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thatsonemorbidcorvid · 11 months

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5 minute read

Women who are groped on trains in East Asia face the further threat of their assault being filmed and uploaded for sale online. In a year-long investigation, the BBC World Service's investigative unit, BBC Eye, has gone undercover to unmask the men cashing in on sexual violence.

It was the morning rush hour in Tokyo. The train was packed and rocky.

Takako (not her real name) was on her way to school. The 15-year-old tried to hold on to a grab bar.

Suddenly, she felt a hand pressing on her behind. She thought someone had accidentally bumped into her.

But the hand started to grope her.

"That's when I finally realised - it was molestation," Takako recalls.

The hand quickly disappeared in the crowd. "I couldn't do anything about it." She arrived at school in tears that day.

That was her first time being sexually assaulted on public transport, but Takako was molested almost daily for more than a year on her commute. On countless nights, she went to bed crying. "I felt like there was no hope in my life," she says.

Many women like Takako are targeted in public by sexual predators. In some cases, they face another violation - the attack is filmed and the videos are sold online.

Most videos follow the same pattern - a man secretly films a woman from behind and follows her on to a train. Seconds later, he sexually abuses her. The men act discreetly, and their victims can seem totally unaware. These graphic videos are then listed on the websites for sale.

In a year-long investigation, we traced the men behind three websites which sell and produce thousands of these sexual assault videos.

An epidemic in Japan

Encountering sexual abuse almost daily, Takako found herself unable to speak up during the act due to fear and shame. But every night, she covered her mouth with a towel and repeatedly practised in front of the mirror how to call out a harasser: "This person is a 'Chikan'!"

"Chikan" is a Japanese term describing sexual assault in public, especially groping on public transport. It also describes the offenders themselves.

Chikan perpetrators typically take advantage of crowds, and the victims' fear of causing a scene. In Japan, speaking too directly and openly may be seen as rude.

Thousands of arrests are made every year for Chikan offences, but many more go undetected and unpunished. Saito Akiyoshi, mental health professional and author of a book about Chikan, says that only about 10% of victims report the crime.

The Japanese police encourage victims and eyewitnesses to speak up, but the crime is far from being eradicated. The problem is so widespread that even the UK and Canadian governments warn travellers to Japan about it.

Chikan has been normalised by its prominence in Japan's adult entertainment industry. One of the most popular types of pornography in the country - the Chikan genre - has spread to other Asian countries.

Chikan websites

One Chinese-language website called DingBuZhu (which means "I can't hold it" in Chinese) immediately caught our attention.

It's a marketplace for Chikan videos, filmed secretly on mobile phones in crowded public places, such as trains and buses. They are shot across East Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China.

Some videos cost less than a dollar. The site even once allowed users to order tailor-made abuse videos.

We also found links on DingBuZhu to two other websites - Chihan and Jieshe - with the same type of content.

There is a Telegram group with 4,000 members who share tips on how to sexually abuse women.

One name kept coming up on the Chikan websites - "Uncle Qi".

He was hailed as the guru in this community. Dozens of abuse videos were labelled as his work. On Twitter, he put up teasers of the websites' videos to his 80,000 followers. But who was he?

The Telegram group we had been monitoring revealed a clue. One day, an admin claimed in a series of messages that he had abused a woman with Uncle Qi.

The messages were accompanied by photos of a woman standing on what appeared to be a metro platform.

Within hours, we found a match for the location - Ikebukuro station in Tokyo.

And there were more leads pointing us to Japan.

The websites listed a Paypal account receiving Japanese yen which was linked to a Gmail address. When we put the address through Google Contacts, the profile picture that came up was a young man with an elaborate hairstyle and theatrical makeup.

A reverse image search put a name to the face - Noctis Zang, a 30-year-old Chinese-born singer living in Tokyo. He was the frontman of a metal band called The Versus.

Noctis had a glamorous public image, but we soon found something hidden behind it.

In early 2022, The Versus' photographer had alleged on Chinese social media platform Weibo that Noctis built "porn websites" alongside another band member, Lupus Fu.

He had posted pictures of a notebook, which showed some accounting and video categories similar to those on the websites. The photographer had also posted a video which appeared to show Noctis's browsing history, with links to Chihan, Jieshe and the admin pages of DingBuZhu.

Could this rock singer be Uncle Qi?

