NEW: In 2022 Russia destroyed half of Mariupol. Now Moscow wants to show it is rebuilding the city.

But the reality is very different. Residents live in dangerous, half-built, leaking homes, while Russian companies profit from contracts worth millions.
FT.com/mariupol
For nearly a year, we’ve been tracking the ‘reconstruction’ of Mariupol, matching Russian media reports and govt announcements, with satellite imagery and residents’ social media posts, to find out what is really happening in the city and how reality compares to the propaganda.

NEW: A @bellingcat guide to open source investigations in China (OR all the things that don’t work and why, plus a to do list for investigators - building tools to access websites and apps and archive that material). Thread
bellingcat.com/resources/2023… China has, in practice, a parallel internet to the rest of the world with different apps and websites, meaning that many of the tools used by open source investigators outside China may not be useful.

Hacked Xinjiang police documents reveal thousands of photos of detainees and detail of life inside the camps, including a police shoot to kill policy for those trying to escape
bbc.in/3NqGbxO via @BBCNews Incredible to see the detainees' photos too. If course we know that it is personally devastating to be detained in this system, but seeing the mug shots is something else. In some photos there are police armed with batons standing over the detainees.

As the opening ceremony for the #beijing2022 Olympics starts, 1 million people are detained in Xinjiang. A thread on one of the more incongruous sides of the Xinjiang detention camps – their garden and landscape designs, with animal statues, water features, pavilions and more 🧵 First the more typical stuff – most of these facilities have a flag in a formal looking courtyard in front of main admin building, like this one at Kizilsu Prison in Artux.

After we reported that Hugo Boss was working with a Chinese supplier with close ties to Xinjiang, that supplier was quietly cut from Hugo Boss' supplier list. Here’s how we did the investigation. Thread
buzzfeednews.com/article/alison… The fact that forced labour is so widespread in Xinjiang and the difficulty of conducting independent audits of supply chains, has lead to cotton produced in the region being banned from entering the US.

This Chinese guy went to Xinjiang and using our map of camps and detention facilities, went to visit locations to see what was there – THREAD
HT @WilliamYang120 and @muyixiao
@WilliamYang120 @muyixiao For an English (or any other language) translation of the subtitles, open the link in Google Chrome, click the three dots bottom right of the video to open the transcription, then right click in the window and select translate to English.

NEW: China has built enough space to detain 1 million Muslims. After locating the network of camps in Xinjiang last year, we got China’s prison building regs and began to reverse engineer what they had built. By @meghara and me. THREAD
buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar… Over the past year we have drawn all 347 compounds which we believe are part of the current detention program and calculated their gross floor areas – the buildings’ footprints multiplied by the number of storeys.

NEW China has built nearly 2 million square metres of factories in camps in Xinjiang, focused in the Uyghur and Kazakh heartlands of southern and western Xinjiang. By me and @meghara
buzzfeednews.com/article/alison… Factories across Xinjiang – both inside and outside the camps – typically look the same. They are large, rectangular, steel framed buildings, often with blue, sometimes red, roofs. Here’s one under construction in Shule county, Kashgar in 2017/18.

Our latest: using satellite images, detainee interviews and leaked videos we reconstructed one of Xinjiang’s camps to give a detainee’s eye view of life inside. Over the past five years, the camps and campaign of oppression against Muslims has come to dominate this town. In 2016 a small detention centre just outside town could hold 300 people. By the end of 2018 it was ten times larger.

China's Baidu has blank spots in its mapping platform. We used those blank locations to look for the network of prisons and internment camps in Xinjiang, where up to a million Muslim minorities have been detained. Here's how we did it. buzzfeed.com/alison_killing… It's difficult for journalists to work in Xinjiang because of theheavy surveillance, active attempts by authorities to prevent journalists reporting, but also because the region is so big. That’s why we turned to satellite imagery to help us investigate.

There's a ton of basic misunderstandings of refugee law, asylum processes and basic dehumanisation of the people making these journeys in this thread. Let's go through it point by point...

https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296029833928081408?s=20

So far, so good. Lots of interviews with people on the move and visits to key spots along routes through Europe.

https://twitter.com/_edwardcrawford/status/1296030736265420802?s=20

Over the past year, I've been looking at the implications of publicly streaming live webcams in public space and the way these can be matched with social media data to identify ppl in crowds. No special software required. Published today in @BuzzFeedNews

https://twitter.com/meghara/status/1175448367679397889

Here's the story. And thanks to the amazing @meghara @HayesBrown and @jsvine
buzzfeednews.com/article/meghar…

Hi @Eurostar I've just been denied boarding in Brussels with my trainee assistance dog. You knew when I booked that he was in training and that I was the handler - I have this in writing. Why then is the train manager in Brussels allowed to deny me boarding on these grounds? The manager also made bizarre claims about my dog possibly being killed by the UK authorities if he wasn't a fully trained assistance dog. This is simply untrue. Pet dogs are allowed to travel provided they have a rabies vaccination and have been dewormed in the past 5 days.