China treats Uighur kids as ‘orphans’ after parents seized

In this Aug. 30, 2018, photo, security personnel inspect camera equipment of journalists outside the Hotel City Kindness Kindergarten, where Meripet learnt her children are kept in Hotan, in western China's Xinjiang region. (AP)
Updated 22 September 2018
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China treats Uighur kids as ‘orphans’ after parents seized

  • The families say that among these children, 14 are known to be in state-run orphanages and boarding schools

ISTANBUL: Every morning, Meripet wakes up to her nightmare: The Chinese government has turned four of her children into orphans, even though she and their father are alive.
Meripet and her husband left the kids with their grandmother at home in China when they went to nurse Meripet’s sick father in Turkey. But after Chinese authorities started locking up thousands of their fellow ethnic Uighurs for alleged subversive crimes such as travel abroad, a visit became exile.
Then, her mother-in-law was also taken prisoner, and Meripet learned from a friend that her 3- to 8-year-olds had been placed in a de facto orphanage in the Xinjiang region, under the care of the state that broke up her family.
“It’s like my kids are in jail,” Meripet said, her voice cracking. “My four children are separated from me and living like orphans.”
Meripet’s family is among tens of thousands swept up in President Xi Jinping’s campaign to subdue a sometimes restive region, including the internment of more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities that has alarmed a United Nations panel and the US government . Now there is evidence that the government is placing the children of detainees and exiles into dozens of orphanages across Xinjiang.
The orphanages are the latest example of how China is systematically distancing young Muslims in Xinjiang from their families and culture, The Associated Press has found through interviews with 15 Muslims and a review of procurement documents. The government has been building thousands of so-called “bilingual” schools, where minority children are taught in Mandarin and penalized for speaking in their native tongues. Some of these are boarding schools, which Uighurs say can be mandatory for children and, in a Kazakh family’s case, start from the age of 5.
China says the orphanages help disadvantaged children, and it denies the existence of internment camps for their parents. It prides itself on investing millions of yuan in education in Xinjiang to steer people out of poverty and away from terrorism. At a regular news briefing Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the measures taken in Xinjiang were necessary for “stability, development, harmony” and to fight ethnic separatists.
But Uighurs fear that these measures are essentially wiping out their ethnic identity, one child at a time. Experts say what China is doing echoes how white colonialists in the US, Canada and Australia treated indigenous children — policies that have left generations traumatized.
“This is an ethnic group whose knowledge base is being erased,” said Darren Byler, a researcher of Uighur culture at University of Washington. “What we’re looking at is something like a settler colonial situation where an entire generation is lost.”
For Meripet, the loss is agony; it is the absence of her children and the knowledge they are in state custody. A year and a half after leaving home, the 29-year-old mother looked at a photo of a brightly painted building surrounded by barbed wire where her children are believed to be held. She fell silent. And then she wept.
“When I finally see them again, will they even recognize me?” she asked. “Will I recognize them?“

