Exiled pro-democracy activist on being Uyghur during Tiananmen Square protests

In 1989, a young Uyghur named Örkesh Dölet was a student leader in the Tiananmen Square protests. Throughout the protests, Dölet represented students in televised negotiations with Chinese Communist Party leaders. After the massacre, the 21-year-old was put on China's list of most wanted student leaders and so he fled the country. He now lives in exile in Taiwan. 'For every important choices I make in my life, my Uyghur-ness has always came in and played an important role,' he says. 'That we do the right thing, not the safe thing.'

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The Sun

2 hours ago

• The Sun

Trump's shock Iran strikes take us to brink of global conflict and will strengthen Axis of Evil alliance, experts warn

TRUMP'S historic strikes against Iran could push the world to the brink of global conflict, experts have warned. Wounded Iran has vowed to fight on, and at this very moment will be calling upon its allies to gather against the West. 7 7 While Israel has stamped out much of Iran's power in the Middle East, it still has formidable allies with similarly anti-west interests. Experts believe Trump's strikes could force the axis of evil closer together and set in motion a chain of events that embroils more countries in the conflict. Philip Ingram, a global defence expert, told The Sun: 'Iranian ballistic missiles will not reach the United States and therefore to try and respond to the United States attack Iran's going to have to do something different. "It'll bring its axis of evil. That means Iran, Russia, North Korea and China. "We are a couple of feet further up the escalation ladder towards a global conflict." North Korea showed its willingness to get involved with other wars when Kim sent 12,000 troops over to fight on Russia's front line with Ukraine. With Iran increasingly desperate, North Korea could step in and provide military aid such as "missile technology", Ingram said. Russia has been one of Iran's most vocal allies, and has warned all along that regime change would be "unacceptable". The Kremlin said the assassination of Iran's supreme leader would "open the Pandora's box". Ingram said that 'Iran and Russia will join forces to try and cause as much disruption in different countries as possible." Watch Trump hail 'very successful' bombing on Iran's nuke bases Russia is well-versed in the dark arts, and has propagated a campaign of sabotage against the West, so would have plenty to teach Iran. Forcing Iran and Russia closer together is not the only way US strikes could impact on Putin. Ingram said: 'The escalating conflict helps Russia by moving Russia-Ukraine further down the agenda so that people aren't focusing on it. 'It also ties up international geopolitical organisations and politicians in a complex Middle East situation - so again they don't have the capacity to focus on what Russia's doing in Ukraine." Chip Chapman said that the most immediate threat to western allies would be if Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz - which could even see the UK dragged into the conflict. He said: "20 percent of the world's oil runs through the strait. Closing it could have huge implications for the oil price. 'And that's where the Brits may get involved. If the Iranians were to try and close the Strait of Hormuz, there would be a definite ask from the Americans to the Brits." 7 7 Russia would likely back Iran's decision to close the strait, because an increase in oil prices would help fund its activities, Ingram explained. For many years Iran enjoyed considerable power in the Middle East through its proxies across the region. Two of the key players were Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon - but over the past 20 months Israel has seriously crippled them. However, Ingram says the Houthis in Yemen still pose a threat to the world other. He said: "I think we will see a massive uptake in Houthi activity in disrupting international shipping in the Red Sea." Experts have also warned that the strikes could prove a "slippery slope" and commit the US to pursuing more extreme military goals in Iran - such as overthrowing the regime. 7 7 Laura Blumenfeld, a Middle East analyst at the Johns Hopkins School, said: "Beware mission creep, aiming for regime change and democratization campaigns. "You'll find the bones of many failed US moral missions buried in Middle East sands." US-driven regime change would likely drive a wedge further between the West and the Islamic world - as was the case with Iraq - the experts suggest. Ingram said: "If there Ayatollah was killed it could change the whole way the government is set up in Iran, like we had with the fall of the Shah. "Then you whatever comes in next could be worse than what's in now and more polarised." 7 The US strikes could also prove a spark to other flash points around the world - such as the China-Taiwan tensions. Ingram said 'China will likely sit back and wait to see what's happening, to begin with. "Xi Jinping might think the international community is so tied up in the Middle East, that he has a window of opportunity, and he might try and take Taiwan. 'The world is not just a more febrile place, but the potentials for a series of events to happen to take us into a global conflict have just become even more complex to try and analyse. 'We haven't moved away from conflict. We have moved away from a despot regime getting towns on nuclear weapons, but it's not made the world immediately safer. 'What happens over the coming days and weeks will let us understand as to whether we have moved back from the brink of a global conflict or move further forward.'

