the service of a foreign country on U.S. soil, misrepresentation and obstructing the operation of a public service. He was brought before a judge Monday and taken into custody, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn federal prosecutor told AFP. According to the NYPD, he is suspended without pay. Born in China, the man was granted political asylum in the U.S., claiming he was tortured by Chinese authorities because of his Tibetan ethnicity. The investigation revealed, however, that both of his parents were members of the Chinese Communist Party. “If confirmed by the courts,” the espionage operation “shows that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in malign operations to suppress dissent, not only in Tibet … but any place in the world,” said the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group that promotes Tibetans’ freedoms and rights. After allowing Tibet to function autonomously from 1912-1950, Beijing retook control of the territory in 1951. The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has lived in exile since 1959. 
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U.S. President Donald Trump met at the White House on Monday with one of the five women on his list to replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to sources.  The 87-year-old liberal icon died last Friday after a lengthy battle with cancer. Trump said he would announce his nominee after funeral services for her later this week.  The president mentioned Amy Coney Barrett by name, along with Barbara Lagoa, as he spoke to reporters before boarding his Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn. He did not confirm meeting with Barrett.  U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a law professor at Notre Dame University, poses in an undated photograph obtained from Notre Dame University, Sept. 19, 2020.Later in remarks in Dayton, in the Midwestern state of Ohio, Trump said he would announce his choice probably on Saturday, but possibly the day before.  “It will be a brilliant person,” the president said. “It will be a woman.”  Both Barrett, a 48-year-old Midwestern Catholic, and Lagoa, a 52-year-old Cuban American from Florida, are conservatives whom Trump appointed to federal appellate court judgeships in recent years.  The president told reporters he might meet with Lagoa later this week when he travels to Miami. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s outstanding,” he added.  Florida Supreme Court Justice Barbara Lagoa, currently a United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, poses in a photograph from 2019 obtained Sept. 19, 2020.Others reported to be on Trump’s short list are Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Joan Larsen, Fourth Circuit Judge Allison Jones Rushing and deputy White House counsel Kate Todd.  Timing of voteThe president, in his Monday afternoon remarks to reporters, called on the Republican- controlled Senate to vote on confirmation before the Nov. 3 election. “I’d much rather have a vote before the election,” Trump said. “We have plenty of time to do it.” That is a reversal from the position he took four years ago when a Supreme Court seat became vacant in the final year of former President Barack Obama’s second term.  “I think the next president should make the pick,” he said in 2016.  Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee hoping to prevent Trump’s reelection, said the victor in the November election should make the court selection after being inaugurated for a new White House term in January.  Trump on Monday said there was “zero chance” that Democrats wouldn’t try to fill a Supreme Court vacancy if they controlled both the presidency and the Senate as Republicans currently do.  FILE – Allison Jones Rushing testifies before a Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing on her nomination to be a United States circuit judge for the Fourth Circuit, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Oct. 17, 2018.Ginsburg will lie in repose at the Supreme Court Wednesday and Thursday, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Ginsburg will lie in state in the U.S. Capitol on Friday.  Trump’s Supreme Court pick of another conservative, his third after winning Senate confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, would tip the current 5-4 conservative edge on the country’s top court to 6-3.  The new choice could affect decisions on legalized abortion in the U.S., immigration, health care, voting rights, gun ownership restrictions, religious liberty and an array of other issues for more than a generation.  ‘Ginsburg’s dying wish’Trump’s anticipated court selection has touched off a rancorous political debate in Washington: should the nomination be considered before the election or after? After would effectively allow the American electorate to have a say by deciding the presidential election, which would allow the winner — either Biden or Trump — to make the choice at the start of a new four-year term.  In 2016, Republicans refused to allow consideration of Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of that year. They argued that high court vacancies should be left unfilled during an election year so the American people can weigh in on the choice. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer criticized the Republican Party’s change in position and said no vote should take place until next year.  “That was Justice Ginsburg’s dying wish. And it may be the Senate’s only, last hope,” Schumer said.  FILE – Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen moderates a panel discussion during the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention in Washington, Nov. 17, 2016.Trump is questioning whether Ginsburg actually told her granddaughter just before dying that she hoped her seat would not be filled until after the presidential election.  “It just sounds to me like it would be somebody else. It could be, and it might not be, too. It was just too convenient,” the president said to reporters. 2016 vs. 2020″No wonder Americans have so little faith in government and in this Senate, led by the Republican majority,” Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defended his positions in both 2016 and 2020, saying the difference is that four years ago, different parties were controlling the Senate and White House, whereas now, the same party controls both. He said historical precedent has been on his side in both cases. “There was clear precedent behind the predictable outcome that came out of 2016. And there is even more overwhelming precedent behind the fact that this Senate will vote on this nomination this year,” McConnell said.  Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said Monday that voters chose Republicans to lead the Senate in the 2018 elections in part because they were committed to supporting Trump’s Supreme Court nominees.  “We should honor that mandate,” he said, speaking from the Senate floor.  Republicans have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, but two Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — said over the weekend they would oppose voting on Trump’s eventual nominee before the election.  Trump criticized both lawmakers, claiming they were “very badly hurt” politically by their statements.  If two more Republicans say no to a preelection vote, consideration of the nominee would be scuttled until at least the post-election, lame duck session of Congress. If one more Republican objects, Vice President Mike Pence could break the 50-50 deadlock in the Senate in favor of considering Trump’s nominee.  Ken Bredemeier contributed to this report.