“PROTECTION OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN“
When Xi came to power in 2012, an early challenge to his rule was a surge in violent attacks that killed several hundred people and which Beijing pinned on Uighur separatists. Since then, Xi has overseen the most extensive effort in recent years to quell Xinjiang, appointing in 2016 the former Tibet party boss Chen Quanguo to lead the troubled region bordering Afghanistan.
Chen rolled out unprecedented security measures such as internment camps that hold Muslims without trial and force them to renounce their faith and swear loyalty to the Communist Party. China has described religious extremism as an illness that needs to be cured through what it calls “transformation through education.” Former detainees say one can be thrown into a camp for praying regularly, reading the Qur’an, going abroad or even speaking to someone overseas.
The camps are among the most troubling aspects of Xi’s campaign to assert the party’s dominance over all aspects of Chinese life, which has drawn comparisons with Mao Zedong. Authorities heeding Xi’s call to “Sinicize” religion across the country have shut underground churches , burned Bibles , replaced pictures of Jesus with ones of Xi, and toppled crescents from mosques. The party also has beefed up its ability to track the movements of its 1.4 billion people, with Xinjiang serving as an important testing ground.
In Xinjiang, detention has left countless children without their parents. Most of these families in China cannot be reached by journalists. However, the AP interviewed 14 Uighur families living in Turkey and one Kazakh man in Almaty with a total of 56 children who remain in China.
The families say that among these children, 14 are known to be in state-run orphanages and boarding schools. The whereabouts of the rest are unknown because most of their adult relatives in Xinjiang have been detained.
Some interviewees, like Meripet, requested that they be identified only by their first names because they feared official retaliation against their relatives. Others insisted their full names be used despite the risks, saying they were desperate for their stories to be heard. They pleaded with reporters to track down their families in Xinjiang, and one interviewee pressed a piece of paper into a reporter’s hand with a Chinese address scribbled on it.
The regional government appears to be moving quickly to build centers to house the children of these exiles and of detainees. An AP review of procurement notices in Xinjiang has found that since the start of last year, the government has budgeted more than $30 million (200 million Chinese yuan) to build or expand at least 45 orphanages, known variously as children’s “welfare centers” and “protection centers,” with enough beds to house about 5,000 children.
In July and August alone, the government invited bids for the construction of at least nine centers for the “protection of disadvantaged children” in the Xinjiang city of Hotan and several counties in Kashgar, Aksu and Kizilsu prefectures, inhabited primarily by ethnic minorities. Most orphanages have a minimum of 100 beds mandated by the government, and some are much larger. One notice called for an orphanage in Moyu county with four four-story dormitories, coming to 22,776 square meters in size — nearly as big as four football fields.
These numbers do not include kindergartens and other schools where some children of Uighur detainees are being housed. It’s impossible to tell how many children of detainees end up at these schools because they also serve other children.
Shi Yuqing, a Kashgar civil affairs official, told the AP over the phone that “authorities provide aid and support to everyone in need, whether they’re the children of convicted criminals or people killed in traffic accidents.” But such services may not be welcome. A government report from Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture in June last year acknowledged that relatives were resistant to “handing over” their extended families’ kids to the orphanages because they “lack trust or confidence” in the centers.
A friend told Meripet last November her four children were living in the Hotan City Kindness Kindergarten in southern Xinjiang. The friend said Meripet’s sister-in-law had visited her children and was permitted to take them home for one night only.
The school looks like a house-sized castle, with a bright marigold facade, orange turrets and blue rooftops. Its entrance is blocked by an iron gate and a walled enclosure lined with barbed wire. “We Are Happy and Grateful to the Motherland,” say the red characters emblazoned on one fence.
The principal, who gave only her last name, Ai, told AP reporters that the institution is “just a normal kindergarten.” But the authorities’ anxiety was clear: armed police officers surrounded the reporters’ car minutes after their arrival at the school and ordered them to delete any photos.
Gu Li, a propaganda official for Hotan who also immediately appeared on site, said: “There are really young kids here — some of them may even be orphans whose parents have died.”
A report published this February in the Xinjiang Daily, a party newspaper, called Hotan City Kindness Kindergarten a “free, full-time” kindergarten for children 6 and younger that provides accommodations and clothing to those whose “parents cannot care for them for a variety of reasons.”
“Soon after many of the kids arrived at the school, they grew taller and got fatter, and quickly started using Mandarin to communicate,” the article said. Another state media report in January said $1.24 million (8,482,200 yuan) had been invested in the kindergarten.
Satellite imagery shows that the kindergarten was constructed less than three years ago, just as an initiative was launched to strengthen “bilingual” education in Xinjiang. More than 4,300 bilingual kindergartens were built or renovated last year, according to the government. A report on the project in a state-run regional newspaper said such kindergartens teach children “civilized living habits.”
“The children started educating their parents: your hands are too dirty, your clothes are too dirty, you haven’t brushed your teeth,” the report quoted Achilem Abduwayit, a deputy chief of the Hotan city education bureau, as saying.
Life in an orphanage could have a lasting psychological and cultural impact on children, said James Leibold, an expert on Chinese ethnic policy at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
“You grow up as a ward of the state,” he said. “They’re told to be patriotic citizens, told that the identity and religion of their parents was abnormal, if not radical, and thus needs to be eradicated.”
Meripet has at least an inkling of where her children are. Her brother, a 37-year-old doctor named Aziz, has not heard any news of his three youngest children since his wife was taken to a re-education center in June 2017.
Aziz fled to Turkey more than a year ago after he received a call from his local police station ordering him to report to authorities immediately. More than half his neighbors had already been taken away to re-education centers or prison, he said.
Now the young doctor is often shaken awake by a nightmare in which his kids are huddling at the bottom of a cliff, their faces smudged with dirt, calling to him to hoist them up. Aziz walks for what feels like hours but cannot reach them. He awakens with their cries ringing in his ears.
“If I could, I would choose not to have been born as a Uighur, to not have been born in Xinjiang,” Aziz said. “We are the most unfortunate ethnic group in the world.”

