Chechen leader Kadyrov pledged his loyalty to Putin. Akhmat troops who were previously stationed in Donbass are expected to arrive in Rostov soon.

Seems like Wagner group has already made it to Moscow....

The Wagner group reportedly seized the Ministry of Defense building in Rostov and now heading towards Moscow in a possible military standoff with the Russian military. Is this Prigozhin playing hardball to oust Sergei Shoigu or is an actual coup attempt against Putin underway?

If anyone is looking for a female Cpop artist that serves both vocals and visuals. Shan Yichun is that girl.

Which Asian cover is your favorite?

Korean

Japanese

Mandarin (China)

Mandarin (Taiwan)

Vietnamese

Thai

A new report puts the loss of life from Afghanistan to Yemen at 4.5 million – the bulk of them poor women and children who are victims of economic collapse and continuing trauma

Abdoulaye is a lost child of the post-9/11 world – one among millions. Born into a village community displaced by Islamist violence, he and his family found refuge in an abandoned school near Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. Weakened by malnutrition and anaemia, Abdoulaye, 3, contracted malaria. Despite frantic efforts to save him, he died, unremarked and unknown to the world at large.

“Abdoulaye is doubly uncounted: as a displaced person and as a war death,” writes Stephanie Savell, a cultural anthropologist, recalling his brief life in a disturbing new report that reveals the vast, unacknowledged human costs of contemporary global warfare. “Though he is mourned by his family and his community, officially, he never existed. His story is emblematic of how this kind of death, and its omission in counts of the dead, happens in any number of conflicts.”

Savell’s report, How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health, published by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, focuses on what she terms “indirect deaths” – caused not by outright violence but by consequent, ensuing economic collapse, loss of livelihoods, food insecurity, destruction of public health services, environmental contamination and continuing trauma, including mental health problems, domestic and sexual abuse and displacement.

Calculated this way, the total number of deaths that occurred as a result of post-9/11 warfare in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia rises dramatically from an upper estimate of 937,000 to at least 4.5 million, of which up to 3.6 million were “indirect deaths”. Such deaths grow in scale over time. In Afghanistan, where the war ignited by the 2001 US-led invasion ended in 2021, the indirect death toll and related health problems are still rising.

Experts suggest “a reasonable, conservative average estimate for any contemporary conflict is a ratio of four indirect deaths for every one direct death”, Savell says. The poorer the population, the higher the resulting indirect mortality when conflict erupts. “Indirect deaths are devastating, not least because so many of them could be prevented, were it not for war,” she writes. Generally speaking, men are more likely to die in combat. Women and children are disproportionately affected indirectly.

Savell does not attempt to apportion blame between various actors, although the US, which launched the “global war on terror” in 2001, bears heavy responsibility. She concedes that establishing definitive figures for war deaths of any kind is problematic and politically contested. Using the best available sources and data, her aim, she says, is to expand awareness of the fuller human costs of these wars and support calls for governments to alleviate continuing harms.

“The mental health effects of war reverberate through generations, impacting parents and children, and then their children after that. Estimates [suggest] … anxiety and depression are two to four times greater among conflict-affected populations than the global average,” she writes. “Women tend to suffer [these effects] more acutely due to gender-based violence, which is heightened in wartime. In Iraq, rape and sexual violence increased sharply after 2003 [when the US and UK invaded] … Children are also particularly vulnerable. [Those] who experience high levels of collective violence are twice as likely to develop chronic diseases.”

Levels of child malnutrition are indicators of the scale of war-related damage. “More than 7.6 million children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, or wasting, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia,” the report estimates. “‘Wasting’ means not getting enough food, literally wasting to skin and bones, putting these children at greater risk of death, including from … weakened immune systems.”

In Afghanistan specifically, where the economy has collapsed after the Taliban takeover, more than half the population now lives in extreme poverty. Tens of thousands of children under five are dying of preventable diseases such as cholera and measles, of acute malnutrition and neonatal complications. “As much as anyone killed by an airstrike or a gunshot wound, their deaths must be counted among the costs of war,” the report says.

This scrupulously compiled examination of war’s unconsidered, long-term lethal impacts has great power to shock. In Pakistan, for example, between 2004 and 2010, the US conducted “double-tap” drone strikes, mostly on Pashtun villages in Waziristan, along the Afghan border, in which a second strike targeted people rushing to help victims of an initial bombing.