Unmasking the admins

Posing as a music talent scout called Ian, our undercover journalist met Noctis at a fancy rooftop bar in Tokyo.

They first talked about music, but the chat soon moved on to the subject of sex. When Ian said his company used to make porn films, Noctis's eyes lit up.

The two met several more times, and they even celebrated Noctis's birthday together.

Noctis introduced Ian to his fellow band member Lupus Fu, whose name had been mentioned by The Versus' photographer. Lupus, also from China, was studying sociology in Japan.

Ian said his company planned to invest in porn sites and asked if they knew anything about this business.

Noctis confessed he had "some exposure" through a friend, "Maomi", who had created his own porn sites with "metro" content.

Ian then casually brought up DingBuZhu.

Lupus and Noctis both laughed: "That's Maomi's website!"

They revealed that the person behind the Chikan websites was a Chinese man in Tokyo nicknamed Maomi. They said Maomi was reclusive and paranoid.

Noctis and Lupus also admitted that they played admin roles for the websites.

They spelled out their business model.

"In China, sex is the most suppressed," Noctis said, "Some men are very perverted, they just want to see women getting…" Lupus finished the sentence: "screwed over."

Lupus said he was in charge of promoting abuse videos on Twitter. Noctis revealed that he had uploaded more than 5,000 videos on the websites, received payments for the business and taken 30% of revenue. The rest he had transferred to Maomi.

Lupus also said he could help connect Ian to Maomi.

The Chikan club

On a quiet back street in the red-light district of Yokohama, a storefront decorated like a metro station catches your eyes. A sign spells out its concept: "legal Chikan trains".

In this sex club, called Rush Hour, customers can pay to enjoy the Chikan experience legally.

Its manager Hasuda Shuhei welcomes us on board. "We let people do things that can't be done outside. That's why people come here."

Inside, a sickly-sweet smell of cleaning products permeates the air. Private rooms are decorated like train carriages and equipped with a sound system that plays train announcements. Even the club's membership cards look exactly like Japan's transportation cards.

"I think it's important for men to be able to pay to vent in place like this, so they don't commit rape and other forms of sexual assault," says Hasuda.

Mental health professional Saito says that the matter is not as straightforward as Hasuda claims. He says that most Chikan perpetrators are aroused by the idea of domination over and humiliation of their victims.

"They do not treat their victims as equals, but as objects."

It's an opinion that rings true with Takako.

After months of assaults, she fought back one day. As she felt a hand reach for her skirt in a packed train carriage, Takako shouted at the top of her lungs and grabbed the assaulter by his wrist.

Takako took the man to court, where he only got a suspended sentence, even though he had previously been caught for Chikan offences.

Disappointed by the outcome of her case, Takako went on to start an anti-Chikan campaign, producing colourful badges reading "Chikan is a crime!" People can wear them to show they will not keep silent.

"It's a deterrent for criminals," says Takako, who is now 24. There is now an annual anti-Chikan badge design contest among Japanese high school students.

The hamster

Maomi means "kitty cat" in Chinese. However, Lupus said his personality was more like a hamster. "He's harmless, but cautious of everything and he sometimes overreacts."

Lupus was right. Maomi repeatedly refused to meet Ian.

But on Chinese New Year's Eve, Ian's luck changed. Maomi agreed to a meeting at a karaoke bar.

The air was thick with cigarette smoke, the sound of clinking glasses and Chinese pop songs.

The person who turned up was not who we expected. A skinny young man wearing half-rim glasses and a dark trench coat, Maomi looked like he could be a college student. He said he was 27.

Showing an interest in investing in his business, Ian asked how much he made.

"Our daily turnover is around 5,000-10,000 Chinese Yuan (US$700-$1,400; £565-£1,130)," Maomi said proudly, showing the transactions on his phone. "Very stable income, right?"

Ian acted impressed, and mentioned the name Uncle Qi.

Maomi admitted: "I am Uncle Qi."

But to our surprise, he revealed Uncle Qi was not just one person.

He managed a team of 15 people, including 10 in China who made videos under the same name. Maomi received 30 to 100 videos from them each month.

The videos were then sold on the three websites which Maomi confirmed he owned. They had more than 10,000 paying members, mostly Chinese men.

"The key is to be authentic. It has to be real," Maomi said. He later told us his websites even sold videos of drug-facilitated rape.

