THE BIG STORY

In a countryside idyll, China built a detention camp for Muslims. This is what it's like inside.

China’s mass internment of Muslims in Xinjiang is so secretive that little is known about any single camp. Now interviews with former detainees have given us an inside look at one of them. This account of Mongolküre camp in China’s Xinjiang region provides the most intimate, prisoner’s-eye view of a single complex purpose-built to detain and dehumanize the people held inside.

BuzzFeed News talked to three former detainees of the camp, who spoke out about conditions despite the risk to themselves and their families. Their accounts, combined with architectural modeling, have been used to digitally reconstruct the prison.

Each detail, from the narrow walkways to the gridded factory buildings, reveals careful planning in the service of total control. There’s no fresh air. Little stimulation. Only confinement, surveillance, and the constant threat of violence.

Earlier in this series:

👉 Ex-prisoners detail the horrors of China's detention camps

👉 Thousands of satellite images reveal a vast, growing infrastructure for long-term detention and incarceration in China

A rendering of the camp at Mongolküre. Alison Killing for BuzzFeed News

STAYING ON TOP OF THIS

Rural doctors and nurses are treating COVID patients they know — and watching them die

As the pandemic now devastates rural America and small towns, many of which never took restrictive measures to prevent the spread of the virus during the pandemic's first wave, healthcare workers are watching people they know die. "'It's not fair. I don't want to die,'" a nurse practitioner in Jonesboro, Arkansas, said she was told by a patient she knew for years. "That’s a hard thing to hear from someone that you know."

Nurses and doctors are trying to use their personal connections to get people to follow basic coronavirus prevention advice, such as wear masks and socially distance. But they're hitting a wall: "It feels like we’re fighting two pandemics: the virus and misinformation," South Dakota nurse Ashley Kingdon-Reese said.

SNAPSHOTS

A tiger nearly bit a volunteer's arm off at Carole Baskin's Big Cat Rescue. The volunteer of five years, Candy Couser, was about to feed a tiger named Kimba when he grabbed her arm, Baskin said in an email to BuzzFeed News.

The busiest hurricane season on record in the Atlantic Ocean produced a whopping 30 named storms. Here are all of them.

For the first time, Twitter put a warning label on a tweet from the head of social media for India's ruling party. He uses the platform to spread rumors and lies. The label might signal Twitter is finally going to apply the same standards to the rest of the world as it does in the US.

Warner Bros. announced it will release all of its 2021 films on HBO Max the same day as they hit theaters. This will include anticipated releases like The Suicide Squad, Dune, In the Heights, and The Matrix 4.

THE FIRST TIME AS TRAGEDY, THE SECOND TIME AS FARTS

Rudy Giuliani's latest appearance was quite literally full of hot air

Giuliani's list of shambolic media appearances continues to grow. First it was the press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, then hair dye leaking down his face, and now: a lengthy, wild hearing in Lansing, Michigan, in which not one but two fart sounds could be heard as he spoke.

The hearing he led Wednesday was a bizarre string of testimony with a number of so-called witnesses who made brazen, and at times incoherent, claims of widespread voter fraud in the state that supposedly led to President Donald Trump's election defeat. The claims were baseless, and one of the witnesses delivered testimony that drew comparisons to SNL characters. It's worth a watch.

BOOK 'EM, DANNO

Short links, lotsa books

We had a lot of great book coverage this week -- excerpts, author interviews, gift guides -- so here it all is!

👉 Six inspirational passages to read when you're feeling hopeless: An excerpt from Ashly Perez's Read This for Inspiration.

👉 20 photo books that brought us joy in the very exhausting year of 2020

👉 43 books for everyone on your holiday lists

👉 An interview with David Heska Wanbli Weiden, the author of BuzzFeed 👉 Book Club pick Winter Counts, on exploring a Lakota worldview through crime fiction

👉 YA author Aiden Thomas discusses how the bestselling Cemetery Boys wasn't originally supposed to be their debut, and how their identity shaped the story

👉 30+ gifts for anyone who proudly identifies as a bookworm

WEEKEND LONGREADS

I’m 33 Years Old. I Got COVID-19 Eight Months Ago. I’m Still Sick. Eight months into the pandemic, at least 270,000 Americans who contracted COVID-19 have died. Millions of others recovered from the disease. And still others, like our reporter Nidhi Prakash, got sick and never got much better. "COVID-19 has forced me to re-evaluate how I think about health, work, vulnerability, and strength," she writes. "And I’ve wondered whether the pandemic will force our culture at large to make some reevaluations, too."

Photos Show The Devastating Long-Term Effects Of Domestic Assault. "I could not live with myself if I didn’t give voice to my mother’s story. My scrutiny became this book," photographer Hannah Kozak says of He Threw the Last Punch Too Hard. Photo director Kate Bubacz spoke with Kozak about her work, and how she approached working with her family on such a sensitive topic.

The 12 Best Episodes Of TV In 2020. From a wedding in Schitt's Creek to an out-of-this-world episode of Lovecraft Country, these are our picks for the best TV show episodes of 2020, and what makes them so special.

Wishing you a fulfilling weekend,

Brandon