“Reports document that residents of these regions suffered from PTSD, chronic anxiety and constant fear,” Savell writes. “A local resident explained: ‘God knows whether they’ll strike us again or not. But they’re always surveying us, they’re always over us, and you never know when they’re going to strike.’” Untreated, such trauma is debilitating and unceasing.

In many conflict zones, deliberate attacks on healthcare facilities are a favoured tactic. Both direct and indirect deaths result. At one point in Syria’s civil war, according to a 2019 study quoted in the report, “each attack on a healthcare facility corresponded to an estimated 260 reported civilian casualties in the same month”, because of the resulting non-availability of medical assistance.

Displacement is another big driver of indirect deaths, caused by physical insecurity, heightened mental stress, and abuse, exploitation and indifference suffered during attempted flights to safety. An estimated 38 million people have been displaced since 2001. Britain fought in many of these wars. As it debates tougher anti-migrant regulations, the UK must acknowledge its part in causing this crisis.

The report details many additional, lingering deathtraps, including environmental contamination, unexploded ordnance, landmines, and damage to water, sanitation and aid and food distribution systems. More research data is badly needed, Savell writes, but it’s already evident governments must do more to mend what they broke – and that “reparations … are imperative”.

Those who have died are beyond help. But for millions of adults and children still suffering the consequences of the post-9/11 conflicts, the need is urgent. They are condemned to war without end.

The uncounted: millions died unseen in post-9/11 wars | Simon Tisdall

A new report puts the loss of life from Afghanistan to Yemen at 4.5 million – the bulk of them poor women and children who are victims of economic collapse and…

www.theguardian.com

Quote from Yinye

Def agree and all these older HK films still holds up! I made a thread about the OUATIC series some months back and was so happy to discover that some friends here have also enjoyed them! CYF’s Hard Boil is one my favorites.

Your OUATIC thread brought out all the HK cinema enthusiasts on this forum haha.

A Brutal Sex Trade Built for American Soldiers

It’s a long-buried part of South Korean history: women compelled by force, trickery or desperation into prostitution, with the complicity of their own leaders.

In Dongducheon, South Korea, north of Seoul, women forced to work as prostitutes to American soldiers in the decades after the Korean War were confined in this building when they were discovered to have a sexually transmitted disease.

DONGDUCHEON, South Korea — When Cho Soon-ok was 17 in 1977, three men kidnapped and sold her to a pimp in Dongducheon, a town north of Seoul.

She was about to begin high school, but instead of pursuing her dream of becoming a ballerina, she was forced to spend the next five years under the constant watch of her pimp, going to a nearby club for sex work. Her customers: American soldiers.

The euphemism “comfort women” typically describes Korean and other Asian women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II. But the sexual exploitation of another group of women continued in South Korea long after Japan’s colonial rule ended in 1945 — and it was facilitated by their own government.

There were “special comfort women units” for South Korean soldiers, and “comfort stations” for American-led U.N. troops during the Korean War. In the postwar years, many of these women worked in gijichon, or “camp towns,” built around American military bases.

Last September, 100 such women won a landmark victory when the South Korean Supreme Court ordered compensation for the sexual trauma they endured. It found the government guilty of “justifying and encouraging” prostitution in camp towns to help South Korea maintain its military alliance with the United States and earn American dollars.

It also blamed the government for the “systematic and violent” way it detained the women and forced them to receive treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

In interviews with The New York Times, six former South Korean camp town women described how their government used them for political and economic gain before abandoning them. Encouraged by the court rulings — which relied on recently unsealed official documents — the victims now aim to take their case to the United States.

“The Americans need to know what some of their soldiers did to us,” said Park Geun-ae, who was sold to a pimp in 1975, when she was 16, and said she endured severe beatings and other abuse from G.I.s. “Our country held hands with the U.S. in an alliance and we knew that its soldiers were here to help us, but that didn’t mean that they could do whatever they wanted to us, did it?”

South Korea’s history of sexual exploitation is not always openly discussed. When a sociologist, Kim Gwi-ok, began reporting on wartime comfort women for the South Korean military in the early 2000s, citing documents from the South Korean Army, the government had the documents sealed.

“They feared that Japan’s right wing would use it to help whitewash its own comfort women history,” said Ms. Kim, referring to historical feuds between Seoul and Tokyo over sexual slavery.

In the aftermath of the Korean War, South Korea trailed the North in military and economic power. American troops stayed in the South under the U.N. flag to guard against the North, but South Korea struggled to keep U.S. boots on the ground.

