Human Rights/Civil Liberties

On a new television show, a character named the Beast hoists her opponents onto her shoulders before slamming their backs to the canvas in a signature move called a power bomb. Outside the ring, the Beast is Twana Barnett. She works as an emergency medical technician and Covid compliance officer. Local television stations, reeling in their fight against online entertainment, are now tagging the Beast and her colleagues into the ring. They’re the stars of a syndicated weekend program called “WOW—Women Of Wrestling”…

Major global providers of virtual private networks, which let internet users shield their identities online, are shutting down their servers in India to protest new government rules they say threaten their customers’ privacy.The Indian agency overseeing computer security will soon require VPN operators in India to collect information such as customer’s names, email addresses and the IP addresses they use to connect to the internet. Providers must maintain the data for at least five years and furnish the information to…

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee on Thursday issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the “Stop Woke Act” championed by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. The law likely runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of free speech, the judge said. Y-Vonne Hutchinson, chief executive of California-based consulting and strategy firm ReadySet, said she welcomed the decision.…

H&M HM.B 0.06% resumed sales on a popular e-commerce platform in China, more than a year after the Swedish fashion brand was virtually erased from the Chinese internet after it expressed concerns about reports of forced labor in the country’s Xinjiang region. Chinese social-media users noticed this month that H&M Hennes & Mauritz AB reopened its official store on Tmall, one of the flagship e-commerce platforms run by…

The U.S. solar industry is confronting fresh disruptions as U.S. officials crack down on human-rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region, which produces almost half the world’s supply of a crucial component in solar panels.Several Chinese solar-panel suppliers, among the world’s largest, have had shipments to the U.S. detained or sent back during the past several weeks as customs agents enforce a new law, industry executives and analysts say.…

Broad new data on wages earned by college graduates who received federal student aid showed a pay gap emerging between men and women soon after they joined the workforce, even among those receiving the same degree from the same school.The data, which cover about 1.7 million graduates, showed that median pay for men exceeded that for women three years after graduation in nearly 75% of roughly 11,300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs at some 2,000 universities. In almost half of the programs, male graduates’ median…

Months into its war against Ukraine, Moscow continues to let its own citizens access YouTube, leaving a conspicuous hole in its effort to control what Russians see and hear about the conflict. YouTube’s availability in Russia has continued for longer than some Google executives themselves initially expected, according to people familiar with the matter, especially given that the Silicon Valley giant has irked Moscow during the war. YouTube has suspended hundreds of channels run by Kremlin-affiliated entities…

Early last year, Masayoshi Son addressed his staff on a video call. At the time, startup companies were surging in value, but SoftBank 9984 -0.98% Group Corp. wasn’t investing in enough of them.His executives needed to persuade more companies to take their money, the Japanese billionaire lectured, according to former employees. Mr. Son, SoftBank’s chief executive, set up a spreadsheet tracking calls to companies and eased…

HONG KONG— Volkswagen AG VOW 3.31% reiterated a commitment to producing vehicles in China’s western region of Xinjiang, an area where Western politicians, academics and human-rights groups say Beijing is forcibly assimilating ethnic minorities. The German car maker plans to keep its factory in Xinjiang going at reduced levels and is open to a plant visit by a human-rights specialist recently nominated by the company’s board,…

Companies must take a multipronged approach to stay on the right side of a strict new U.S. law aimed at curbing forced labor in China, compliance experts said, with steps such as sourcing products from other countries and visiting Chinese suppliers for spot checks.The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which went into effect last month, gives U.S. Customs and Border Protection the power to block importing goods with ties to Xinjiang, the home region of China’s Uyghur minority group, because those goods are presumed to be…