Maomi talked about his business as though it were any other budding start-up. He described his team as "passionate" and "brave". He even casually mentioned he had been training others to carry out and film sexual assaults.

But there was one thing he never mentioned - the women in his videos. It was as if they didn't matter to him at all.

Maomi exposed

We wanted to know Maomi's real identity. At another meeting with Ian, he opened up about how he got into this business.

Like many boys, Maomi liked Superman, anime and video games growing up. But when he was 14, he started watching sexual assault videos like the ones he sold now.

He knew his business was not risk-free.

"I am so cautious," Maomi said. "Safety first." To avoid scrutiny from the Chinese authorities, he planned to naturalise as a Japanese citizen.

However, as careful as Maomi was, he made a mistake.

When Ian asked where to send the investment funds, Maomi pulled out his bank card and handed it to Ian.

The card revealed his real name - Tang Zhuoran.

Later, we confronted Maomi with our allegations.

As we approached, he tried to cover his face and walked away. And all of a sudden, he snapped, hitting out at our camera and crew.

The next day, by coincidence, we spotted Maomi at the airport. He was leaving Japan.

Uncle Qi's Twitter account, where he openly promotes the abuse videos, is still active.

Twitter did not respond to our request for comment. Instead, they sent us a poo emoji, which has been an automatic reply to any inquiry directed to their press email since March.

We also put our allegations to Noctis and Lupus. They did not respond. We have since learned they no longer work with Maomi.

On a spring day, we meet up with Takako to tell her about our investigation. Appalled, she says: "We women are just content in their videos. They see us as objects. They don't think we have a heart."

Takako advocates for tougher laws against these crimes.

Japan is set to reform its sexual assault laws. However, campaigners say these changes don't go far enough.

But Takako will not give up. "We will not cry ourselves to sleep."

Additional reporting by Chie Kobayashi, Ryuzo Tsutsui, Hanae Arrour Takahashi and Joel Gunter

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dailydragon08 · 1 year

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A World Without Monsters Ch 2

Read chapter 1 here!

Pairing: Raleigh x Reader

Summary: During a post-kaiju war press tour, you and your copilot Raleigh finally grapple with the growing feelings you have for each other while also wrestling the world of reporters, politicians, and more who would manipulate the world's saviors for their own purposes.

Warnings: friends to lovers slow burn, mentions of depression and anxiety, PTSD, and trauma throughout multiple chapters.

A/N: Raleigh x Reader series about coming to terms with feelings during a post-movie events press tour, along with a series of flashbacks showing how you two met and become close while piloting Gipsy Danger. Sorry it took me so long to post this! Been dealing with some pretty serious health issues but am getting better! Hope you enjoy!

Read here on AO3.

December 2025

“A press tour?” you and Raleigh repeated at the same time—rather unenthusiastically.

“Well, don’t sound so excited,” Herc replied. Although the grim look on his face and crossed arms told you he was just about as thrilled as you were. The three of you sat in Pentecost’s old office, the thin strip of window that ran from floor to ceiling revealing the cold winter skies behind your new commanding officer. You still had trouble believing it was a kaiju-free world out there—a world without monsters at last. It was what everyone had wanted, worked towards for years…but, now that it was here, it was like everyone didn’t know what to do.

It had been two months since you’d closed the Breach and in that time, many of those at the Shatterdome had either returned to their families or moved on. About a quarter of the base still remained, you and Raleigh included.

“Do we really have to?” you asked. “I mean, how long is this press tour?”

“Six months,” Herc answered. “And the order came from the White House, so it would be foolish to refuse. They’ve decided to make the first stop Hong Kong to help ease you into it.”

“Okay…but what exactly does a press tour entail?” You looked to your copilot beside you, knowing from his memories that he and Yancy had done some press before he’d died, but nothing like what Herc was describing.

Herc shrugged. “Just…be interviewed, really. Go on talk shows, go to events, talk to different government officials, shake hands, get congratulations, talk to the little people. But since you two are the last two jaeger pilots left…people will probably be a bit crazier than they would’ve been years ago.”

Raleigh sighed and slumped back in his chair, running a hand down his face. You reached over and gave his arm a gentle squeeze. He covered his hand with yours and squeezed back, meeting your eyes. You almost winced at the dark circles that had seemed to take up permanent residence on his face, but yours probably weren’t much better. He gave you a small smile. “Well, at least we’ll be doing it together.”

