HONG KONG—The fatal beating of a pet corgi by epidemic prevention workers disinfecting a residential building linked to a Covid-19 outbreak in southeastern China has sparked outrage in China, leading some pet owners and animal rights activists to question the extent of China’s stringent pandemic-control measures.
On Friday, the corgi’s owner shared security footage showing her dog cowering behind a table as two people wearing hazmat suits walk toward it, with one brandishing an iron rod. As the two workers step past the dog’s cow-print bed, one of them hits the dog in the face with the rod as it tries to escape to the other room, after which it runs out of the frame.
said the FBI and Haitian police are in contact with the kidnappers and seeking the release of the missionaries, abducted last weekend just outside the capital Port-au-Prince by a gang called 400 Mawozo.
Among the missionaries are five children, Mr. Quitel said, one an 8-month baby and the others 3, 6, 14 and 15 years old.
President Biden has been briefed, White House press secretary
Jen Psaki
said Monday, and the FBI will help Haitian officials investigate the kidnapping and try to negotiate a release.
“The FBI is part of a coordinated U.S. government effort to get the U.S. citizens involved to safety,” she said.
Mr. Quitel said negotiations could take weeks.
“We are trying to get them released without paying any ransom,” said Mr. Quitel. “This is the first course of action. Let’s be honest: When we give them that money, that money is going to be used for more guns and more munitions.”
He said Haiti’s authorities are seeking an outcome similar to what followed the abduction in early April of a group of Catholic priests and nuns by the same gang. The five priests, two nuns and three of their relatives were released at the end of the month. Ransom was paid for just two of the priests, Mr. Quitel said.
The headquarters of Christian Aid Ministries in Berlin, Ohio, on Monday.
Photo:
KRIS MAHER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“That would be the best outcome,” he said.
Mr. Quitel said the missionaries, members of Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, are held in a safe house right outside Croix-des-Bouquets, the suburb of Port-au-Prince controlled by 400 Mawazo and near where they were kidnapped by heavily armed men around midday on Saturday.
Kidnappings in the impoverished country, including targeting foreigners, have jumped in recent months amid the political chaos after the July assassination of President
Jovenel Moïse.
Gangs control an increasing swath of the chronically unstable country.
Port-au-Prince came to a standstill on Monday after a national transportation union launched a strike supported by everyone from bank employees to human-rights organizations to protest the surge of kidnappings and lack of security.
Haitians in the city said schools, banks, restaurants and supermarkets were closed and nearby roads blocked by union members and ordinary citizens angry at the violence.
Changeux Mehu, the leader of the transportation union, said the strike could continue on Tuesday to pressure Prime Minister
Ariel Henry’s
government to improve security.
“If the prime minister can’t fulfill our demands, we will call on him to resign,” said Mr. Mehu. “We want the end of insecurity and the end of the kidnappings.”
The gang, 400 Mawozo, has increasingly turned to kidnapping for ransom in recent months, according to Haitian officials. Earlier this year, it kidnapped five priests and two nuns, including French nationals, who were held for three weeks before being released. It is unknown if ransom was paid.
Mawozo means “from the countryside” in Haitian Creole, reflecting the gang’s roots in the eastern district of Croix-des-Bouquets, where they began their activities by stealing cattle before moving into car theft and, more recently, kidnappings for ransom, according to Gédéon Jean of the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights, a Port-au-Prince-based organization that tracks kidnappings in Haiti.
The Christian Aid Ministries headquarters was closed on Monday as a result of the kidnapping of its missionaries in Haiti.
Photo:
Julie Carr Smyth/Associated Press
The Christian charity, which was founded by members of the Amish and Mennonite sects, said in a statement on Monday that Haitian and U.S. officials were aware of the situation and working to resolve it. “We continue to monitor the situation closely and are in earnest prayer,” it said.
At the group’s headquarters in Berlin, Ohio, in a picturesque region of farms and Amish shops catering to tourists, the doors to the lobby were locked Monday and a sign said that it was closed as a result of the kidnapping and asking for prayers.