In 1961, Gyeonggi Province, the populous area surrounding Seoul, considered it “urgent to prepare mass facilities for comfort women to provide comfort for U.N. troops or boost their morale,” according to documents submitted to the court as evidence. The local government gave permits to private clubs to recruit such women to “save budget and earn foreign currency.” It estimated the number of comfort women in its jurisdiction at 10,000 and growing, catering to 50,000 American troops

When President Richard M. Nixon announced plans in 1969 to reduce the number of U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, the government’s effort took on more urgency. The following year, the government reported to Parliament that South Korea was earning $160 million annually through business resulting from the U.S. military presence, including the sex trade. (The country’s total exports at the time were $835 million.)

Some of the women gravitated to camp towns to find a living. Others, like Ms. Cho, were abducted, or lured with the promise of work. A sex act typically cost between $5 and $10 — money the pimps confiscated. Although the dollars didn’t go directly to the government, they entered the economy, which was starved for hard currency.

A South Korean newspaper at the time called such women an “illegal, cancer-like, necessary evil.” But “these comfort women are also frontline warriors in winning dollars,” it said.

Often, newcomers were drugged by their pimps to cope with the shame.

Numbers and Name Tags

Society mostly dismissed such women as yanggalbo, or “whores for the West,” part of the price of maintaining the U.S. military presence in the country after the war.

“The officials who called us patriots sneered behind our back, calling us ‘dollar-earning machines,’” Ms. Park said.

Prostitution was and remains illegal in South Korea, but enforcement has been selective and varied in harshness over time. Camp towns were created in part to confine the women so they could be more easily monitored, and to prevent prostitution and sex crimes involving American G.I.s from spreading to the rest of society. Black markets thrived there as South Koreans clamored for goods smuggled out of U.S. military post-exchange operations, as well as foreign currency.

In 1973, when U.S. military and South Korean officials met to discuss issues in camp towns, a U.S. Army officer said that the Army policy on prostitution was “total suppression,” but “this is not being done in Korea,” according to declassified U.S. military documents.

Instead, the U.S. military focused on protecting troops from contracting venereal disease.

The women described how they were gathered for monthly classes where South Korean officials praised them as “dollar-earning patriots” while U.S. officers urged them to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. The women had to be tested twice a week; those testing positive were detained for medical treatment.

Under rules U.S. military and South Korean officials worked out, camp town women had to carry registration and V.D. test cards and to wear numbered badges or name tags, according to unsealed documents and former comfort women.

The U.S. military conducted routine inspections at the camp town clubs, keeping photo files of the women at base clinics to help infected soldiers identify contacts. The detained included not only women found to be infected, but also those identified as contacts or those lacking a valid test card during random inspections.

They were held in facilities with barred windows and heavily dosed with penicillin. The women interviewed by The Times all remembered these places with dread, recalling colleagues who collapsed or died from penicillin shock.

Shame, Silence and Even Death

South Korea has never come to terms with the story of its camp town women, in part because of the steadfast alliance between Seoul and Washington. The subject remains far more taboo than discussions of the women forced into sexual slavery by Japan.

“We were just like comfort women for the Japanese military,” Ms. Cho said. “They had to take Japanese soldiers and we American G.I.s.”

None of the government documents unsealed in recent years revealed any evidence to suggest that South Korea was directly involved in recruiting the women for American troops, unlike many women forced into sexual slavery under Japanese occupation.

But unlike the victims of the Japanese military — honored as symbols of Korea’s suffering under colonial rule — these women say they have had to live in shame and silence.

South Koreans began to pay more attention to the issue of sexual exploitation in camp towns after a woman named Yun Geum-i was brutally sexually assaulted and viciously murdered by an American soldier in 1992.

Between 1960 and 2004, American soldiers were found guilty of killing 11 sex workers in South Korea, according to a list compiled by the advocacy group Saewoomtuh.

The U.S. military declined to comment on the Supreme Court ruling or the women’s claims. “We do not condone any type of behavior that violates South Korean laws, rules or directives and have implemented good order and discipline measures,” its spokesman, Col. Isaac Taylor, said by email.

A Legacy of Pain

Camp towns faded with South Korea’s rapid economic development.

Though former camp town women want to bring their case to the United States, their legal strategy there is unclear, as is what recourse they may find.

In a psychiatric report that Ms. Park submitted to the South Korean court in 2021 as evidence, she compared her life with “walking constantly on thin ice” out of fear that others might learn about her past. Her arms and thighs show scars from self-inflicted wounds.

Under the South Korean court ruling, Ms. Park and others were each paid between $2,270 and $5,300, which did little to ease their financial distress.