 
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The U.S. Congress this week considers legislation to fund the federal government through mid-December, but a dispute over farm aid raised questions about whether lawmakers can avoid a government shutdown amid a pandemic just weeks before the Nov. 3 elections. With government funding lapsing on Sept. 30, House Democrats announced Monday they had filed the stopgap funding legislation, but angered Republicans by leaving out new money that President Donald Trump wanted for farmers. The House will take up the bill Tuesday, a Democratic aide said. The Senate could then act later this week. The new federal fiscal year starts Oct. 1. The bill is designed to give lawmakers more time to work out federal spending for the period through September 2021, including budgets for military operations, health care, national parks, space programs, and airport and border security. FILE – Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, Aug. 27, 2020.The spending proposal “will avert a catastrophic shutdown in the middle of the ongoing pandemic, wildfires and hurricanes, and keep government open until December 11, when we plan to have bipartisan legislation to fund the government for this fiscal year,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement. But the measure’s December end date will require Congress to return to the government funding question again during its post-election lame-duck session, either during or after what could be a bruising fight to confirm Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And the legislation does not include $21.1 billion the White House sought to replenish the Commodity Credit Corporation, a program to stabilize farm incomes, because Democrats considered this a “blank check” for “political favors,” said a House Democratic aide who asked not to be named. Trump promised more farm aid during a rally in Wisconsin last week. Republicans were not happy.  FILE – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell meets with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, July 20, 2020.”House Democrats’ rough draft of a government funding bill shamefully leaves out key relief and support that American farmers need. This is no time to add insult to injury and defund help for farmers and rural America,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote on Twitter.  Republicans could seek to amend the document to add in the provision, but both chambers would ultimately need to pass the same version for the measure to go to Trump for signing into law. The bill proposes spending $14 billion to shore up a trust fund that pays for airport improvements and air traffic control operations. It also directs $13.6 billion to maintain current spending levels on highways and mass transit. 
 
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A federal judge in Nevada has dismissed a lawsuit by President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign that sought to block the state from sending mail-in ballots to every registered voter there, a legal victory for Democrats ahead of November’s election. The order is the latest in a string of wins for Democrats in battleground states, including in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where courts this month ruled that mailed ballots that arrive within certain time periods after Nov. 3’s Election Day must still be counted. Trump’s campaign had argued that the Nevada law, which includes provisions mandating that ballots received up to three days after Nov. 3 be counted even if they lack a postmark, would lead to election fraud. Experts say election fraud is exceedingly rare in the United States, but Trump, a Republican facing off against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, has repeatedly said without evidence that an expected surge in voting by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic could lead to a rigged election. In an order dated Friday but released Monday, U.S. District Judge James Mahan dismissed the case, saying the campaign does not represent Nevada voters, and did not have legal standing to bring the complaint, which he called “impermissibly generalized.” “Plaintiffs never describe how their member voters will be harmed by vote dilution where other voters will not,” Mahan wrote, explaining in part his reasons for the dismissal. “Not only have plaintiffs failed to allege a substantial risk of voter fraud, the State of Nevada has its own mechanisms for deterring and prosecuting voter fraud,” he wrote, adding that the alleged injuries were speculative. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Marc Elias, an elections lawyer working with Biden’s campaign, said on Twitter that the ruling was a “big victory” for Democrats. Nevada is among eight states that plan to mail every voter a ballot. Election officials in most states have encouraged at-home voting as the highly contagious nature of the novel coronavirus has made voting in person a concern.  
 
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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday withdrew its statement from three days ago on how COVID-19 can spread through aerosolized droplets, saying it was posted “in error.” On Friday, the CDC posted an update to its website saying the virus can be transmitted through tiny, aerosolized droplets that are “produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, sings, talks, or breathes.”  Such passage of the virus would entail a distance greater than the 2-meter space generally accepted as medically proper social distancing between people to avoid transmitting the disease. It is a view that outside health experts have been advancing. CDC Adds Breathing to Ways Coronavirus SpreadsThe CDC has updated its website to add another way to protect yourselfBut on Monday the CDC dropped any mention of airborne transmission, saying that “a draft version of proposed changes to these recommendations was posted in error to the agency’s official website.” Instead, it said the possibility of recommendations on dealing with airborne transmission of the virus are under review. The agency reverted to its previous message, saying that the virus is thought to spread “between people who are in close contact with one another,” a distance of about 2 meters. An agency official said the Friday guidelines were removed because they did “not reflect our current state of knowledge.” The website mistake was the agency’s latest in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and came on the same day as the United States neared 200,000 deaths from the virus, the most of any country in the world.  The CDC recently had reversed its guidance on whether asymptomatic people should be tested for the coronavirus to now say anyone should be tested if they have come in contact with someone known to have been infected. 