Wanda Cross, a 24-year-old Mennonite who lives near Minerva, Ohio, delivered donated clothes to the Christian Aid Ministries’ headquarters Monday.
Ms. Cross, who was born in Haiti and adopted by a Mennonite family in the U.S., said she was shocked to learn of the kidnappings, and that she knew one couple from Oregon.
“It’s very, very sad,” she said. “It makes me want to just go there and talk to these gangs.”
Ms. Cross said she visited her home country in April during what she described as a lull in the unrest there to see her birth mother and to visit a school. Two days after she returned to the U.S. in April, she said she learned of kidnappings at the time in the same areas in Haiti that she had visited.
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Although Christian Aid Ministries is based in Berlin, most of the people on board the bus were from other Mennonite communities around the country, according to leaders in the local Amish and Mennonite community. One is believed to be from southern Ontario, Canada, which has a large Mennonite community.
All of the kidnap victims are Mennonites and not Amish, said Marcus Yoder, executive director of the Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin.
Both Mennonites and Amish hold many beliefs in common, such as adult baptism, simplicity and following the teachings of Jesus, but the Mennonites drive cars and have electricity in their homes, unlike the Amish, who typically don’t.
Christian Aid Ministries was started in 1981 as an informal charity, shipping Christmas bundles and other items to Christians in Eastern Europe, and later created a formal organization called Christian Aid to Romania, focused on sending items to Romanian orphanages, according to Steve Nolt, senior scholar and professor of history at the Young Center at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa.
In early 1988, Christian Aid to Romania started sending donations to Nicaragua and Haiti, building on Amish-Mennonite mission contacts in those two countries, he said, and later to Liberia. The organization’s name then changed from Christian Aid to Romania to Christian Aid Ministries.
Haiti is one of about a dozen countries where Christian Aid Ministries has expatriate staff on the ground year round with local partners, said Dr. Nolt. He said there are several Mennonite organizations doing work in Haiti, but they tend to work independently, coordinating with local officials, rather than other Mennonite organizations.
—Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington, D.C., contributed to this article.
Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com, Juan Montes at juan.montes@wsj.com and Clare Ansberry at clare.ansberry@wsj.com
LinkedIn said it would shut the version of its professional-networking site that operates in China, marking the end of the last major American social-media network operating openly in the country.
LinkedIn, in a statement Thursday, said that it made the decision after “facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.”
In March, China’s internet regulator told LinkedIn officials to better regulate its content and gave them 30 days to do so, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent months, LinkedIn notified several China-focused human-right activists, academics and journalists that their profiles were being blocked in China, saying they contained prohibited content.
LinkedIn said it would replace its Chinese service, which restricts some content to comply with local government demands, with a job-board service lacking social-media features, such as the ability to share opinions and news stories.
LinkedIn’s exit is the latest chapter in the struggle Western internet companies have faced operating in China, which has some of the world’s most stringent censorship rules.
Twitter Inc.
and
Facebook Inc.’s
platforms have been blocked since 2009.
Alphabet Inc.’s
Google left in 2010 after declining to censor results on its search engine. The chat messenger app Signal and audio discussion app Clubhouse were also blocked this year.
Cars today offer high-tech features and gather troves of data to train algorithms. As China steps up controls over new technologies, WSJ looks at the risks for Tesla and other global brands that are now required to keep data within the country. Screenshot: Tesla China
Savvy internet users in China can still access these Western services using workarounds such as virtual private networks, or VPNs, but many people don’t use them.
LinkedIn entered China in 2014 after making rare concessions to abide by local censorship rules. Microsoft agreed to buy the platform two years later. In 2014, then-LinkedIn boss
Jeff Weiner
said that while the company supported freedom of expression, offering a localized version of its service in China meant adhering to local censorship requirements—a view the company has since repeated.
In the Thursday statement, LinkedIn said that after seven years of operating in China it had “not found the same level of success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed.”
Microsoft has had a difficult relationship with China, where it battled for years against software piracy.