“THEY WON’T BE LIKE US ANYMORE“
The government says all 2.9 million students attending compulsory elementary and junior high school in Xinjiang will receive Mandarin instruction by this month, up from just 39 percent in 2016.
Even preschoolers are steeped in the language. A former teacher at a “bilingual” kindergarten outside Kashgar said all lessons were given in Mandarin and the entirely Uighur student body was banned from speaking Uighur at school. A colleague who used Uighur to explain concepts to students was fired, according to the teacher, who lives in Turkey but asked for anonymity because she fears retribution against family in China.
Like all schools in China, this one immersed children in patriotic education. Kindergarten textbooks were filled with songs like “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China,” the teacher said.
Dilnur, a 35-year-old business student in exile in Istanbul, said officials regularly visited her children’s kindergarten in Kashgar and asked the students if their parents read religious verses at home or participated in other faith-based activities. The questions effectively forced children to spy on their own families. A man was taken away by police after his grandson said in class that he had made a pilgrimage to Makkah, she said.
Her seven-year-old daughter once complained that her throat was sore from chanting party slogans. “Mama, what does it mean to love the motherland?” she asked.
Some bilingual schools are boarding schools, which are not uncommon in China. Xinjiang has long provided voluntary boarding school programs that are seen as coveted opportunities for the best minority students. But several Uighurs asserted that in many cases boarding school was now mandatory for minority children, even though Han Chinese children could choose to continue living at home.
The Xinjiang government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The government has said the tuition-free boarding schools relieve parents of education and living expenses and help raise Mandarin standards, which will make their children more employable.
But Uighurs say they don’t want their culture erased.
“If the kids are forced to speak Mandarin and live like Han Chinese every day, I’m afraid they won’t be like us anymore,” said Meriyem Yusup, whose extended family has four children sent to state-run orphanages in Xinjiang.
Adil Dalelkhan, an ethnic Kazakh sock merchant in exile in Almaty, said that even though his then 5-year-old son could live with relatives, he was forced to stay at his preschool Mondays through Fridays instead. The father called the policy a “terrifying” step toward extinguishing Kazakh culture.
A Uighur businessman in Istanbul, also named Adil, told a similar story. Adil’s son was 9 years old when the school system automatically transferred him to a boarding school. All children of a certain age in their Uighur district were obliged to attend boarding school, Adil said. His son was only permitted to come home on weekends and holidays.
“There were iron bars like we saw in a zoo in Kashgar,” Adil recalled.
Dilnur said her neighbors too were only allowed to visit their kids at boarding school on Wednesday nights, and even then they had to hand them candies through a fence.
“The educational goals are secondary to the political goals,” said Timothy Grose, a professor at Indiana’s Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology who has done research on Xinjiang boarding schools. “They aim to dissolve loyalties to ethnic identity... toward a national identity.”
A government notice posted in February in Kashgar states that children in the fourth grade and above with parents in detention must be sent to boarding school immediately — even if one parent is still at home. Students must be instilled with socialist values, the notice said, and be taught to “be grateful for education and love and repay the motherland,” and avoid the “75 types of behavior that show religious extremism.” Such behavior ranges from calling for ‘holy war’ to growing beards and quitting smoking and drinking for religious reasons, the government says.
China insists it guarantees the freedom of religion, but Uighurs view the Chinese education system as a threat to it. In schools, children are taught to respect teachers more than their parents and may criticize their parents’ Islamic faith, according to Byler.
“The students, children, might question them and say, you know, this is backward, this is extremist,” he said.
The Kashgar notice also said schools being modified to house students should place no more than 24 beds in one room--an indication of the program’s size. In 2015, a sprawling new boarding school complex was completed on the outskirts of Kashgar, with the capacity to house 23,400 students and teachers, according to the state-run China Daily.
Abdurehim Imin, a writer from Kashgar, said a friend told him his 14-year-old daughter was sent to a bilingual school in 2015 after his wife was arrested, ostensibly for receiving a gift of olive oil he sent her. When AP reporters visited what was likely his daughter’s school, Peyzawat County No. 4 High School, a local plainclothes officer who identified herself as Gu Li said it was a bilingual boarding school. She said that while Uighur students had to study Mandarin, there were also Han Chinese students studying Uighur.
Yet the exterior of the school bore bright red lettering that said: “Please speak Mandarin upon entering the schoolyard.” Barbed wire around the campus extended for miles, with rows of tall apartment buildings marked as dormitories.
A historian at the University of Sydney, David Brophy, said the move toward boarding schools brings to mind Aboriginal children in Australia who were forcibly separated from their families in the 1900s and placed into state-run institutions that discouraged indigenous identity.
“Should China’s policies continue in this direction, we may be talking about a Chinese version of the Stolen Generation,” he said.

