The last time Akida Pulat saw her mother, renowned Uighur anthropologist Rahile Dawut, was in 2016. Dawut had come as a visiting scholar to the University of Washington, where Pulat was studying for her master’s degree. She remembers her mother spending hours cooking Uighur polo, a traditional dish of rice mixed with carrots and topped with lamb, for her newly made Chinese and American friends. When Pulat said goodbye to her mother at the airport, she promised she’d go back home to Ürümqi to visit the next year.

Since 2017, the Chinese government has been enacting a cultural genocide of the Uighur people and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the western region of Xinjiang. Officials have thrown between 1 and 3 million Uighurs into re-education camps, created a high-tech surveillance state, used Uighurs for forced labor in factories around the country, and razed mosques and Uighur cemeteries. 

The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act is the strongest action yet by any nation over China’s mistreatment of the ethnic minority group. The legislation, which President Donald Trump signed into law on Wednesday, will penalize officials who arbitrarily detain and torture Uighurs and other minorities in the Xinjiang region, freezing their assets and preventing their entry into the United States.

On June 9, on the anniversary of the anti-extradition bill protest that drew one million people and kicked off Hong Kong’s protest movement last year, several hundred protesters marched the streets of Hong Kong with their cellphone flashlights flickering in defiance of the government’s coronavirus restrictions.

Unlike a year ago, police no longer sign off on scheduled protests—deeming them illegal from the start—and quickly begin to search protesters, fire pepper spray, and disperse the small crowds. 

Does anyone remember when Kim Jong-un, the young and rotund Communist dictator of North Korea, died? I remember well, because it was only last month. As reported by respectable news outlets, death was all but certain, especially since Kim had not appeared at the obligatory celebration of his grandfather’s birthday in April. It’s also well known that the self-indulgent scion of his ruthless dynasty is morbidly obese and not in good health.

Minutes before 9 p.m. Tuesday, Anglican Rev. Canon Bayo James Famonure was praying with his wife and two sons in the family’s sitting room when at least three armed herdsmen stormed into their home in Nigeria’s central Plateau state. 

The latest in a string of attacks on Christian leaders in central Nigeria began with the gunmen demanding money. Famonure said he had no cash, and the intruders shot him in the head and leg. Then they shot his wife, Naomi, in the back, and their two sons in their legs. 

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom warned of growing abuses of Muslims, Christians, and other religious minorities in India in its 2020 annual report released on Tuesday. This year, the commission added India to its Countries of Particular Concern list for the first time since 2004. The country’s ruling Hindu nationalist party instituted citizenship policies in January that USCIRF said could leave the country’s religious minorities, especially Muslims, without legal protections.