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SHANGHAI, April 14 (Reuters) - President Xi Jinping has said that China must stick to its strict "dynamic COVID clearance" policy while the global pandemic remains very serious, promising those enduring lockdowns that persistence will win out in the end.

China's zero-COVID policy has put millions of people into lockdown and has had a growing impact on the world's second-largest economy, in contrast with other countries that have thrown off restrictions even though the virus is still spreading.

"We must persist putting people above all, life above all ... We must adhere to scientific precision, to dynamic zero-COVID," Xi said during a visit to the southern island of Hainan on Wednesday, state media reported.

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"The current global pandemic is still very serious, and we cannot relax the prevention and control work. Persistence is victory."

The coronavirus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019. Wuhan's lockdown in early 2020 heralded a Chinese policy that significantly limited the spread of the virus for most of the next two years.

But new outbreaks of the fast-spreading Omicron variant began flaring early this year.

The epicentre of China's battle with COVID is now the financial hub of Shanghai where most of its 25 million residents are under lockdown.

Shanghai authorities said on Thursday the daily tally of new asymptomatic cases had risen again, to 25,146 compared with 25,141 a day earlier. Symptomatic cases rose to 2,573 from 1,189.

But raising hopes for a shift in policy, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a guide on home quarantining on its social media page on Wednesday.

Under China's tough rules, even people with asymptomatic or very mild cases must go into quarantine at centralised facilities, where many people have complained about poor conditions.

The CDC's guide on quarantine at home - in a well-ventilated room stocked with masks, sanitizer and other gear - raised hopes that the rule for quarantine at state facilities might be relaxed.

But when asked by a social media user in an online comment about who might be eligible for home quarantine, the CDC referred to the old rules.

Authorities in Shanghai also gave no hint of any change in strategy at a Thursday briefing.

An official said that cases in the city continued to rise despite the lockdown in part because of a backlog with test results and also because transmission between family members was still going on.

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Reporting by David Kirton;Editing by Robert Birsel

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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China's Xi says sticking to tough COVID curbs will bring victory - Reuters

Myria Georgiou, LSE, and Marek Troszyski, Collegium Civitas, Warsaw recently travelled across the routes followed by many Ukrainian refugees: from the Poland-Ukraine borders to Polish cities and towns. Here, they recount their observations and findings about the nature of the border in wartime.

Conducting research at a wartime border is anything but ordinary. Yet, after an intense week of travel and engagement with its Polish and Ukrainian actors, the border reveals itself as somehow ordinary, peculiarly expansive, and fundamentally contradictory. The border, we repeatedly recorded in our encounters with volunteers, activists, refugees and authorities, is much more than a line separating the two countries. Instead, it expands across the pathways of refugees journeys where we observed the many contradictory responses to their flight.

Following the routes that many refugees take once they escape immediate danger, we travelled from the Ukrainian border town of Yavoriv () through the Polish crossing points of Medyka and Budomierz, and into the border city of Przemyl and regional capital of Lublin. We then followed the pathways that bring so many into Warsaws train stations, and eventually peripheral Polish towns and villages, such as those of Wieliszew. Across these and many other Polish territories, more than two million refugees from Ukraine have now found, at least temporarily, shelter. As we followed the refugee routes into European territories, what became apparent is that in many ways the border is shaped through media representations and social media connectivities.

In our research, we recorded at least three contradictory and competing dimensions of the borders communicative architecture: control and exceptionalism, philanthropy and post-humanitarianism, but also, solidarity and resistance.

Control and exceptionalism: In these conditions of humanitarian emergency, we came across the most paradoxical condition of the national borders: on the one hand, we saw them becoming porous with refugees and humanitarians crossing between Ukraine and Poland all the time, and on the other, we experienced these borders as digitally rigid systems of control and exceptionalism. Specifically, when we crossed between the two countries as part of a humanitarian mission, we were reminded that, crisis or not, the border is now a digital border of inflexible passport checks and use of transnational databases that decide who can cross and who cant. Our wait at the check-points was long but incomparable to humanitarian medics experience: while they cross from Poland into Ukraine to take care of the sick and the injured on a daily basis, the medical convoys still have to spend many hours thorough long passport and vehicle controls. Every day. Inflexible border governance has become most ordinary across the west, especially as it is increasingly digitally controlled through drones, thermal cameras, databases. Ordinary even at war.