’AN ETERNAL TORTURE’
Since coming to Istanbul by himself in 2014, 42-year-old Imin, the writer, has led a solitary existence in a dimly-lit apartment with bare walls and stacks of writings. For the first year, he avoided looking at photos of his children.
“We are dying every day,” Imin said. “We cannot see our kids, we cannot see our parents. This is an eternal torture.”
In December, he was sent a photo of his daughter wearing a traditional Chinese “qipao.” He deleted the picture because he could not bear to look at it, he said, and could not sleep for nearly a month.
Imin also has four other children in Xinjiang. Last summer, a friend who had visited his home in Kashgar told Imin that two of his kids were killed in a traffic accident while his wife was in jail. He doesn’t know where the other two are.
Feeling helpless, he wrote verse after verse in mourning:
“I will go...to tear down your dark, endless night...
I will go, to embrace again my hometown...
I will go, bearing my sorrow to your tomb.”
Elsewhere in Istanbul, Meripet’s house was quiet during Eid Al-Adha, a Muslim holy festival heralded by large family reunions. In a room at the end of the hall, there rose the distant laughter of relatives’ children, children who were not hers.
She flipped through the photographs which she keeps in her purse: Abdurahman, the oldest; Adile, her only daughter; and her two younger sons, Muhemmed and Abdulla. Meripet has a fifth child, a son named Abduweli who was born in Turkey. She calls him “my only light.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I will go crazy from this pain,” she says. “I have only been able to keep living because I know there is hope — I know one day I will see my children again.”


US to revoke all South Sudan visas over failure to accept repatriation of citizens: Rubio

Updated 9 sec ago
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US to revoke all South Sudan visas over failure to accept repatriation of citizens: Rubio

  • South Sudan had failed to respect the principle that every country must accept the return of its citizens in a timely manner, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said
  • Washington “will be prepared to review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation,” he added

WASHINGTON: The US said on Saturday it would revoke all visas held by South Sudanese passport holders over South Sudan’s failure to accept the return of its repatriated citizens, at a time when many in Africa fear that country could return to civil war.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has taken aggressive measures to ramp up immigration enforcement, including the repatriation of people deemed to be in the US illegally.
The administration has warned that countries that do not swiftly take back their citizens will face consequences, including visa sanctions or tariffs.
South Sudan had failed to respect the principle that every country must accept the return of its citizens in a timely manner when another country, including the US, seeks to remove them, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
“Effective immediately, the United States Department of State is taking actions to revoke all visas held by South Sudanese passport holders and prevent further issuance to prevent entry into the United States by South Sudanese passport holders,” Rubio said.
“We will be prepared to review these actions when South Sudan is in full cooperation,” Rubio said.
It is time for South Sudan’s transitional government to “stop taking advantage of the United States,” he said.
South Sudan’s embassy in Washington did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
African Union mediators arrived in South Sudan’s capital Juba this week for talks aimed at averting a new civil war in the country after its First Vice President Riek Machar was placed under house arrest last week.
South Sudan President Salva Kiir’s government has accused Machar, a longtime rival who led rebel forces during a 2013-18 war that killed hundreds of thousands, of trying to stir up a new rebellion.

Machar’s detention followed weeks of fighting in the northern Upper Nile state between the military and the White Army militia. Machar’s forces were allied with the White Army during the civil war but deny any current links.
The 2013-18 war was contested largely along ethnic lines, with fighters from the Dinka, the country’s largest group, lining up behind Kiir, and those from the Nuer, the second-largest group, supporting Machar.