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Earlier this year, the software giant said a Chinese hacking group thought to have government backing was targeting previously unknown security flaws in an email product used by businesses. Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is also available in China, drew controversy earlier this year after it blocked the iconic “Tank Man” image linked to the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre not just in China, but also for its U.S. users. The company blamed “accidental human error” and restored the image.
LinkedIn was one of the few bright spots Microsoft had in China, with more than 50 million users in the country. Even so, the platform had come under greater scrutiny from regulators this year. In May, Microsoft was the only foreign firm among 105 apps called out by China’s internet regulator for “improper data collection,” with both LinkedIn and Bing named on the list.
Microsoft President
Brad Smith
told journalists in September that China accounted for less than 2% of the technology company’s revenue, and that percentage has been declining for the past few years.
China’s Corporate Crackdown
Write to Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com and Liza Lin at Liza.Lin@wsj.com
This week, she started taking a taxi to avoid reprisals from the Taliban, who once banned women from driving. It didn’t help. On the second day of the Taliban takeover, a Taliban gunman dragged the doctor, who didn’t want to use her full name, out of the taxi and whipped her for filming the chaos surrounding the evacuations at the Kabul airport through her window.
“I cried the whole way home,” she said.
Since seizing control of Afghanistan, the Taliban have sought to portray themselves as more moderate than when they were last in power in the 1990s, when their hard-line interpretation of Sunni Islam and their treatment of women helped make them a pariah state.
While the Taliban have publicly pledged to respect women’s rights within the limits of Islam, the group hasn’t elaborated on their own reading of it, or made specific promises. Interpretations of Islamic law vary widely, and the possible range of restrictions are causing many inside and outside Afghanistan to fear the worst for women’s freedoms.
In the first big test of Covid- 19 vaccines during a Covid-19 surge, places with higher vaccination rates are dodging the worst outcomes so far, while cases and hospitalizations surge in less-vaccinated areas.
There are more tests yet to come, including when cold weather forces people in the well-vaccinated Northeast back indoors. But as the highly contagious Delta strain tears through the country, the trends thus far suggest vaccines can turn Covid-19 into a less dangerous, more manageable disease.
“Vaccines definitely make a difference,” said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows sharp geographic divides in vaccination and hospitalization levels, with every state that has an above-average vaccine rate showing below-average hospitalizations, including in well-vaccinated New England. In the South, meanwhile, fewer people are vaccinated on average and hospitalization rates are climbing faster.
The Delta-driven surge is unlike its predecessors in the U.S. because the variant spreads more easily and because it is confronting a partially vaccinated population. The U.S. needed an extra month to reach President Biden’s goal of getting 70% of adults at least one shot by July 4. While vaccination rates are picking up, most states remain behind that mark.
OTTAWA—A third indigenous community in Canada says it has discovered unmarked graves near the site of a former Catholic-run residential school for indigenous children, bringing the total number made public in roughly a month to more than 1,000.
The discovery comes on the eve of Canada’s national day and is likely to add to a somber mood across the country as more evidence emerges of Canada’s history of mistreating indigenous peoples. Some communities have canceled Canada Day celebrations, citing the discovery of the graves.
“It’s going to be a day where, yes, we will celebrate, but we will mostly reflect on the work that we all have to do as individuals and institutions to be better, to be more like the country that we like to imagine we are,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday.
The Lower Kootenay Band, a member band of the Ktunaxa Nation, said it was informed of the discovery of 182 unmarked graves by another member band, the aqam. It said the aqam community used ground-penetrating radar to search an area close to the former St. Eugene’s residential school, which operated between 1890 and 1970 near the city of Cranbrook, British Columbia, roughly 40 miles north of the Montana border.
The chief of the aqam band, Joe Pierre Jr., said Wednesday that the band would provide more information as soon as it could.
TOKYO—Japan’s foreign minister called on his Chinese counterpart to take action to improve human-rights conditions for Uyghurs and stop a crackdown in Hong Kong, according to an official Japanese account of a call between the officials.
The unusually strong message from Tokyo comes shortly before Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga travels to the U.S. for a summit with President Biden on April 16.
