Over the past decade China has forcibly repatriated more than 12,000 fugitives, as part of a state campaign to stamp out corruption, according to a new report by a human rights group.
Safeguard Defenders, the Spain-based group, says that Xi Jingping’s government has relied heavily on extrajudicial methods such as kidnappings, harassment and intimidation to “persuade” and coerce Chinese nationals living in more than 120 countries to return to China.
Though Beijing claims the fugitives are alleged criminal suspects, the group’s report says that China’s “deeply flawed and politicized” judicial system makes it difficult to know with certainty whether the accusations have merit.
“It is essential to point out that these extrajudicial operations are illegal under international law regardless of the type of target and all constitute instances of transnational repression,” Laura Harth, one of the authors of the report, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The report, titled “Chasing Fox Hunt,” is based on accounts of 283 individuals who were repatriated or extradited from more than 50 countries, as well as data published by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the agency that coordinates anti-corruption activities under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Fox Hunt” is the official name of the international policing operation launched by the Chinese government in 2014. In 2015, it became part of a broader initiative called “Operation Sky Net,” which added dedicated task forces to crack down on money laundering, fake passports and illegal income, according to the report. Both “Fox Hunt” and “Sky Net” are still active today, and are only two of the state-sponsored operations targeting Chinese nationals overseas.
"If Beijing cannot secure their loyalty via persuasion, it will demand their loyalty via force."
Sato already tops the list of Japanese surnames, accounting for 1.5% of the total population, according to a March 2023 survey, with Suzuki a close second.
Some social media users wrongly assumed the study, first reported on Monday but published in March, was an April fools’ day prank, but Yoshida said he wanted it to give people pause for thought.
A nation of Satos “will not only be inconvenient but also undermine individual dignity,” he said, according to the Asahi Shimbun, adding that the trend would also lead to the loss of family and regional heritage.
According to Yoshida’s calculations, the proportion of Japanese named Sato increased 1.0083 times from 2022 to 2023. Assuming the rate remains constant and there is no change to the law on surnames, around half of the Japanese population will have that name in 2446, rising to 100% in 2531.
Couples in Japan have to choose which surname to share when they marry, but in 95% of cases, it is the woman who changes her name.
However, the picture would be different if Japan’s government submitted to growing pressure to allow married couples to use separate surnames.
The study contained an alternative scenario extrapolated from a 2022 survey by the Japanese Trade Union Confederation, in which 39.3% of 1,000 employees aged 20 to 59 said they wanted to share a surname even if they had the option of using separate ones.
Under those circumstances, Yoshida, whose study was was commissioned by the Think Name Project and other organisations that want to legalise the opportunity to select your surname, projected that by 2531, only 7.96% of the Japanese population would be named Sato, the Mainichi Shimbun reported.
This is the best summary of what Jidu Krishnamurti, David Bohm, and others connected to JK are trying to tell the world. In a nutshell, self-centred thought is created by thought itself and is an attitude of thought that creates an illusion of a self. The truth is found in an attitude of wholeness that questions all assumptions of a distinct self, and of any dependable judgement made through thought. This is not to deny the importance of applications of thought, such as in scientific practice, or planning buildings etc. Rather it calls for a similar attitude in which the importance of suspension of judgement in all aspects of life is especially important for self-centred thoughts and feelings which tend to warp individuals attention to reality such that they may even become completely detached from it.
I agree. I’m no marathon kbin contributor, but I like it here a lot and I would be happier if this thread was about what we can do to support kbin as an instance.
If mbin where a placeholder for doing this (as in if certain permissions aren’t available yet) then I’d be buoyed up by OP’s thread.
Anyhoo, viva la kbin, viva la federation!
Seveneves Neal Stephenson
Tau Zero Poul Anderson
Metro 2033 Dmitry Glukhovsky
The Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky
Lucifer's Hammer Larry Niven
Pushing Ice Alastair Reynolds
Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
Diaspora by Greg Egan
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martin
The 100 Kass Morgan
Interdependency trilogy by John Scalzi.
Silo series of books by Hugh Howey
...A Paraguayan government official has been replaced after it was revealed that he signed a memorandum of understanding with representatives of a fugitive Indian guru’s fictional country, who also appear to have duped several other officials in the South American country.
Arnaldo Chamorro was replaced as chief of staff for Paraguay’s agriculture ministry on Wednesday shortly after it was revealed that he signed a “proclamation” with representatives of the United States of Kailasa...
From Article:
"...Abubakar Atiku Bagudu, who previously served as a state governor and senator, was confirmed as a new minister in Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s government last week, despite having played an “instrumental role” in Abacha’s plundering of the country from 1993 to 1998, according to the United States Department of Justice..."
