Tag: asia

Inside the cyber-scam capital of the world — and modern slavery in the internet age

The message from Alice was blunt: “I don’t trust you. You are one of them, right? You all just want to sell me like some animal.”

Alice’s hostile reaction wasn’t completely surprising to Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo, the co-authors of “Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds” (Verso), out July 8. “Like the dozens of other survivors we met in the following months,” they write, “her harrowing experience had left her unable to trust anyone.”

Alice (not her real name), a Taiwanese single mom, had recently escaped from a Cambodian scam compound where she’d been raped, beaten, sold multiple times and nearly forced into a brothel. 

She’d been lured to the town of Sihanoukville by a friend who promised her a legitimate job, and even paid for her visa and flight. What awaited Alice, however, was not a front-desk position but forced criminal labor in an online fraud mill. 

“The supervisor informed her that she had been sold there to conduct online scams,” the authors write, “and that she would not be allowed to leave until she had earned enough money for the company.” 

When she resisted, the supervisor threatened Alice with a stun gun and “said that if she did not comply, he would lock her up in a room and let several men rape her,” the authors write. “Which is exactly what happened soon after.”

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Close the US Military Bases in Asia

President Donald Trump is again loudly complaining that the U.S. military bases in Asia are too costly for the U.S. to bear.  As part of the new round of tariff negotiations with Japan and Korea, Trump is calling on Japan and Korea to pay for stationing the U.S. troops. 

Here’s a much better idea: close the bases and return the U.S. service members to the U.S.  

Trump implies that the U.S. is providing a great service to Japan and Korea by stationing 50,000 troops in Japan and nearly 30,000 in Korea.  Yet these countries do not need the U.S. to defend themselves. 

They are wealthy and can certainly provide their own defense.  Far more importantly, diplomacy can ensure the peace in northeast Asia far more effectively and far less expensively than U.S. troops.      

The U.S. acts as if Japan needs to be defended against China.  Let’s have a look.  During the past 1,000 years, during which time China was the region’s dominant power for all but the last 150 years, how many times did China attempt to invade Japan?  If you answered zero, you are correct.  China did not attempt to invade Japan on a single occasion.

You might quibble.  What about the two attempts in 1274 and 1281, roughly 750 years ago? It’s true that when the Mongols temporarily ruled China between 1271 and 1368, they twice sent expeditionary fleets to invade Japan, and both times were defeated by a combination of typhoons (known in Japanese lore as the Kamikaze winds) and by Japanese coastal defenses.  

Japan, on the other hand, made several attempts to attack or conquer China. 

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US escalates aggression in Asia-Pacific, Russia to support allies in the region

The Asia-Pacific region has been one of the most important drivers of global economic development, with numerous countries there experiencing unprecedented growth. The most prominent of these is certainly China, the world’s largest and most important economy, a fact that even the infamous CIA admits. However, it wasn’t always like this, unfortunately. There was a period when various Western powers (particularly the ever imperialist United Kingdom) were ravaging and plundering the many millennia-old civilizations in the Asia-Pacific region, brutally exploiting these countries and their populations. And no, these weren’t some obscure events from the distant past, but relatively recent developments, culminating with the US aggression on Vietnam, when Washington DC used a fabricated event as a pretext to attack yet another sovereign nation.

The resulting bloodbath can only be described as an unadulterated genocide, as the US military committed an intentional, cold-blooded murder of approximately five million people (although the number could be far higher). It should be noted that nobody in America was ever convicted for these gruesome atrocities in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Luckily, Washington DC was soundly defeated by Hanoi and forced to turn its tail and run. With the US gone, peace was established and it lasted until around a decade ago. However, America then started shifting focus to the Asia-Pacific once again, resulting in rising tensions that threaten to push the region into yet another disaster. In the last several years, the Pentagon has been setting up bases and deploying previously banned medium and intermediate-range missiles, targeting China and North Korea.

However, this isn’t enough for the warmongers and war criminals in Washington DC and they’re now sending the US Navy (USN) to begin the first permanent forward deployment of Virginia-class SSGNs (nuclear-powered guided missile submarines). According to military sources, USS “Minnesota” is to be based on Guam, where it’s “expected to facilitate more effective projection of American naval power into the Western Pacific”. The US-occupied island plays a major role in Washington DC’s aggression in the Asia-Pacific, as it’s also home to the Andersen Air Force Base, where there’s a constant rotation of fighter jets and nuclear-capable strategic bombers such as the B-52 “Stratofortress” and B-1B “Lancer”. The USN also operates another four Los Angeles-class attack submarines (SSNs) on Guam, namely the USS “Annapolis”, USS  “Asheville”, USS “Jefferson City” and USS “Springfield”.

