Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Residents under COVID-19 lockdown in China's southern manufacturing hub of Guangzhou have torn down barriers meant to confine them to their homes, taking to the streets in defiance of strictly enforced local orders, according to video and images circulating on social media.
Some of the images show large crowds cheering and surging across toppled barriers and filling streets after dark in the city's Haizhu district, which has been under an increasingly restrictive lockdown since November 5, as the epicentre of the city's ongoing COVID outbreak.
The clanging sound of metal barriers falling reverberates across the neighbourhood and mingles with cheers in the footage, in scenes multiple social media users said took place late Monday evening on district streets.
In one video, COVID workers in protective medical wear can be seen standing on the sidelines as barriers fall, while trying to speak with people on the streets. "They're revolting," a woman's voice is heard saying in the background of one of the videos. CNN has geolocated the images to Haizhu district, but could not independently confirm them.
It is not clear how many people were involved in the protest, or how long it lasted. Related posts were swiftly scrubbed from the Chinese internet by censors.
When CNN reached the phone line of the Haizhu District government office, a phone operator said that the area was still "largely closed off".
When asked whether protests took place in recent days, the operator declined to answer.
The public protest -- an exceedingly rare event in China, where authorities keep tight control over dissent -- appears as yet another sign of the mounting public anger and desperation over the government's stringent zero-Covid policies.
The scenes in Guangzhou, which reported over 5,100 new COVID cases on Tuesday -- the vast majority asymptomatic -- come as Beijing's unrelenting drive to stamp out the spread of the virus faces questions of sustainability, amid fast-spreading new variants.
China is experiencing a surge in infections nationwide, this time fuelled by simultaneous outbreaks across multiple cities, where control measures are stretching residents and local authorities to the brink.
On Tuesday, China's National Health Commission reported more than 17,772 new COVID cases across the country, its highest total since April 2021, with Guangzhou, a city of 19 million, accounting for more than a quarter of those.
Last week, the city placed three districts including Haizhu under lockdown in a bid to stem the spread, imposing a raft of restrictions' on residents' movements and business activity. That was followed in recent days by additional measures on neighbourhoods designated "high risk."
Zhang Yi, deputy director of the Guangzhou municipal health commission, told a news conference Monday that "pandemic containment measures" will be "enhanced" -- a veiled reference for lockdowns -- in the entirety of Liwan and Panyu districts, as well as parts of Haizhu and Yuexiu districts.
The rising case numbers and accompanying controls have pushed more residents across China to question the costs of the brute-force measures employed by authorities to stamp out cases, which include mandatory quarantining close contacts of Covid patients, mass testing, and lockdowns that can see people confined to their districts, neighbourhoods or apartments -- sometimes for months on end.
Top officials in Beijing, including Chinese leader Xi Jinping, have pledged that the measures should be balanced with economic and social interests. Authorities last week revised the policy, including discouraging unnecessary mass testing and overly zealous classification of restricted "high risk" areas.
They also largely scrapped the quarantining of secondary close contacts and reduced the time close contacts must spend in central quarantine -- all changes officials insist are not a relaxation but a refinement of the policy.
Those measures came as Xi prepared for a week of diplomacy attending summits in Southeast Asia in a signal that China was ready to return to the world stage, with Xi meeting with key Western leaders in person this month for the first time since the pandemic began.
But for the citizens back home who are trapped in lockdown, recurring issues like accessing prompt medical care or enough food and supplies, or losing work and income -- have over and over again led to hardship and tragedy, including numerous deaths believed to be linked to delayed access to medical care.
Guangzhou's Haizhu district, where images showed nighttime protests, is home to a number of migrant workers living in densely packed buildings in areas known as "urban villages."
Their circumstances can compound the hardship of the oppressive measures as the true number of residents needing supplies in a given housing block may be unclear to officials delivering goods. There's also no option of remote work to preserve income for those employed in factories and on construction sites.
In messages shared on social media, observers noted hearing Haizhu residents originally from outside Guangzhou pleading for help from officials such as compensation for rent and free supplies.
In a video circulating on social media, a man can be heard screaming "Us Hubei people want to eat! Us Hubei people want to be unsealed!" referring to another province in China, where many migrant workers in the district come from. He is part of a crowd that's gathered facing a COVID workers in hazmat suits.
In a separate clip of the same scene, another man asks the workers: "If your parents have gone sick, how would you feel? If your children are suffering from fever and prevented from leaving (for the hospital), how would you feel?"
People in another video can be heard shouting out their frustrations and desperation to a man who identifies himself as the neighbourhood director and says he wants to address their concerns. One resident rushes forward to say that as non-local residents they're left to queue for hours for COVID-19 testing and the meat sold to them by the government has gone bad, while they can't get through to local support hotlines.
"Nobody came to explain and the community's office line is always busy. And our landlord doesn't care if we live or die. What should we do?" the resident says, while the other members of the crowd start to shout together: "Unseal! Unseal!"
In the city news conference Monday, a Haizhu district official acknowledged criticisms that restrictions could have been announced earlier and with more clarity on areas affected by the measures.
"We have also realized many of our shortcomings," said Su Mingqing, a deputy head of Haizhu district.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.