 
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Turkey is embarking on a major naval construction program to restore the regional maritime influence it lost after the Ottoman empire’s collapse. But the policy is already generating regional tensions – in particular – with its neighbor, Greece. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
Camera: Berke Bas    Producer: Jon Spier
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The newly formed U.S. Space Force is deploying troops to a vast new frontier: the Arabian Peninsula.
Space Force now has a squadron of 20 airmen stationed at Qatar’s Al-Udeid Air Base in its first foreign deployment. The force, pushed by President Donald Trump, represents the sixth branch of the U.S. military and the first new military service since the creation of the Air Force in 1947.
It has provoked skepticism in Congress, satire on Netflix, and, with its uncannily similar logo, “Star Trek” jokes about intergalactic battles.
Future wars may be waged in outer space, but the Arabian Desert already saw what military experts dub the world’s first “space war” — the 1991 Desert Storm operation to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Today, the U.S. faces new threats in the region from Iran’s missile program and efforts to jam, hack and blind satellites.
“We’re starting to see other nations that are extremely aggressive in preparing to extend conflict into space,” Col. Todd Benson, director of Space Force troops at Al-Udeid, told The Associated Press. “We have to be able to compete and defend and protect all of our national interests.”
In a swearing-in ceremony earlier this month at Al-Udeid, 20 Air Force troops, flanked by American flags and massive satellites, entered Space Force. Soon several more will join the unit of “core space operators” who will run satellites, track enemy maneuvers and try to avert conflicts in space.
“The missions are not new and the people are not necessarily new,” Benson said.
That troubles some American lawmakers who view the branch, with its projected force of 16,000 troops and 2021 budget of $15.4 billion, as a vanity project for Trump ahead of the November presidential election.
Concerns over the weaponization of outer space are decades old. But as space becomes increasingly contested, military experts have cited the need for a space corps devoted to defending American interests.
Threats from global competitors have grown since the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when the U.S. military first relied on GPS coordinates to tell troops where they were in the desert as they pushed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait.
Benson declined to name the “aggressive” nations his airmen will monitor and potentially combat. But the decision to deploy Space Force personnel at Al-Udeid follows months of escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iran.
Hostilities between the two countries, ignited by Trump’s unilateral withdrawal of the U.S. from Iran’s nuclear accord, came to a head in January when U.S. forces killed a top Iranian general. Iran responded by launching ballistic missiles at American soldiers in Iraq.
This spring, Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard launched its first satellite into space, revealing what experts describe as a secret military space program. The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on Iran’s space agency, accusing it of developing ballistic missiles under the cover of a civilian program to set satellites into orbit.
World powers with more advanced space programs, like Russia and China, have made more threatening progress, U.S. officials contend. Last month, Defense Secretary Mark Esper warned that Russia and China were developing weapons that could knock out U.S. satellites, potentially scattering dangerous debris across space and paralyzing cell phones and weather forecasts, as well as American drones, fighter jets, aircraft carriers and even nuclear weapon controllers.
“The military is very reliant on satellite communications, navigation and global missile warning,” said Capt. Ryan Vickers, a newly inducted Space Force member at Al-Udeid.
American troops, he added, use GPS coordinates to track ships passing through strategic Gulf passageways “to make sure they’re not running into international waters of other nations.”
The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which 20% of the world’s oil flows, has been the scene of a series of tense encounters, with Iran seizing boats it claims had entered its waters. One disrupted signal or miscalculation could touch off a confrontation.
For years, Iran has allegedly jammed satellite and radio signals to block foreign-based Farsi media outlets from broadcasting into the Islamic Republic, where radio and television stations are state-controlled.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has warned that commercial aircraft cruising over the Persian Gulf could experience interference and communications jamming from Iran. Ships in the region have also reported “spoofed” communications from unknown entities falsely claiming to be U.S. or coalition warships, according to American authorities.
“It’s not that hard to do, but we’ve seen Iran and other countries become pretty darn efficient at doing it on a big scale,” said Brian Weeden, an Air Force veteran and director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, which promotes peaceful uses of outer space. “There’s a concern Iran could interfere with military broadband communications.”
Responding to questions from the AP, Alireza Miryousefi, a spokesman at Iran’s mission to the United Nations, said “Iran will not tolerate interference in our affairs, and in accordance with international law, will respond to any attacks against our sovereignty.” He added that Iran has faced numerous cyber attacks from the U.S. and Israel.
Failing an international agreement that bars conventional arms, like ballistic missiles, from shooting down space assets, the domain will only become more militarized, said Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. Russia and China have already created space force units and the Revolutionary Guard’s sudden interest in satellite launches has heightened U.S. concerns.
Still, American officials insist the new Space Force deployment aims to secure U.S. interests, not set off an extraterrestrial arms race.
“The U.S. military would like to see a peaceful space,” Benson, the director of Space Force troops stationed in Qatar, said. “Other folks’ behavior is kind of driving us to this point.”
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We continue to look at life during the pandemic and some creative ways people are helping their community.  
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