 


Panama wants ‘respectful’ ties with US amid canal threats

Updated 06 April 2025
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Panama wants ‘respectful’ ties with US amid canal threats

  • The United States and China are the two biggest users of the Panama Canal, which handles five percent of global maritime trade, giving it vital economic and geostrategic importance

PANAMA CITY: Panama hopes to maintain a “respectful” relationship with the United States, even as President Donald Trump has repeated threats to retake the Panama Canal, Foreign Minister Javier Martinez-Acha said Saturday.
His comments came ahead of a visit next week by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a trip made more urgent against the backdrop of Trump’s threats and his allegations of Chinese interference in the canal.
“We discussed illegal migration, organized crime, drug trafficking and (other issues),” Martinez-Acha wrote on X of a call Friday with US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. “It was a cordial and constructive exchange.”
“I reiterated that all cooperation from Panama will take place under the framework of our constitution, our laws, and the Canal Neutrality Treaty,” he wrote. “Relations with the US must remain respectful, transparent and mutually beneficial.”
The US State Department said Landau had “expressed gratitude for Panama’s cooperation in halting illegal immigration and working with the United States to secure a nearly 98 percent decrease in illegal immigration through the Darien jungle,” an arduous path northward followed by many migrants.
The two officials also discussed the sale last month by the Hong Kong company CK Hutchison to giant US asset manager BlackRock of its concession in ports at either end of the Panama Canal, Martinez-Acha added.
Panama’s comptroller has been conducting an audit of Hutchison since January.
Landau “recognized Panama’s actions in curbing malign Chinese Communist Party influence,” the State Department said.
The deal was set to close on April 2 but has been held up as Chinese regulators pursue an investigation.
The United States and China are the two biggest users of the Panama Canal, which handles five percent of global maritime trade, giving it vital economic and geostrategic importance. It was inaugurated by the United States in 1914 and has been in Panamanian hands since 1999.


Tens of thousands of Spaniards march across the country to protest the growing housing crisis

Updated 06 April 2025
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Tens of thousands of Spaniards march across the country to protest the growing housing crisis

  • The housing crisis has hit particularly hard in Spain, where there is a strong tradition of home ownership and scant public housing for rent

BARCELONA, Spain: Tens of thousands of Spaniards marched in protests held across the European country on Saturday in anger over high housing costs with no relief in sight.
Government authorities said that 15,000 marched in Madrid, while organizers said 10 times that many took to the streets of the capital. In Barcelona, the city hall said 12,000 people took part in the protest, while organizers claimed over 100,000 did.
The massive demonstration of social angst that is a major concern for Spain’s left-wing government was organized by housing activists and backed by Spain’s main labor unions.
The housing crisis has hit particularly hard in Spain, where there is a strong tradition of home ownership and scant public housing for rent. Rents have been driven up by increased demand. Buying a home has become unaffordable for many, with market pressures and speculation driving up prices, especially in big cities and coastal areas.
A generation of young people say they have to stay with their parents or spend big just to share an apartment, with little chance of saving enough to one day purchase a home. High housing costs mean even those with traditionally well-paying jobs are struggling to make ends meet.
“I’m living with four people and still, I allocate 30 or 40 percent of my salary to rent,” said Mari Sánchez, a 26-year-old lawyer in Madrid. “That doesn’t allow me to save. That doesn’t allow me to do anything. It doesn’t even allow me to buy a car. That’s my current situation, and the one many young people are living through.”
Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez said on X that “I share the demand of the numerous people who have marched today: that homes are for living in and not for speculating.”
Lack of public housing
The average rent in Spain has almost doubled in the last 10 years. The price per square meter rose from 7.2 euros ($7.90) in 2014 to 13 euros last year, according to real estate website Idealista. The increase is bigger in Madrid and Barcelona.
Incomes have failed to keep up, especially for younger people in a country with chronically high unemployment.
Spain does not have the public housing that other European nations have invested in to cushion struggling renters from a market that is pricing them out.
Spain is near the bottom end of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries with public housing for rent making up under 2 percent of all available housing. The OECD average is 7 percent. In France it is is 14 percent, Britain 16 percent and the Netherlands 34 percent.
Angry renters point to instances of international hedge funds buying up properties, often with the aim of renting them to foreign tourists. The question has become so politically charged that Barcelona’s city government pledged last year to phase out all its 10,000 permits for short-term rentals, many of them advertised on platforms like Airbnb, by 2028.
Marchers in Madrid on Saturday chanted “Get Airbnb out of our neighborhoods” and held up signs against short-term rentals. In Barcelona, someone carried a sign reading “I am not leaving, vampire,” apparently in a message to would-be real estate speculator seeking to drive him out of his home.
Authorities under pressure
The central government’s biggest initiative for curbing the cost of housing is a rent cap mechanism it has offered to regional authorities, based on a price index established by the housing ministry. The government says the measure has slightly reduced rents in Barcelona, one of the few areas it has been applied.
But government measures have not proven enough to stop protests over the past two years. Experts say the situation likely won’t improve anytime soon.
“This is not the first, nor will it be the last, (housing protest) given the severity of the housing crisis,” Ignasi Martí, professor with the Esade business school and head of its Dignified Housing Observatory, said in an email.
“We saw this with the financial crisis (of 2008-2012) when (a protest movement) lasted until there was a certain economic recovery and a reduction in the social tension,” Marti added.