Jane: Can we begin by talking about the idea of unity, which is the central principle with which Beshara Magazine is concerned. My understanding of your work is that you start with the concept of unity – wholeness – and explain how particular phenomena emerge from it, rather than deriving unity from the parts. Can you say something about how you came up with this idea?
David: If we go back to Newtonian concepts, Descartes, etc., the whole idea of physics was analysis into separate parts which are eternally related. That worked quite well for a long time. But in more modern physics, like relativity and quantum theory, it is clear that if you attempt to define these point particles, you cannot do it in the classical way; we cannot regard them as independent separate things, like billiard balls, which interact with each other only in the exterior.
One idea for getting around the problem in relativity is to try and make them into extended points, but there is no consistent way of doing that because the theory dictates that they cannot be rigid. The other idea is to imagine them as dimensionless points, but that leads to other problems. Therefore it is not possible to conceive of the whole as being made out of a collection of separate parts in Einstein’s theory; the idea of unbroken wholeness is implied.
With quantum mechanics, there are all sorts of new properties which do not cohere very well with relativity, but lead you to unbroken wholeness in another way. You have the notion of quantum jumps of energy that are said to be discrete and unanalysable – in other words, the basic energy comes in the form of quanta – and the idea is that everything is connected by those. Therefore in the final analysis, it is again all one unbroken whole.
Secondly, there is the phenomenon of wave-particle duality: that an electron going through two slits behaves like a wave, and yet it arrives at the detector like a particle. So it appears to have a nature that depends upon its context, and this again suggests that the particle does not have its own separate nature entirely, but is internally related to the whole, or at least to its environment. And a third thing is quantum non-locality, in which under certain conditions you can find a close connection between things which are physically distant. This violates classical ideas, and provides another way in which a system of particles unites into a whole which has an objective feature of wholeness, meaning that it is not reducible to actions of parts.
It was clear to me that there are problems in bringing relativity and quantum theory together because relativity demands strict causality, strict continuity and strict locality, whereas in quantum mechanics the behaviour of individual particles is basically unpredictable, and there are also these issues of discontinuity and non-locality. So the basic concepts of the two theories do not cohere, although there are certain mathematical algorithms and experiments that make them work together. Therefore, it seemed to me that in order to bring them together you would have to say that the common ground is undivided wholeness...
From the Transcript:
...Hoddeson:
I’m interested in learning where your early interests in science came from.
Bohm:
Right. Well, I think I became interested in science when I was 8 or 9, when I read some science fiction stories. Then later, we had a book in the library, no a book in my fourth grade class, on astronomy which really impressed me with all these great things going on in the heavens, all the order, and so on. And then I had a few friends, and we went to the library to pick up some chemistry, I was around 12 or 13, and I became more and more interested in science, especially in physics...
...Bohm:
Yes. Then I had a theory of trying to imagine the universe was four-dimensional, that we were sort of structures going through the fourth dimension, but we were only aware of three of them. I had one or two friends, and we used to talk about these things when I was in high school. And I used to like to study, also to construct model airplanes and small radios.
Hoddeson:
What about these friends, did they end up going into —
Bohm:
One was the son of a miner. I don’t know how he ended up. After he left school, he probably took some sort of job. I lost track of him. Another was able to go to college, and became an engineer...
...Hoddeson:
What got you to start studying plasmas?
Bohm:
Well, first of all, because that’s what was going on there. But then it became interesting, because I could see the plasma as an interesting thing. First of all, it was a sort of an autonomous medium; it determined its own conditions, it had its own movements, which were self-determined, and it had the effect that you had collective movement, but all the individuals would contribute to the collective and at the same time have their own autonomy. Therefore, it seemed that there were a great many interesting things that you could think about in the plasma. And I became quite interested in it. The magnetic field complicated it in a large number of ways. Actually, we did some work there which came out later — I think Wakerling edited it — on plasma magnetic diffusion, and also sheaths in magnetic plasmas, and so on...
Yes it's horrifying. The article states that most Western countries are moving away from trade deals that allow corporations to sue countries for loss of business etc, but I believe that pacts like the Trans Pacific Partnership may include such idiotic rights for corporations; leaving countries in compromised situations should they need to change business practices for example.
“If we were to shut our doors today, they would be homeless with no food,” Christina Lane, a support worker for the Asylum Seekers Support Trust (ASST), said of her clients.
The charity relies on donations to help about 400 asylum seekers across the country, including those who had been detained in detention facilities.
Lane said clients are regularly referred by Immigration New Zealand, but the government agency refuses to provide funding for their care