Have heavy crime tape restrictions in place and heavy restrictions on any foreigners trying to enter china and this is simply chinas why of dealing with what they believe could be a 2nd wave of infections 180 cases its certainly not a Great Development but china would say its particularly in recovery mode at this stage compared to the rest of the world but there have been a number of questions about the accuracy of these figures coming out of china weve had last week a senior british minister Michael Goves questioning tried as transparency about the effectiveness of this particular virus and present donald trump has also said he questions the number of deaths he said the death toll is on the light side looking at the overall figures coming out of china the total number of deaths of 3343. 00 so thats certainly low in comparison to the rest of the world and 83134 cases of the crowd a virus infection so this is why the questions are appearing and increasing about chinas transparency and its the accuracy of its not just its figures but the accounting measures its using to calculate the number of infections in the country in the u. K. The number of reported deaths caused by the virus has gone above 10000 and there is growing concern about the lack of protective equipment for Health Workers also promised johnsons been released from hospital after spending 3 months in intensive care thanks doctors and Health Care Workers for saving his life in the last 7 days i have of course seen the pressure that the n. H. S. Is under ive seen the personal courage not just of the doctors the nurses but of everyone the cleaners the cooks the Health Care Workers with every description physios radio group was foremost this who kept coming to work kept putting themselves in harms way kept risky this deadly virus it is thanks to that courage that devotion that duty and that love. That are in the chess has been unbeatable in the us the Infectious Disease expert dr anthony felt she says he cant guarantee it will be safe for americans to vote in person during the vendors president ial election the u. S. Has more confirmed cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world and the number of fatalities in the worst affected state new york is rising some leaders are calling the trumpet ministration to provide more testing kits. The Worlds LargestOil Producers have agreed to the biggest Production Cut in history the demand for oil has plummeted in the Coronavirus Crisis so a cut in production could help keep Petroleum Prices from dropping saudi arabia russia and several other Oil Producing nations have made a deal to reduce production by nearly 10000000 barrels a day in may and june turkeys president reject has rejected his interior ministers resignation so you tried to quit after he abruptly and forced a 48 hour curfew that sparked panic buying in major cities that curfew has since been lifted. To celebrations were disrupted by powerful tornadoes that carved a path of destruction through several southern u. S. States at least 6 people were killed when around 13 twisted whipped through mississippi where the governor has not declared a state of emergency start storms also destroyed hundreds of buildings and caused power blackouts in parts of louisiana texas and alabama and a priest in brazil is going to some extreme heights to carry out an easter blessing took a helicopter ride over at Rio De Janeiro to bless the city from the air many people in the deeply catholic country are staying home to stop the spread of coronavirus but here we have rios christ the redeemer statue lives up to honor the countrys front line Health Care Workers. Youre up to date with the headlines on aljazeera from london studio b. Unscripted is next. Theres no punchline to state violence sometimes stuff is just bad pop culture is not innocent its coated with all kinds of politics the white mainstream feels that the shift is happening then nervous didnt nervous i like my feminist sort of murder free. Market month i can help contribute to a conversation that will lead to an outcome that is freedom justice equality and selfdetermination for everyone im an academic a writer journalist. My name is father and im from pakistan i think some ideas are too dangerous to do except in novel form and the author of 6 books of fiction and nonfiction and i always knew i wanted to be right. When. We have an opportunity i remember seeing marks speech at the un in defense of the Palestinian People which got him fired from c. N. N. And shortly after a free palestine i asked myself look at i have in common with a member of the bhutto family a political dynasty in pakistan. From book one always is about pakistan but its about much more than that its about the universal psychology of oppression i read marks book nobody about the injustices faced by africanamericans and i was struck by how much it resonated with that spoke to me about my. So there was a lot of talk. I think you can do that a lot of things while i was writing the way writing always felt like the clearest way to think to talk about issues that i cared about and to explore things that the served me i think fiction is even more liberating in that sense because if you were to tell people ive written a book about radicalism they may not really want to read it or talk about it but when you put it in fiction. You can bring all kinds of dangerous ideas to people without them really knowing that youve done that why did you write same thing i like dangerous ideas that free dangerous ideas because there were people who see a brown body in a black body here danger and think that were writing about how to destroy stuff and in some ways we are but were trying to destroy oppressive systems that people yeah and so for me i thought as a writer i had an opportunity to use my mind in my spirit and marshal a whole tradition in the service of justice but i find that when you come from the places we come from when youre talking about the things that we talk about and theres a discomfort with dangerous ideas do you get told a lot of the times to be positive oh yes yes im like its incredibly frustrating yeah not because im without hope or optimism but