You smiled back at him, turning back to Herc as he added, “And the official governments of whatever country we’re in will be paying for your accommodations. So you’ll have some of the nicest hotel rooms they can offer, plus no water restrictions.”

“Soooo,” you paused, your hand still in Raleigh’s, “we can take long, hot showers?”

Herc chuckled. “As long as hot as you want. You’ll be pretty pampered from what I’ve heard. You two have earned it.”

“Will you or anyone else be coming with us?”

“I’m coming for support, but they’re more interested in you since you’re young and were part of the mission to close the Breach.” His eyes fell to your shoes, and you could tell he was thinking of Chuck. As much of an ass as he was, he was still part of the team and you couldn’t deny you missed him.

“We’ll be getting a schedule and new orders soon,” Herc continued. “I’ll let you know as soon as we get more information. We’ll be heading out in two weeks.”

“Will we stay in the Shatterdome for the Hong Kong part of the tour?” Raleigh asked, his thumb rubbing soothing circles on the back of your hand. It was almost second nature for you both at this point to comfort each other however you could, mainly through touch. Not that you were complaining.

“No, they’ve got a hotel set up for you in the middle of the city. And…they want everyone to clear out of the Shatterdome soon.”

“What?” you asked, brows furrowing. “But they could revamp the jaeger program, maintain it in case it’s needed again. They can’t possibly think shutting it down again is a good idea after everything we all just sacrificed to keep it alive.” And the Shatterdome was your home now. Where would you go after the press tour?

“I don’t know what their plans are for it. No one has said anything about shutting down the jaeger program, but I’ll try to find out more. They might just want to repurpose the bunker and move the program to a new location, who knows.”

“Doubt it,” Raleigh mumbled. “They’re not known for their intelligence, evidently.”

Herc sighed. “Well, we’ve got our orders. Let’s just concentrate on getting through this without making too many waves.” He chewed on his lip for a moment, his eyes flickering to your and Raleigh’s linked hands. “Dismissed.”

You exchanged a glance with your copilot, sighing as you stood and made your way back to your room. You didn’t even realize you were still holding Raleigh’s hand until Newt’s “hey lovebirds” as he passed you in the hall.

August 2025

As the last of the flying sparks faded away, Raleigh’s smile took their place. It was fitting, since it felt like there were also sparks flying in your stomach whenever those blue eyes landed on you.

You lifted your visor to return his smile. “Hey! Looking for Gipsy?”

“Yep.” He’d changed from his torn sweater and worn-down jacket into military-issue cargo pants, boots, and a dark blue sweater that brought out his eyes. “And you mentioned you would be with Tendo? Is he here?”

“Ayyy, Becket boy!”

Raleigh’s face lit up enough to make rainy Hong Kong seem like paradise. They embraced before Tendo led Raleigh a few feet away to the railing overlooking Gipsy as she went through maintenance. You heard Raleigh mutter “so beautiful” reverently as he stared at her and couldn’t help but pretend he was talking about you. Stop it, you told yourself. You’re in the middle of a war for Christ’s sake.

You only half listened as Tendo rattled off all the improvements made to the jaeger before piping up at your name. “What?”

Tendo made his way over to his workstation with Raleigh trailing behind. He stopped next to you and smiled and you couldn’t help but smile back. He seemed to know how to pull happiness from you with just a look.

“I was telling Raleigh how you’re one of our best,” Tendo said. “And a damn good pilot, too.”

Raleigh perked up. “Hey, I forgot to ask. Are you one of the candidates for my copilot?”

You nodded, feeling excited and also slightly sick at the prospect of Raleigh inside your head. You’d definitely have to get a handle on your thoughts beforehand—if he chose you. “It definitely took some nagging, but I did manage to convince Pentecost to add me to the roster.”

He beamed. “I look forward to it.”

You smiled in return. “Me, too.”

“So, um…” he hesitated, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Tendo’s a bit busy, but what about you? Do you want to get some lunch?”

“Tendo!” you called over your shoulder. “Will you survive if I go get lunch?”

“Knock yourself out,” he replied from where he was bent over a piece of machinery. “But not literally. Your hands are smaller than mine, so I’ll need you to help me with this piece later.”