Japan is typically wary of angering Beijing, which is its largest trading partner. Tokyo is a close ally of Washington but didn’t join the U.S. and several other nations in March in imposing sanctions on China over its repression of its mostly Muslim Uyghur majority.
During the 90-minute phone call on Monday, Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi also raised concerns with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi about the continued presence of armed Chinese coast guard vessels around islands in the East China Sea controlled by Tokyo but claimed by Beijing.
In a statement after the call, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Mr. Wang objected to Japan’s interference in matters involving the Xinjiang region, where rights groups have alleged repression of Uyghurs, and Hong Kong and urged Japan to respect China’s internal affairs.
Sarah Mahalchick and her future husband talked on one of their first dates about wanting to adopt. There were lots of children out there who needed parents, they told each other from the start.
But when they were ready to expand their family, they opted for fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization. It seemed to make sense: Ms. Mahalchick’s employer would pay for a large chunk of the treatments through her health insurance; it offered almost no help on adoption.
Fertility benefits are becoming almost trendy at blue-chip companies, with more firms offering to help with the costs of IVF and egg freezing. But in many cases, companies that offer fertility benefits give no financial assistance to employees who want to adopt, and when they do their adoption benefits are often much less generous.
Estimates on how many companies offer fertility or adoption benefits are fuzzy. Most employers give neither. But the gap is clear.
The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that as of 2018, 27% of employers offered some form of infertility coverage and 11% offered adoption assistance. FertilityIQ, a website that offers courses and other information on family building, regularly scours benefit disclosures from thousands of employers. In a report released Saturday, it calculates that only one in five companies that offer fertility coverage also offer adoption assistance.
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil—Brazil is in the throes of a battle against the new Covid-19 variant from the Amazon that threatens to send shock waves across the globe.
Home to less than 3% of the world’s population, Brazil currently accounts for almost a third of the daily global deaths from Covid-19, driven by the new variant. More than 300,000 have died, and daily deaths now top 3,000, a toll suffered only by the far more populous U.S.
“We’re in the trenches here, fighting a war,” said Andréia Cruz, a 42-year-old emergency-ward nurse in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In the past three weeks alone, the surrounding state of Rio Grande do Sul has seen nearly 5,000 people die from Covid-19, more than in the final three months of last year.
The spread of the virus in Brazil threatens to turn this country of 213 million into a global public-health hazard. The so-called P.1 strain, present in more than 20 countries and identified in New York last week, is up to 2.2 times more contagious and as much as 61% more able to reinfect people than previous versions of the coronavirus, according to a recent study.
The P.1 is now responsible for the majority of new infections in Brazil, with many doctors here saying they are seeing more young and otherwise healthy patients falling ill. About 30% of people dying from Covid-19 are now under 60, compared with an average of about 26% during Brazil’s previous peak between June and August, according to official figures analyzed by The Wall Street Journal.
FLUSHING, N.Y.—Before sunset Monday, a few dozen Asian-Americans outfitted in neon vests and jackets combed the streets of this New York City neighborhood.
They weren’t police officers. They were students, retail workers and retirees equipped with little more than a cellphone in the event they came across someone being harassed or attacked. Their mission: to stop would-be attackers from hurting other Asians, whether it be by calling the police for help or stepping in themselves.
“It’s made me feel sick,” said volunteer Wan Chen, 37, of the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes around the country. “So this is the time we need to speak up and try our best to help. If anyone tries to do anything, maybe they’ll think twice.”
Volunteer groups such as this one have sprung up around the U.S., patrolling the streets of Asian communities from New York City to Oakland, Calif. They have multiple goals: to escort individuals worried about their safety where they need to go, check in on community members, and if needed, intervene if they see someone being harassed.
Cities around the country have seen upticks in hate crimes against Asians since the start of the pandemic. One analysis conducted by researchers at California State University, San Bernardino, found hate crimes targeting Asians in 16 of the largest U.S. cities increased 149% between 2019 and 2020. Over the same period, overall reports of hate crimes declined by 7%, the researchers found.