The control that states impose on the territorial border is nothing new, but there is a particularity in this case that brings racial exceptionalism and conditional hospitality together. In fact, the most striking element of the wartime border we witnessed in Poland was its exceptionalism. While the Polish government has been welcoming Ukrainian refugees, it has continued to use its military and information power to push back the victims of others wars, such as those in Syria and Afghanistan, who remain trapped at the Belarus-Polish border. From imposing no-go zones around that other border so that media and activists have no access to information, all the way to aggressive campaigns on state media that present those seeking refuge there as merely male, non-white, and threatening migrants, the Polish government fundamentally divides those seeking refuge into good and bad migrants. Yet, even this state of exceptionalism is not simple. Even good migrants are subjected to the impossible nationalist doctrine of the border (as, for example, reflected in the Polish Minister of Educations announcement that Ukrainian children in the countrys schools will need to write their school exams in Polish, as the government has no intension to introduce privileges).

Philanthropy and post-humanitarianism: Along, and partly against, the structures of state control, we observed the unimaginable scale and extent of humanitarian support for those arriving in Poland: a scale and level of fast response which is hard to not admire. After all, the country received more than two million refugees within four weeks. No formal structures of reception were in place for weeks and citizens were acting as fist response to incredible levels of need. In many cases they still do. Even now, numerous volunteer-organised warehouses across villages, towns and cities which we visited receive vast humanitarian supplies of all kinds, which are then effectively distributed to refugees in Poland or sent to those in need in Ukraine. Again and again, volunteers told us how they set up social media accounts or used their personal ones to organise the collection and distribution of such provisions, social media which have brought together local volunteers but also supporters from across the world. Many of them still cannot believe the local and global level of response to those simple and amateur social media campaigns.

While the level of effective and digitally mediated volunteerism is incredible, the values and experiences behind it vary enormously. Some of the volunteers we met told us how their preconceptions for the previously suspicious neighbours have been replaced by solidarity towards those in need. Others, such as the members of an impressive border village humanitarian campaign, told us how important it is to support the neighbouring country suffering from the Russian invasion. Yet, Ukrainians are still not to be trusted, they also told us, adding that they only trust their Polish compatriots to deliver humanitarian help across the border. Some others, among those with the best of intentions, saw Ukrainians as refugees like no other (i.e., victims of Russian aggression; neighbours; white) who deserve hospitality. Many refused to talk about the future challenges of refugee arrivals. For most, questions of long-term settlement and integration were quickly dismissed. For them, this is a crisis of the here and now.

Solidarity and resistance: Alongside acts of philanthropism and exceptional benevolence, we also witnessed activism of solidarity, which has stubbornly defied the border regimes attempts to divide good and bad migrants. Such is the case of the grassroots Homo Faber in Lublin that uses its social media to demand long-term strategies of welcome and resettlement, including refugee housing, and that of Grupa Granica that campaigns for indiscriminatory welcome of all refugees, no matter where they come from. And we witnessed the incredible activism of the local and international networks of solidarity that converge in the Folkowisko Embassy of Freedom. This is an impressive grassroots initiative at the border town of Cieszanw, which brings together doctors, activists, volunteers from across the world; day in day out, they generate from the ground-up actions that vary from book collections for Ukrainian refugee kids (Books not Bombs) to humanitarian and medical support delivered to cities across Ukraine.

The most important actors of the border, of course, are refugees themselves. Over the last few weeks, Ukrainian refugees have been appearing on our screens as victims of violence and uprooting. As often is the case with media representations of war, refugees appear as silent victims, or people who only speak of their suffering. During our research, we met many of those who, while having experienced trauma and violent uprooting, resisted being defined either through silent suffering, or through the wests benevolent philanthropism. Among those we met, two women told us that they were eager to get a job, knowing perhaps how conditional and ephemeral state support is. A young man showed us his Instagram profile that looked like any other teenagers social media profile, reminding us how he, like so many other young people, sought ordinariness under conditions of precarity and uprooting. At least in appearance.

These are only some of our many observations across the ever-expanding border. Listening to the people who are living the war and its consequences, and observing practices of control but also of struggle, we were again and again reminded of how the stories we tell of refugees and of humanitarianism often simplify the agency and the politics of the border. The border that we saw in its visible and invisible structures and expressions is a site of violence, of liminality, but also of resistance and agency.

Note: This research was conducted within the project Migrants. Analysis of media discourse on migrants in Poland, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Albania and the Czech Republic (MAD), financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange as part of the International Academic Partnerships programme (no. PPI / APM / 2018/1/00019 / DEC / 1).