Choi Gwi-ja, 77, fought back tears when she described multiple abortions she and other women endured because of the prejudice against biracial children in South Korea. Her voice quavered recalling women who killed themselves after G.I.s who had taken them as common-law wives subsequently abandoned them and their children.

She recalled how officials once urged the women, many of them illiterate like her, to earn dollars, promising them free apartments in their old age if they would sell their bodies for money at the camp towns. “It was all a fraud,” she said.

'The likes of Malaysia and Vietnam are often predicted to be winners from decoupling, able to hoover up western businesses as they leave China.

There are problems with this account, however, the first being that so far decoupling has barely begun to happen. Semiconductors are one notable exception, given successful American attempts to stop global chipmakers selling to China. But for all the talk of supply chain de-risking and resilience, similar moves in other sectors are hard to spot.

Western multinationals talk more often about a “China plus one” strategy, in which they keep making things in China but also pick another manufacturing base, Malaysia say, as a hedge.

Take Samsung. Its decision in 2020 to shift production to Vietnam means the South Korean giant now assembles millions of phones in Vietnamese factories each year. Many are then exported to the west. Many components that go into those phones are still made in China, however, so Vietnam must also import more of those too.

Vietnam’s bilateral trade with China has rocketed in recent years, with similar patterns discernible in the rest of what is sometimes called “factory Asia”. Forthcoming research from Aaditya Mattoo, an economist at the World Bank, suggests that east Asian nations have lately been exporting more to the US but also importing much more from China.'

First Buzzfeed news shutting down last week now this. What is going on with American news outlets right now?

Wait till ppl discover Dalai Lama's support for NXIVM, a sex cult that preys on young women/children. The cult founder Keith Raniere was sentenced to 120 yrs in prison for sex trafficking underaged girls. Just like Jeffrey Epstein who had ties to the CIA. declassified documents show that the CIA paid the Dalai Lama $180,000 a year for much of the 1960’s.

Dalai Lama paid $1 MILLION to endorse women-branding 'sex cult'

The Dalai Lama was given $1 million to travel to the U.S. and meet Keith Reniere, founder of NXIVM in Albany, NY. The 'self-help' organization is accused of…

www.dailymail.co.uk

The US have weaponized the dollar for far too long. Now it's all coming back to bite them in the ass.

I had a blast watching John Wick 4 last week. Long ass movie but lots of fun nevertheless. Martial arts legend Donnie Yen who played the blind asssasin Caine delivered a standout performance (bro was basically Asian Daredevil.)

JW4 director Chad Stahelski mentioned in an interview that he paid homage to Hong Kong movies like SPL/Killzone and it got me thinking. Hong Kong's contribution in reshaping modern Hollywood action cinema cannot be understated. Without legendary Gun Fu director John Woo and martial arts choreographers such as Yuen Woo Ping and Corey Yuen working behind the camera in Hollywood, we literally wouldn't have the Matrix, Kill Bill, Shang Chi and the John Wick franchise. Keanu Reeves wouldn't be the action star that he is today and Michelle Yeoh, a HK action veteran wouldn't have won the Oscars for best actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's honestly shameful that HK cinema don't get the credit they deserve.

Anyways here's my list of notable Hong Kong action flicks from the 80s-2000s:

A Better Tomorrow (1986)

The Killer (1989)

Once Upon A time in China (1991)

Police Story 3 (1992)

Hardboiled (1992)

Iron Monkey (1994)

Fist Of Legend 1994

Black Mask (1996)

SPL/Killzone (2005)

Flashpoint (2007)

Ip Man (2008)

US is waging a tech war with China and China is waging a financial war with the US rn. US is rallying 'like minded' countries to stifle China's technological development particularly in the field of semiconductors to prevent China from accessing high end chips. Meanwhile China is using BRI and BRICs nations to promote dedollarization in favor of countries trading in local currencies to bypass US sanctions.

In the military front, US is trying to form an Asian NATO alliance with SK and Japan and announced they will be expansioning their bases in the Philiphines to complete the encirclement of China in the indo pacific. A miscalculation in the SCS or the Taiwan strait could trigger a military conflict but with the Ukraine war still ongoing both China and US cannot afford another war at this time.

Another day, another school shooting in America. Republicans and democrats be like 'Tiktok is the problem'

Quote from Disturbia

i mean its literally a ccp spy tool

That's what META lobbyists would say. Twitter, facebook, youtube, google are all tools for spying and harvesting data by the FBI/NSA.