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Russia May Deploy Medium, Short-Range Missiles in Asia if US Missiles Appear There

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has not ruled out the deployment of medium- and shorter-range missiles in the Asia-Pacific region as a retaliatory measure against the United States.

“Of course, this is one of the options that has also been repeatedly mentioned. The appearance of such US systems in any region of the world will determine our next steps, including in the field of organizing a military and military-technical response,” Ryabkov told reporters, answering the question whether Russia is considering the possibility of deploying medium-range and short-range missiles in Asian countries.

The fate of Russia’s moratorium on the deployment of medium-range and short-range missiles depends entirely on the US policy, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Monday.

“[Russian] President [Vladimir Putin] said what he said. The issue of placement is exhaustively reflected in his statement. As before, what is happening depends entirely on the choice that our opponents will make at this extremely alarming, very dangerous moment, and on the line that they will pursue,” Ryabkov told reporters.

When asked whether this meant that the fate of the moratorium depended on the actions of the United States, Ryabkov answered in the affirmative.

There are currently no restrictions on the deployment of Russia’s new Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile under existing international obligations, the diplomat said.

At the same time, the 1998 memorandum of understanding between Russia and the United States on notifications of missile launches continues to be in effect, Ryabkov said, adding that it was within the framework of this document that Russia notified the United States of the test combat launch of the Oreshnik missile.

When asked if the US tried to contact Russia after the test launch, the diplomat said no.

US bases in Europe, including those where tactical nuclear weapons are deployed, are not excluded as potential targets for Russia in the event of a hypothetical military conflict, Ryabkov said.

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Insights into Early Modern Human Activity in the Jungles of Southeast Asia

Studying microscopic layers of dirt dug from the Tam Pà Ling cave site in northeastern Laos has provided a team of Flinders University archaeologists and their international colleagues further insights into some of the earliest evidence of  Homo sapiens in mainland Southeast Asia.

The site, which has been studied for the past 14 years by a team of Laotian, French, American and Australian scientists, has produced some of the earliest fossil evidence of our direct ancestors in Southeast Asia.

Now a new study, led by PhD candidate Vito Hernandez and Associate Professor Mike Morley from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, has reconstructed the ground conditions in the cave between 52,000 and 10,000 years ago.

“Using a technique known as microstratigraphy at the Flinders Microarchaeology Laboratory, we were able to reconstruct the cave conditions in the past and identify traces of human activities in and around Tam Pà Ling,” says Hernandez. “This also helped us to determine the precise circumstances by which some of the earliest modern human fossils found in Southeast Asia were deposited deep inside.”

Microstratigraphy allows scientists to study dirt in its smallest detail, enabling them to observe structures and features that preserve information about past environments and even traces of human and animal activity that may have been overlooked during the excavation process due to their minuscule size.

The human fossils discovered at Tam Pà Ling were deposited in the cave between 86,000–30,000 years ago but until now, researchers had not conducted a detailed analysis of the sediments surrounding these fossils to gain an understanding of how they were deposited in the cave or the environmental conditions at the time.

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GREEN NEW DEAL? All But One Of World’s 100 Most Polluted Cities Are in Asia

All but one of the world’s 100 most polluted cities are in Asia, according to a new report, underscoring how powerless the U.S. is in combatting the supposed threat of global warming.

The study, published by IQAir, focused on measuring fine particulate matter known as PM2.5, which gives an estimate of air pollution. Just nine percent of the over 7,800 cities analyzed worldwide managed to meet WHO’s standards, many of which were in America.

A majority of these cities are in India, with 83 cities identified as pollution hotspots. All these cities exceed the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines by around 1000 percent. Other heavily polluted countries including Bangaldesh, Pakistan and Burkina Faso.

The world’s most polluted city is Begusarai, a city of around 500,000 people in northern India, with an average annual PM2.5 concentration of 118.9 — 23 times higher than World Health Organization guidelines.

IQAir Global CEO Frank Hammes argued that such pollution is shortening people’s life spans.

“We see that in every part of our lives that air pollution has an impact,” he said. “And it typically, in some of the most polluted countries, is likely shaving off anywhere between three to six years of people’s lives. And then before that will lead to many years of suffering that are entirely preventable if there’s better air quality.”

Hammes added that there will be no improvements unless such countries implement “major changes in terms of the energy infrastructure and agricultural practices.”

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