This article givesthe views of the authors and does not represent the position of theMedia@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Photography credit: Marek Troszyski

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The communicative architecture of the wartime border: Control, hope and solidarity - London School of Economics

It has been over six months since the city of Kabul fell under Taliban control during the groups whirlwind military campaign across Afghanistan. The withdrawal of US troops may have ended a 20-year war, but an aftermath of pervasive violence, human suffering, and political and social tension remains.

Following the Talibans seizure of power, financial aid provided by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was abruptly halted and governments froze the Da Afghanistan Banks (the countrys central bank) funds held in overseas reserves. International financial aid had amounted to about 75% of the governments budget and funded many essential services, like healthcare and education. The abrupt loss of funds paired with the absence of a financial structure under the Taliban launched the country toward an economic collapse and a humanitarian crisis.

Electricity is fundamental to a successful economy as well as human security, and the current power outages in Afghanistan indicate a system that is already suffering.

The international community has since started providing humanitarian aid, but their attention has largely shifted to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began at the end of February 2022. Last fall, the EU pledged $1.15 billion to humanitarian aid, and in January 2022 the US announced it would contribute $308 million. President Joe Biden signed an executive order to split the $7 billion of frozen Afghan funds currently held in the US, designating half for additional humanitarian aid and the other half for relatives of the victims of 9/11.

For those living in Afghanistan, the help cannot come fast enough. Over a million residents fled Afghanistan during the Talibans takeover and the following economic crisis. Jobs and incomes are disappearing (with a disproportionate impact on women, who experienced a 16% drop in employment levels in the fall of 2021); hospitals dont have the resources for staff wages or medical supplies; and millions of people are facing food insecurity. According to the UN, 97% of Afghans could fall below the poverty line by the summer of 2022 if the nations political and economic crises are not addressed and now, this looks almost certain to occur.

Unplanned power outages hitting Afghanistan have further aggravated the situation. About 80% of Afghanistans electricity is imported from neighboring countries in Central Asia. Despite previous reports that the Taliban has been unable to pay Afghanistans energy bills, it did sign an agreement with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to continue importing electricity in 2022. But electricity reliability remains a concern, and in January 2022, Uzbekistan unexpectedly cut 60% of Afghanistans imported electricity due to technical problems that lasted multiple days.

Measurements provided by the Payne Institutes Earth Observation Group (EOG)s VIIRS Nighttime Light create a unique view of the situation in Afghanistan. While the images are from space, the patterns can provide insight about what may be happening on the ground. Payne Institute uses data provided by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), an instrument on a satellite co-operated by National Aeronautics and Space Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that collects near-real-time imagery of the Earth, to monitor and report monthly light radiance measurements at sites across the world. They have been observing the radiance at multiple locations in Afghanistan for nearly a decade.

Changing light patterns are not new for Afghanistan, which has dealt with rolling power outages for decades due to issues with supply and conflict, but the departure of US troops, the Talibans dominance, and the countrys plunge into an economic crisis create new concerns about electricity blackouts. Electricity is fundamental to a successful economy as well as human security, and the current power outages in Afghanistan indicate a system that is already suffering.

A SATELLITE VIEW OF CITY LIGHTS

To better the situation in Afghanistan, the EOG looked at the lighting patterns of three locations in Afghanistan: Kabul, Kandahar, and Bagram.

Kabul

Kabul is the capital and largest city of Afghanistan. Looking at long-term trends, the lights in Kabuls city center and the Hamid Karzai International Airport have both decreased over the past decade, but while the decrease in the city center has been gradual, the airport lights experienced two historic drops: one in March 2016 and another in March 2017. Afterward, the radiance remained at a lower level.

Just after May 2021, the radiance measurements in Kabul dropped sharply, especially in the city center where the Presidential Palace and US Embassy are located (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Radiance levels of Kabuls city center from April 2012 to January 2022 show a gradual decline over the past decade with a notable drop in mid-2021 (Earth Observation Group, Colorado School of Mines).

During August 2021, light levels at the Hamid Karzai International Airport remained close to normal as the US and NATO maintained control of the airport and helped evacuate over 100,000 people from the country. But by September 2021, the lights went dim as the last US troops were withdrawn and the Taliban took control of the airport (Fig. 2). International airlines rerouted their commercial flights away from Afghanistan, and despite the Talibans request for international flights to resume, the commercial activity remained limited.

Figure 2. Radiance levels of the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul have decreased from April 2012 to January 2022 with notable drops in 2016 and 2017.