sometimes you just got to bring bad news you know im telling a story at the beginning of nobody but a boy my brown who was left on the ground for a half hours after being killed by a Police Officer after being stopped for jaywalking yeah for crossing in the wrong part of the street. His schooling was was poor 80 percent of the people in the town have warrants against them now for murder or theft usually feel like jaywalking or parking tickets when i look at the store what it means to be young and vulnerable in america and black or brown muslim trans clear you know what immigrant what have you. Its sad its depressing yeah and editors say you know this is great stuff its powerful its informative but i want people to laugh at the end i need a punch line and theres no punch line to stay violence sometimes stuff is just bad you know and we have to wrestle within with the sit with it instead of being titillated in stimulated and excited by it or made to believe that the world is going to just be ok so just let people sit with this misery some would say though you are a fiction writer yeah in any way you want thats true it ends badly lets raise a bit of average other work and it often is already a very the book is great but the story. Yeah i mean you leave us in this place yeah but thats life do you think mike that life doesnt end in this tidy way where everything is sorted and theres conclusions and people have closure and so i think when youre writing fiction at least you you have plenty of moments that are joy and of beauty and of love but sometimes the endings are as they are in life painful yes i love though that while the ending is painful the journey there is not entirely so i want to travel around the world i see that as the resistance yeah and i see joy in the midst of pain your books do that your books do that one of the things i loved about your book and your writing is reading about you in ferguson. Protesting mike browns death and having palestinians tweet you how to do it tear gas yeah yeah you tell us about that we were there at midnight when they in ferguson a few days after the killing of my broom and the next night tear gas tear in before the curfew tear gas tear gas. And we started getting tweets because the world was watching this yeah and were getting tweets from ramallah and they were like run toward the wind. You know stand closer to the soldiers because if you stand close to the soldiers they want to or guess you can they get tear gas you know right this shirt or on your eyes the kind of makeshift gas mask and they have been protesting in the west bank against what was happening in gaza because in the same moment that we were protesting in ferguson august 24th teen there was thered been a 51 day war in gaza for july and august of that same year 2014 now were not just crying for the tear gas were also crying because were like oh my god palestinians who are catching hell in the west bank and in gaza watching and theyre taking the time of all the things they could be doing theyre taking the time to tell us how to be safer and were building those bonds of solidarity so theres joy in theres joy in the midst of that pain in the backdrop of that and i guess. That connects to another piece of this for me which is the question of activism yet because youre not just writing now im not just writing were also on the ground in a certain way do you identify as activists some people dont like that term i dont know i dont really know what its supposed to mean i can only write about the things i really care about so i can only put my voice and my time to something that means something to me and i think those are uncomfortable issues those are issues of powerlessness of injustice but i dont know i think writing when done well is activism i do think theres a difference between writing in the house writing in the ivory tower in yeah you know and being with being there you know i mean people who are literally killed for writing and for drawing yeah thats a whole different world so i dont i dont take writing off the table as a form of resistance i think activism is its own thing and its all kind of freedom fight. I guess what i wonder though is. With the respective values of each and my concern is that sometimes as academics we kind of pooh pooh what happens on the ground sometimes people on the ground and i go youre just in your tower right what good is that were good is it to write the runaways when theyre real people youre feeling well from american imperialism do people ever make you feel guilty for writing sure all the time. I get asked all the time why are you writing when you could be doing and i think writing for me is a form of doing i think exactly because of imperialism is oppressing and silencing so many people that is a valid form of fighting back to rights to have different stories and i think it means something for those of us who come from the global south for those of us who are asian or muslim to see our stories reflected in fiction in film. And not only in the news right you know were in also from an oriental is oriental aslans because we can watch home when we shouldnt. Care boy we shouldnt but we can and its there but i dont want to watch that anymore im tired of that for me pop culture is not innocent and its not entertaining its coated with all kinds of politics and and we go to it innocently you know but of course the people who are making and producing pop culture are not innocent exactly and then when you watch that from a 1000000 miles away that becomes your norm for who and what black people are who are what must i mean or how they live south asians and such or was born in 78 and i was growing up in the eightys and ninetys i was a complete professional wrestling nerd i mean the grand moment of wrestling the kind of turret modernised moment of wrestling with hogan becomes the champ yeah by being the iron sheik you come down the hours from tehran iran and he got his title by stealing it yeah right and he allied with with the russians wrestlers becomes them sergeant slaughter is as old boy you know so fitting in so hes a super jingoistic imperialist sort of figure whos defeating russians and