Protesters tee off against Trump and Musk in ‘Hands Off!’ rallies across the US

Updated 06 April 2025
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Protesters tee off against Trump and Musk in ‘Hands Off!’ rallies across the US

  • Over 1,200 “Hands Off!” demonstrations were planned by more than 150 groups
  • Trump chided for “tearing this country apart” as he goes golfing amid tariff turmoil

Opponents of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk rallied across the US on Saturday to protest the administration’s actions on government downsizing, the economy, human rights and other issues.
More than 1,200 “Hands Off!” demonstrations were planned by more than 150 groups, including civil rights organizations, labor unions, LBGTQ+ advocates, veterans and elections activists. The protest sites included the National Mall in Washington, D.C., state capitols and other locations in all 50 states.
Protesters assailed the Trump administration’s moves to fire thousands of federal workers, close Social Security Administration field offices, effectively shutter entire agencies, deport immigrants, scale back protections for transgender people and cut federal funding for health programs.
Musk, a Trump adviser who owns Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has played a key role in government downsizing as the head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. He says he is saving taxpayers billions of dollars.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign advocacy group, spoke at the Washington protest, criticizing the Trump administration’s treatment of the LBGTQ+ community.
“The attacks that we’re seeing, they’re not just political. They are personal, y’all,” she said. “They’re trying to ban our books, they’re slashing HIV prevention funding, they’re criminalizing our doctors, our teachers, our families and our lives. This is Donald Trump’s America and I don’t want it y’all. We don’t want this America, y’all. We want the America we deserve, where dignity, safety and freedom belong not to some of us, but to all of us.”

Thousands of people marched in New York City’s midtown Manhattan. In Massachusetts thousands more gathered on Boston Common holding signs including “Hands off our democracy,” “Hands off our Social Security” and “Diversity equity inclusion makes America strong. Hands off!”
In Ohio, hundreds rallied in the rain at the Statehouse in Columbus.
Roger Broom, 66, a retiree from Delaware County, Ohio, said at the Columbus rally that he used to be a Reagan Republican but has been turned off by Trump.
“He’s tearing this country apart,” Broom said. “It’s just an administration of grievances.”
Hundreds of people also demonstrated in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, a few miles from Trump’s golf course in Jupiter, where he spent the morning at the club’s Senior Club Championship. People lined both sides of PGA Drive, encouraging cars to honk and chanting slogans against Trump.
Archer Moran from Port St. Lucie, Florida, said, “They need to keep their hands off of our Social Security.”
“The list of what they need to keep their hands off of is too long,” Moran said. “And it’s amazing how soon these protests are happening since he’s taken office.”
The president plans to go golfing again Sunday, according to the White House.
Asked about the protests, the White House said in a statement that “President Trump’s position is clear: he will always protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries. Meanwhile, the Democrats’ stance is giving Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare benefits to illegal aliens, which will bankrupt these programs and crush American seniors.”
Activists have staged nationwide demonstrations against Trump or Musk multiple times since Trump returned to office. But the opposition movement has yet to produce a mass mobilization like the Women’s March in 2017, which brought thousands of women to Washington, D.C., after Trump’s first inauguration, or the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted in multiple cities after George Floyd’s killing in 2020.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, protesters said they were supporting a variety of causes, from Social Security and education to immigration and women’s reproductive rights.
“Regardless of your party, regardless of who you voted for, what’s going on today, what’s happening today is abhorrent,” said Britt Castillo, 35, of Charlotte. “It’s disgusting and as broken as our current system might be, the way that the current administration is going about trying to fix things — it is not the way to do it. They’re not listening to the people.”
“All they’re doing is making sure that they have a parachute for them and their rich friends, and everybody else here that lives here — that makes the gears turn for this country — are just screwed at the end of the day,” she said.
 