There are multiple military sites located in Kabul, including a CIA black site prison known as Salt Pit (labeled as Military Site 1 in Fig. 3). Unlike other radiance trends in Kabul, the site shows a significant increase in activity after June 2016. The compound was also used by US forces during the Taliban take-over. In April and May 2021, after the announcement that US forces would leave the country by September, personnel began destroying some of the compound buildings to prevent sensitive materials from falling into Taliban hands. After the Taliban entered the city, the compound was used to help evacuate hundreds of people. They were flown to the nearby Hamid Karzai International Airport via helicopter to avoid Taliban checkpoints.

Near the end of August, US forces demolished more equipment and structures of the compound before completing their evacuation and leaving the site to fall under Taliban control. The lights, which dimmed during the summer of 2021, dropped to darkness by September. The compound was still empty in October 2021, but a Taliban commander said the group planned to use the site for military training in the future.

Figure 3. Radiance levels from April 2012 to January 2022 at the CIA Eagle Base/Salt Pit military compound.

The light levels across the city remained similar to September 2021s condition for a few months, but in January 2022 there was another significant decrease in radiance that extended across a larger area. Kabul was among the locations that experienced unexpected power outages in January 2022, which may have contributed to this decrease. These figures below show the change in the months average radiance level compared to the median in Kabul before, during and after the Talibans seizure of the city (from May to September 2021). The fourth picture is from January 2022. Red indicates that the light levels are lower than usual and blue indicates that they are higher.

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Lights of a Country Under Taliban Control - Inkstick

The McGowan Government will provide a further $9 million in funding to the disability sector through the State Government's Sector Transition Fund.

The Sector Transition Fund was established to safeguard the future sustainability and build capacity of the Western Australian disability sector as part of the State's transition to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

The funding package announced today will continue to support people with disability, their families and carers to achieve the best possible outcomes, while also assisting providers to continue delivering and maintaining the highest quality of supports and services.

The State Government committed $20.3 million over two years from 2018 to 2019 to assist registered service providers with the transition to the NDIS operating environment.

Following consultation with the sector, a further $14 million was allocated in 2020-21, with the latest $9 million in funding for 2021-22 bringing the McGowan Government's total investment in transition support to $43.3 million.

The initiatives being funded in the latest phase include:

Comments attributed to Disability Services Minister Don Punch:

"The McGowan Government is strongly committed to continuing to support WA's disability sector through the final stages of the transition to the NDIS.

"This funding is about enhancing choice and control for NDIS participants and supporting NDIS providers to both attract and retain staff to strengthen their capacity to deliver the highest quality of sustainable supports.

"This latest funding round will, for example, make training in Auslan available to people who will benefit from using it day-to-day, or who are pursuing Auslan interpreting as a career - with the importance of Auslan clearly demonstrated in the Premier's media conferences on COVID-19.

"While certainly improving the quality and safety of NDIS supports and services, the administrative requirements imposed by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission have presented challenges for disability service providers - and funding provided through the Sector Transition Fund will strengthen the capacity of providers to meet these requirements.

"A number of projects to improve the attraction, retention and development of staff in the disability workforce, with a focus on regional and remote areas, are also set to receive funding, to ensure people with disability and their families can receive services from skilled disability workers who are encouraged to remain in the sector."

Minister's office - 6552 6900

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$9 million to attract workers and build further capacity in WA's disability sector - Media Statements

More than 1,000 Ukrainian marines defending the besieged city of Mariupol have surrendered and the port has been captured, Moscow has said, as the presidents of four countries bordering Russia arrived in Kyiv in a show of support for Ukraine.

In one of the most critical battles of the war, Russias defence ministry said that on Wednesday 1,026 soldiers from Ukraines 36th Marine Brigade, including 162 officers, had voluntarily laid down their arms near the citys Ilyich iron and steelworks.

It later said Mariupols trade sea port was under full control of Russian forces.

There was no independent confirmation of the claims. Ukraines defence ministry said it had no information about the surrender and the Ukrainian military command said only that Russian forces were attacking the Azovstal industrial area and the port.

The Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, who says his forces are playing a major role in the battle, urged the last Ukrainians holed up in Azovstal to surrender. The 26th Marine Brigade had said on Monday that it was preparing for a final battle in Mariupol.

The city, the main target yet to be brought under Russian control in the eastern Donbas region, has been encircled and largely reduced to rubble during Moscows seven-week invasion. The citys mayor has said 21,000 civilians have died and more than 100,000 remain there awaiting evacuation.

Its capture would be the first fall of a major Ukrainian city and would help Russia secure a land passage between the self-proclaimed republics in Donetsk and Luhansk in Donbas and Crimea, which Moscow occupied and annexed in 2014.

