Around mid-November, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a shocking report detailing China’s gay conversion problem.
Powerful first-hand accounts expose how state-owned hospitals are using electric shock machines and medication to convert gays back to some form of 'normalcy'. The practice is an open secret in China, where a majority of gays are forced by their families into hospitals, because the culture labels it as a curable-disease.
Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,
I know everything is fan-freaking-tastic - with the tax reform bill and global synchronized expansion and all. I figure the last thing you need is some nattering naysayer throwing cold water on this unbelievable party, so I won’t. At least not for the short run.
At the start of the year, one of the often repeated risk factors was that a trade war between China and the US could break out due to Trump's hardline stance on the US trade deficit with Beijing. Since then, such fears have largely faded as the status quo re-established itself, and trade between the two nations has proceeded largely unchanged. However, one year later, dark clouds may finally be gathering.
The US has filed a legal submission to the WTO as a third party, intervening in a case that China has brought against the European Union. The US rejects China’s argument that under the 2001 agreement, which confirmed China’s WTO status, it would should automatically be considered a “market economy” fifteen years after joining.
According to multiple reports in Middle East regional sources, China plans to send elite military units to Syria to advise and assist the Syrian Army in an attempt to root out the country's terrorist insurgency, especially Chinese Islamist foreign fighters who have shown up in increasing numbers in Syria's north since the start of the conflict.