US starts collecting Trump’s new 10 percent tariff, smashing global trade norms

Updated 06 April 2025
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US starts collecting Trump’s new 10 percent tariff, smashing global trade norms

  • Trump’s tariffs impact global markets, causing $5 trillion loss in S&P 500 value
  • Exemptions include crude oil, pharmaceuticals and semiconductors

WASHINGTON/JUPITER, Florida: US customs agents began collecting President Donald Trump’s unilateral 10 percent tariff on all imports from many countries on Saturday, with higher levies on goods from 57 larger trading partners due to start next week.
The initial 10 percent “baseline” tariff paid by US importers took effect at US seaports, airports and customs warehouses at 12:01 a.m. ET (0401 GMT), ushering in Trump’s full rejection of the post-World War Two system of mutually agreed tariff rates.
“This is the single biggest trade action of our lifetime,” said Kelly Ann Shaw, a trade lawyer at Hogan Lovells and former White House trade adviser during Trump’s first term.
Shaw told a Brookings Institution event on Thursday that she expected the tariffs to evolve over time as countries seek to negotiate lower rates. “This is a pretty seismic and significant shift in the way that we trade with every country on earth,” she added.

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Trump’s Wednesday tariff announcement shook global stock markets, wiping out $5 trillion in value for S&P 500 index companies by Friday’s close, a record two-day decline. Driven by recession fears, prices for oil and commodities plunged, while investors fled to the safety of government bonds.
Among the countries first hit with the 10 percent tariff were Australia, Britain, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina and Saudi Arabia despite their having goods trade deficits with the US last year. White House officials have said many countries would run larger deficits with the US if their policies were fairer.
A US Customs and Border Protection bulletin provided a 51-day grace period for cargoes loaded or in transit to the US before 12:01 a.m. ET Saturday. These cargoes need to arrive by May 27 to avoid the 10 percent duty.
Trump’s higher “reciprocal” tariff rates of 11 percent to 50 percent are due to take effect on Wednesday at 12:01 a.m. ET. European Union imports will face a 20 percent tariff, while Chinese goods will be hit with a 34 percent tariff, bringing Trump’s total new levies on China to 54 percent.
Beijing on Saturday said, “The market has spoken” in rejecting Trump’s tariffs. China applied a slew of countermeasures, including extra levies of 34 percent on all US goods and export curbs on some rare earth minerals.
“China has been hit much harder than the USA, not even close,” Trump said on Saturday on social media. “THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic.”
Shortly after posting the comment, Trump was spotted arriving at his Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, reading a New York Post article covering China’s retaliation to US tariffs and the stock market fall.

Israel, Taiwan, Vietnam
“A trade war is in no one’s interest. We must stand united and resolute to protect our citizens and our businesses,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in post on X.
Some world leaders hoped to strike a deal with Trump and avert economic fallout while others weighed countermeasures.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was expected to visit the White House on Monday, sources said, to discuss the new 17 percent tariff on Israel. Media reported Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba of Japan, which faces a 24 percent levy, was seeking a telephone conversation with Trump.
Vietnam, which benefited from the shift of US supply chains away from China after Trump’s first-term trade war with Beijing, agreed on Friday to discuss a deal with the US after Trump announced a 46 percent tariff on Vietnamese imports.
The head of Taiwan’s National Security Council was in Washington for talks that were expected to include the tariffs, a source said. Taiwan President Lai Ching-te huddled with tech executives on Saturday to discuss how to respond to the 32 percent duty imposed on its products.
Italian Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti warned on Saturday against imposing retaliatory tariffs on the United States, saying at a business forum near Milan that doing so could cause damage.
US billionaire Elon Musk, a close Trump adviser, told a political event in Italy by video on Saturday that he hoped to see complete freedom of trade between the United States and Europe, which he described as “a zero tariff situation.”
Canada and Mexico were exempt from Trump’s latest duties but still face a 25 percent tariff imposed recently on goods that do not comply with rules of origin under a North America trade accord.
While Trump’s order exempted 1,000 product categories from the new tariffs such pharmaceuticals, uranium and semiconductors, the administration is considering new duties on some of them.