The Times - UK (2022-05-25)

the times | Wednesday May 25 2022 2GM 33

Trump candidate tells

black rival ‘Go back

where you came from’

Page 34

night of a 2-1 home defeat that ended

Avellino’s bid for promotion to the

second division.

Giovanni D’Agostino, the son of the

club’s chairman, had given his views on

the failure to win promotion at a post-

match press conference.

“It’s easy to see the real culprits are

the players,” he said. “They haven’t

shown they are worthy of wearing this

shirt. I don’t wish to be misunderstood

but the situation needs to be unlivable

for some of [the players] now. Maybe

the piazza [fans] can help us.”

D’Agostino said the club had hitherto

protected the players from the fans.

Two men, aged 22 and 30, were ar-

rested by the police. A woman who was

with them had yet to be identified.

“full-length Superman booths” had

been saved for posterity. All four are on

the Upper West Side, so Clark Kent, if

he were still working in the midtown

skyscraper that housed the offices of

the Daily Planet in the Superman films,

cember 2012. Murphy issued a call to

action to his colleagues, asking, “Why

are you here?” if not to prevent further

atrocities.

“This only happens in this country

and nowhere else,” he said.

Murphy added: “I think everybody

here is going to be shaken to the core by

this. I have no idea how a community

deals with this. There’s no way to do this

well. Your community is never, ever the

same after this.”

Uvalde Memorial Hospital said

earlier that 13 children had been taken

there by ambulance or bus, and another

hospital reported that a 66-year-old

woman had been admitted in a critical

condition.

It was not immediately clear how

many people, in addition to the dead,

were injured in the shooting.

Following the shooting, a message on

the school’s website told parents not to

attempt to pick up their children and

New York’s “last” public payphone, off

Times Square, was taken to a museum

Footballer stripped by fans

‘wasn’t fit to wear the shirt’

Italy

Tom Kington Rome

New York says goodbye to last payphone

riages had given way to cars, and

long-distance travel had been revolu-

tionised by the miracle of aviation, so

payphones were giving way to

“high-speed wi-fi kiosks”, he said. The

kiosks offer charging for mobile phones

and access to the fastest free wi-fi

network.

In their mid-1980s heyday the city’s

79,000 payphones hosted over two mil-

lion calls a day. But, even as the last of

their number was consigned to history,

there were those who insisted it was not

the last at all. George Mannes, editor of

AARP, a magazine aimed at the over-

50s, said there was still a booth on a

riverside avenue on the Upper West

Side. The journalist Maggie Haberman

asked about another on the same

avenue.

The city’s office of technology and

innovation acknowledged that four

With promotion thwarted by a narrow

defeat, the players of Avellino in south-

ern Italy may have been expecting a

little relaxation before another push

next season.

However, in Italian football failure is

not tolerated. The club’s star midfielder

was chased by “ultra” fans and stripped

to his underwear because, they said, he

was not fit to wear the team’s colours.

Claudiu Micovschi, 23, a Romanian,

was driving home after his side lost to

Foggia when, near midnight, he was

forced to stop by a car full of supporters

and forced to remove his club tracksuit.

The incident occurred on May 4, the

Leaked files reveal

China’s orders to

kill fleeing Uighurs

The UN’s most senior human rights

representative has been urged to

investigate claims that China operated

a shoot-to-kill policy for Uighur

Muslim prisoners who tried to escape

from its brutal “re-education” camps.

Michelle Bachelet, the UN commis-

sioner, is on a six-day trip to China

which coincides with the release of a

cache of official documents that were

hacked and leaked online. They detail

widespread allegations of forced deten-

tion and other abuses at the heart of

China’s highly secretive system of mass

incarceration in the western region of

Xinjiang.

According to the documents, Presi-

dent Xi himself ordered the

enlargement of the facilities to hold up

to two million people.

Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, is

under pressure from MPs to declare the

plight of the Uighur ethnic minority a

“genocide”, with fresh evidence

emerging of their persecution.

The leaked documents contain more

than 300,000 personal records and

2,800 photos of detainees said to have

been selected for “re-education”,

among them children aged as young as

six. Some pictures show hooded prison-

ers manacled at the wrists and ankles,

surrounded by guards wielding clubs,

riot shields and guns.

The BBC, working with a consortium

of 14 media organisations from 11 coun-

tries, has been able to authenticate

significant elements of the files. They

include a 2017 internal speech by Chen

Quanguo, a former Communist Party

secretary in Xinjiang, in which he alle-

gedly orders guards to shoot dead any-

one who tries to escape, and calls for

officials in the region to “exercise firm

control over religious believers”.

A 2018 speech by Zhao Kezhi, the

public security minister, mentions

direct orders from Xi to increase capa-

city at the camps. Bachelet met Wang

Yi, the foreign minister, on Monday.

Yesterday and today she was expected

to visit the cities of Urumqi and Kash-

gar, the centre of the alleged crack-

down on Uighurs and other Muslims

prompted by violent clashes in 2009

and two terrorist attacks in 2014.

The files suggest that 12 per cent of

the adult Uighur population was de-

tained in the camps in 2017-18, many for

offences such as growing a beard, which

suggested they were practising Mus-

lims. One man was jailed for ten years

in 2017 for having “studied Islamic

scripture with his grandmother” for a

few days in 2010.

China has denied persecuting and

detaining more than a million mainly

Muslim Uighurs in the camps, insisting

that the inmates are local residents who

voluntarily attend vocational schools.

However, Dr Adrian Zenz, the

scholar who published an analysis of

the leaked files yesterday in a peer-

reviewed journal, said they “describe

the routine use of armed officers in all

areas of the camps, the positioning of

machineguns and sniper rifles in the

watchtowers and the existence of a

shoot-to-kill policy for those trying to

escape”.

Truss said the revelations added to

“the already extensive body of evidence

from Chinese government documents,

first-hand testimony, satellite imagery

and visits by our own diplomats to the

region”. She urged Beijing to grant

Bachelet, 70, “full and unfettered access

to the region so that she can conduct a

thorough assessment of the facts”, add-

ing: “If such access is not forthcoming,

the visit will only serve to highlight

China’s attempts to hide the truth of its

actions in Xinjiang.”

China has called the UN mission,

long delayed by the pandemic, a chance

to “clarify misinformation” but accused

America, Britain and other critics of

trying to “sabotage the visit”. The for-

eign ministry called reports of the

leaked files “the latest example of anti-

China forces smearing Xinjiang”.

Beijing can no longer deny the

oppression, leading article, page 31

China

Didi Tang Beijing

would need to take a half-hour taxi ride

to get changed.

In a recent blog post Mark Thomas,

founder of the Payphone Project, which

has been monitoring the gradual dis-

appearance of payphones since 1995,

said that when he had tried to use one

of the few remaining survivors, he had

been connected to an automated voice

that asked for his credit card details. He

added that the phone did not seem to

allow 911 calls.

The city council said a few privately

run payphones still operated on public

property, and some railway stations

had them. A reporter on the news web-

site Hell Gate found one at a subway

station in lower Manhattan. He used it

to make a call to his editor to say, with

some excitement, that reports of the

payphone’s death had been if not great-

ly then at least somewhat exaggerated.

shaken by atrocity

that pupils needed to be accounted for

before being released. The district said

that the city’s civic centre was being

used as a reunification centre.

Uvalde is home to about 16,000

people and is located about 75 miles

from the border with Mexico. Robb Ele-

mentary School is in a mostly residen-

tial neighbourhood of modest homes.

There have been 27 school shootings

in America this year, according to the

media organisation NPR.

MARCO BELLO/RUETERS