iranians and so were justifying Foreign Policy by framing these people in a certain way and then im looking at all these africans and arabs in iranians who are barbaric and look at these White American superheroes yeah so by the time i find out that were going to go into the persian gulf were going to youre prepared im prepared for it makes sense because i just like those guys i watch every saturday. And i cant imagine how you feel watching that stuff im here is all the time actually at the scene that always. Really really upsets me is 0 dark 30 year where the cia officer i mean knows how theyre always really concerned careful thoughtful individuals in film so whenever someone torture theres always the cia officer to be like is he going to be ok. So theres a moment 0 dark 30 and this is like history according to hollywood where theres a man being water boarded and we know right that actually torture didnt yield any actionable intelligence right but this is man being tortured to within an inch of his life and the camera is not really looking at him its looking at jessica chasin the cia officer and shes like this. Whole the whole time you know youre going to kill him and shes like i could be sick and she walks to a corner for her poor her and i think thats the gays and thats the gays of power and so pop culture identifies our solidarity with the powerful and never the powerless and i think most people watch that and think its a great action film or theres drama and suspense but thats intense cruelty and theres intense dehumanization playing and its everywhere i mean its in the shows its in the t. V. Its in sports as you said and i think thats why people like. Mohammed are the. A so moving and powerful because they fought against that they brought some new form of politics and resistance and questioning in the sent to the field of at a time in pop culture you know we have come kaepernick in yes in the in the states you know who took that knee and is essentially lost his career because hes willing to stand up and fight state violence against black bodies and there are more figures like that im sure you know i just in theres never been an overabundance of them there always been a few here you people who over time we begin to love and romance but in the moment we hate them you know they suffer they suffer they suffer extraordinary cost and i think that we can never forget the costs but you know mark we i mean in south asia where cricket playing countries indian bison we had in february of 2019 tensions between these 2 countries in their Nuclear Armed nations so when you have tension between 2 Nuclear Nations thats i mean possible annihilation and one of the things that was really disturbing to see is how entertainment figures and sports figures rallied for war we have athletes who are wearing military camouflage hats to play a game a lot of Bollywood Actors tweeting for war pretty horrific stuff like cheerleading attacks jingoistic statements in the states thats the norm right yeah kaepernick does kneeling against the backdrop of air force and army commercials the entire sport which is all about war i mean the trenches and blitzing and doyle along bombs hes the outlier there any outliers where you are no no its all pretty its pretty depressing because weve got a lot of vulture hyper nationalism and i think im not sure its ever been that bad i guess thats why again your book for me is so. Necessary because when i hear the story of state repression when i see american imperialism when i see economic deprivation and i see how one could become desperate and one could become radicalized by this was the argument against american imperialism from some of us here was youre creating the very thing that youre afraid of. How do you get to that place of thinking about radicalization i think that if were looking at the 20 years of the war on terror almost its been such a shallow narrative and that narrative has been presented to us by by the west essentially and what theyve said is theyre these people theyre muslims theyre vulnerable to radicalism theyre dangerous they come from these places and thats it and they left themselves out of the frames there is no conversation about americas forever wars or about the thousands of of civilians killed in these secret drone campaigns. There is no conversation about inequality and poverty and i think for a lot of us living outside the west that was always false was always paid in the film you know and to me the question of radicalism doesnt come from religion at all but its a question of anger of powerlessness a fear of isolation. And if you have young people in society where they have no this isnt for their future they have a vision for a dignified life noble work safety then theyre going to be vulnerable to any vision that is offered to them and theyll take it and so on that level i think the world is is not helping and radicalism is only furthering its by cutting out space to me i would argue that many of us in the United States have a radical vision yeah but i would use the language of radicalization because of what it connotes sure and it seems that when people in the global south want to have a radical imagination and a radical reimagining of the world we think of violence within of destruction as you say we dont think about the forces they get them there is any way to have maybe throw it open a little bit to question you know i dont want to jump in at this moment how are we to get to sites that are unwilling to cooperate with one another such as opposing states or even sectarian actors in the middle east to come together and begin focusing on their similarities and contribute to cooperation and more constructive. Who the good question here 1st. I think it varies from context to context. And also i have to push a little bit ask who the we is in terms of who is the we that is doing the work restriction here so in the case of israel palestine we can pretend that theres been an enduring war thats going on since the beginning of time which is the kind of dishonest narrative or we could say this is a very material struggle over over land and resources that could in tomorrow if the United States<