How Whitney Duan became China’s richest woman, then vanished without a trace

Once upon a time, Weihong “Whitney” Duan was the poster woman for the Chinese dream. 

After growing up poor, she wheeled and dealed her way to a billion-dollar fortune, making her name as China’s most successful female entrepreneur. 

Then, on Sept. 5, 2017, at age 50, she simply disappeared from the streets of Beijing. 

As her ex-husband Desmond Shum recounts in his new book, “Red Roulette,” (Scribner), out now, “she was last seen the day before in her sprawling office at Genesis Beijing, a $2.5 billion development project that she and I had built. There, Whitney had masterminded real estate projects worth billions more. And now suddenly she was gone.” 

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‘We Need to Protect Kids from Parents’: House Democrats Rail Against Schools Requiring Parental Consent to Vaccinate Children

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY) said the government knows better than parents when it comes to vaccinating children against the Chinese coronavirus.

During a budget reconciliation markup meeting on Thursday, Yarmuth slammed an amendment sponsored by Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) that proposes that schools must obtain parent or guardian consent before vaccinating children.

He said in opposition to the amendment:

I know I’ll get in a lot of trouble for this, but I want to refer to the sponsor’s premise for the amendment, and the first words out of her mouth were, ‘parents know what’s best for their children.’ I think the evidence is compelling and overwhelming and widespread that they don’t.

The congressman, who is also chairman of the Budget Committee, further emphasized that he believes “a lot of parents are misinformed” which is “why we have, literally, tens of thousands of kids now in hospitals and suffering from this virus.”

“One of the reasons that we need to avoid steps like this is that we need to protect kids from their parents,” he said. [emphasis added] “That is the unfortunate state of the country right now. And for that reason and many others, I will oppose the amendment.”

When introducing her amendment for discussion, Miller said her proposal is squarely focused on the acquisition of parental consent prior to the provision of medical care to minors, and contended that “parents know what’s best for their children — not any governing body.”

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9/11 and the Politics of Fear and Self-Preservation

The 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001 is a particularly somber one, not just because of the horrific nature of events of that day reaching its second-decade milestone, but because of how little we seem to have learned in that amount of time.

The fear and trauma generated by the events of 9/11 were used by the U.S. national security state and its civilian allies to great effect to divide the American population, to attack independent reporting as well as independent thought, to gut the anti-war movement, and to normalize the U.S. government’s overt and persistent degradation of the country’s Constitution. This, of course, is in addition to the illegal U.S. occupations and drone wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that were also born out of this event.

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