Joe Biden announced $800m in new US military aid to Ukraine on Wednesday. He said this would include artillery, armoured personnel carriers and helicopters. Biden added it would contain many of the highly effective weapons systems we have already provided and new capabilities tailored to the wider assault we expect Russia to launch in eastern Ukraine.

The Polish and Baltic presidents headed to the Ukrainian capital by train on Wednesday to show support for the countrys president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and his embattled troops in what the Polish presidential adviser Jakub Kumoch called this decisive moment for the country.

The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, Estonias Alar Karis, Gitanas Nausda of Lithuania and Latvias Egils Levits met in the Polish city of Rzeszw near the Ukrainian border. Heading to Kyiv with a strong message of political support and military assistance, Nausda tweeted from the station.

The programme of the visit by the leaders of four Nato member states who fear they may face Russian attacks if Ukraine falls was not disclosed for security reasons but local media reported that the heads of state visited Borodianka, near Kyiv.

Nausda said the town was permeated with pain and suffering after civilian Ukrainians were murdered and tortured there, and residential homes and other civilian infrastructure were bombed.

He said it was hard to believe that such war atrocities could be perpetrated in 21st-century Europe, but that is the reality. This is a war we must win.

It came as Ukrainian forces claimed to have damaged a Russian warship carrying 510 crew in the Black Sea with missile strikes on Wednesday. Neptune missiles guarding the Black Sea caused very serious damage to the Russian ship, Maksym Marchenko, the governor of Odessa, wrote on Telegram.

The visit followed Kyivs reported refusal to meet the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who visited Poland on Tuesday and said he had planned to go on to Ukraine but was not wanted. The former foreign minister is facing heavy criticism for his past policy of rapprochement towards Moscow.

On Wednesday, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said it was confusing that Steinmeier had not been received in Kyiv. Ukraines ambassador to Germany said the government would be glad to welcome Scholz, but diplomats said the snub to Steinmeier may make that more difficult.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, declined on Wednesday to repeat Bidens accusation that Russia was carrying out genocide against Ukrainians, warning that verbal escalations would not help end the war.

The US president said on Tuesday it had become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of even being able to be a Ukrainian. Macron said it was important for leaders to be careful with language.

I would say that Russia unilaterally unleashed the most brutal war, that it is now established that war crimes were committed by the Russian army and that it is now necessary to find those responsible and make them face justice, he said.

After visiting Bucha the site of mass killings of Ukrainian civilians Duda told a news conference: This is not war, this is terrorism. The Polish leader said that the perpetrators and those who had given orders had to be brought to justice.

Zelenskiy told Estonian MPs on Wednesday, without providing evidence, that Russia was using phosphorus bombs in Ukraine. Ukrainian forces in Mariupol said a drone had dropped a poisonous substance on the city, but there has been no independent confirmation that Russia used banned chemical weapons.

While Russian troops have largely withdrawn from around Ukraines capital in the face of stiff resistance and logistical problems, western officials and analysts say the invasion force is gearing up for a major offensive in the east.

Military experts say local support, logistics, the terrain in the region and the appointment by Moscow of a new senior general, Aleksandr Dvornikov, could improve the performance of a force that Britains defence ministry said on Wednesday had so far been hampered by an inability to cohere and coordinate.

Ukraines armed forces command said Russian forces were fully ready for a fresh assault in the eastern Donetsk and southern Kherson regions. In the Donetsk and Tavria [Kherson] directions, according to available information, the enemy is ready for offensive actions, the armed forces said in a Facebook post.

The Russian retreat from around Kyiv has led to the discovery of large numbers of apparently massacred civilians, drawing international condemnation and calls for a war crimes investigation. The Kyiv district police chief said on Wednesday that 720 bodies had been found around the capital, and more than 200 people were missing.

An expert report commissioned by the Vienna-based OSCE security and human rights organisation published on Wednesday found clear patterns of (international humanitarian law) violations by the Russian forces in their conduct of hostilities.

It said there had also been also violations by Ukraine, but concluded those committed by Russia were by far larger in scale and nature. Ukraine has previously acknowledged there could be isolated incidents of violations and said it would investigate.

Moscow, however, has rejected all allegations of atrocities and Vladimir Putin dismissed the reports as fakes. The Russian president said on Tuesday that Moscow would rhythmically and calmly continue its operation, which the UN says has so far driven more than 10 million Ukrainians from their homes, more than 4.6 million of whom have fled abroad.

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More than 1,000 Ukraine marines have surrendered in Mariupol, says Russia - The Guardian