Reuters

2 hours ago

• Reuters

Taiwan is 'of course' a country, president says in rebuke to China

TAIPEI, June 22 (Reuters) - Taiwan is "of course" a country and China lacks both the historical evidence and legal proof to back up its sovereignty claims, President Lai Ching-te said on Sunday in a strong rebuke to Beijing and its stepped up political and military pressure. China says democratically-governed Taiwan is "sacred" Chinese territory that has belonged to the country since ancient times, and that the island is one of its provinces with no right to be called a state. Lai and his government strongly reject that view, and have offered talks with China multiple times but have been rejected. China calls Lai a "separatist". Giving the first of 10 speeches in a series called "uniting the country", Lai drew on Taiwan's history, including the millennia-long connection of its indigenous people to other Austronesians, like native Hawaiians, to show what he said was Taiwan's separate and distinct development from China. Taiwan's people have a record of opposing invasion, like uprisings against Japan's 1895-1945 colonial rule, and under the last imperial Chinese dynasty, the Qing, Taiwan was only considered a Chinese province for eight years, he added. "Of course Taiwan is a country," he said at a speech to a Taiwan branch of Rotary International, pointing also to its presidential elections. "But China says no, that Taiwan is not a sovereign country." China's Taiwan's Affairs Office did not respond to a request for comment outside of office hours. China says the 1971 United Nations resolution, which took away Taipei's seat in the body and gave it to Beijing, is one of the legal bases of its claims. Lai, who in March called China a "hostile foreign force", said it was "totally wrong" for Beijing to say that U.N. resolution had anything to do with Taiwan's sovereignty as it was only about which government was represented at the body. China's threat to Taiwan is real, added Lai, pointing to its daily military activities around the island. "Taiwan's future can only be decided by its 23 million people - does everyone approve of this?" he said, to a round of applause. The defeated Republic of China government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong's communists, and that remains the island's formal name.

The Guardian

4 hours ago

• The Guardian

Trump's plan to ban US states from AI regulation will ‘hold us back', says Microsoft science chief

Microsoft's chief scientist has warned that Donald Trump's proposed ban on state-level guardrails on artificial intelligence will slow the development of the frontier technology rather than accelerate it. Dr Eric Horvitz, a former technology adviser to Joe Biden, said bans on regulation will 'hold us back' and 'could be at odds with making good progress on not just advancing the science, but in translating it into practice'. The Trump administration has proposed a 10-year ban on US states creating 'any law or regulation limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems'. It is driven in part by White House fears China could otherwise win the race to human-level AI, but also pressure from tech investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, an early investor in Facebook, which argues consumer uses should be regulated rather than research efforts. Its co-founder, the Trump donor Marc Andreessen, said earlier this month that the US was in a two horse race for AI supremacy with China. The US vice-president, JD Vance, recently said: 'If we take a pause, does [China] not take a pause? Then we find ourselves … enslaved to [China]-mediated AI.' Horvitz said he was already concerned about 'AI being leveraged for misinformation and inappropriate persuasion' and for its use 'for malevolent activities, for example, in the biology biological hazard space'. Horvitz's pro-regulation comments came despite reports that Microsoft is part of a Silicon Valley lobbying push with Google, Meta and Amazon, to support the ban on individual US states regulating AI for the next decade which is included in Trump's budget bill which is passing through Congress. Microsoft is part of a lobbying drive to urge the US Senate to enact a decade-long moratorium on individual states introducing their own efforts to legislate, the Financial Times reported last week. The ban has been written into Trump's 'big beautiful bill' that he wants passed by Independence Day on 4 July. Horvitz was speaking at a meeting of the the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence on Monday when he said: 'It's up to us as scientists to communicate to government agencies, especially those right now who might be making statements about no regulation, [that] this is going to hold us back. 'Guidance, regulation … reliability controls are part of advancing the field, making the field go faster in many ways.' Speaking at the same seminar, Stuart Russell, the professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said: 'Why would we deliberately allow the release of a technology which even its creators say has a 10% to 30% chance … of causing human extinction? We would never accept anything close to that level of risk for any other technology.' Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion The apparent contradiction between Microsoft's chief scientist and reports of the company's lobbying effort comes amid rising fears that unregulated AI development could pose catastrophic risks to humanity and is being driven by companies prioritising short-term profit. Microsoft has invested $14bn (£10bn) in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, whose chief executive Sam Altman who this week predicted that: 'In five or 10 years we will have great human robots and they will just walk down the street doing stuff … I think that would be one of the moments that … will feel the strangest.' Predictions of when human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be reached vary from a couple of years to decades. The Meta chief scientist, Yann LeCun, has said AGI could be decades away, while last week his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a $15bn investment in a bid to achieve 'superintelligence'. Microsoft declined to comment.