“Okay, I’ll see you in a bit, fat fingers.”

“Hey! They’re buff, not fat!”

You snorted, heading towards the workshop door with a laughing Raleigh in tow.

“So, you two seem like you get along well. Are you close?”

“I’d like to think so,” you answered as you slapped your visor and gloves down on the table near the door, muttering a shy thanks as Raleigh jumped ahead of you to hold the door. “Don’t tell him I said this, but he is pretty awesome. But he’d just let that go to his head.”

Raleigh smiled, looking around the bustling hallway on the way to the mess hall. You remembered how empty the Shatterdome was when you first arrived. You were one of the first people there with Pentecost and Herc, and the task of turning it into the bustling resistance base it was now seemed impossible. Now with Pentecost’s plan to seal the Breach, it felt like everything was finally coming together for the final attack in a way that made your stomach twist in anticipation. You could very well see the Breach up close soon—and may even die in an attempt to seal it. You resisted the urge to sigh, not wanting to worry Raleigh. Although his mind might have been wandering in the same direction.

You’d been lost in your thoughts and silent for some time during your walk, but he didn’t seem to mind. He threw another lopsided smile your way before jogging ahead of you several steps to hold the mess hall door open for you. You thanked him again, your stomach doing little somersaults at his manners. A good portion of the men on base either ignored you or were constantly trying to one up you, likely intimidated by your skillset. You’d gotten used to getting shoved around, whether it was an accident or some jealous peer trying to prove their superiority. Raleigh had none of that and in fact, seemed to even want to make sure you were taken care of, insisting you go ahead of him in line with your tray, offering to help you reach things, and even asking if you wanted help carrying your tray to one of the open tables. You’d heard stories about the nightmare he’d been through in losing his brother and it amazed you that he was still so sweet and protective, making you yearn for the spot next to him in Gipsy even more.

“So how are you adjusting to the Shatterdome?” you asked as you sat across from him. “Or is it pretty similar to the military bases you’ve been on?”

“Well,” he loaded his fork with an impressive amount of food from multiple sections of his tray. “It’s a lot busier, but that’s probably ’cause they’ve stuffed everyone into one base versus being scattered across several. But I was at the Wall before this and that was just as hectic, so I don’t mind.”

“Looks like there’s plenty of room at this table,” a familiar Australian accent said behind you.

You turned and returned Herc’s smile as he and Chuck headed towards you, trays in hand. “Max!” you cried.

The little bulldog’s tongue lolled out of his mouth happily as he broke into a run and jumped up on the bench next to you. You gave him a good scratch behind the ears as he leaned into you, laughing and pushing him away as he tried to lick at your tray.

Chuck slid into the bench next to you, giving you a nod in greeting as Herc settled next to Raleigh, introducing his copilot.

“He’s more my copilot,” Chuck replied, making you roll your eyes. “Right, Dad?”

Herc eyed him warily and you shook your head. Herc was always so sweet to his son who only ever gave him grief in return. While he’d never turned his ire on you, it didn’t mean you wanted to smack him any less.

The urge to smack became stronger and stronger as Chuck tried to intimidate Raleigh into a pissing competition. You’d seen plenty of pilots do it before—and many had even tried to start it with you—and some even ended with fists. Raleigh maintained his composure well, but you could see the fury building in his eyes, his body stiff and unforgiving. You made a mental note to never get on that side of him. You’d heard enough stories to know he could punt anyone into next week if he wanted to.

“Just make sure you keep up,” Chuck said as he stood and adjusted his baseball cap, “or I’ll drop you like a sack of kaiju shit. Come on, Max!”

Max looked at you and whined as you put another bite of food in your mouth. You sighed and threw a piece of chicken up in the air. Max barked happily before snapping it up in his jaws midair, his little butt wiggling in happiness.

“Max!” Chuck called again and Max went scampering after him.

“He’s a smart kid,” Herc said sadly. “I raised him on me own, but never quite knew whether to give him a hug or a kick in the ass.”

Raleigh paused, glancing at you before replying, “With respect, sir, I’m pretty sure which one he needs.”

Herc’s lips formed a thin line before he turned back to his food in silence. The air felt tense, but you couldn’t help noticing the giant salad Raleigh had created out of his veggies, mashed potatoes, bread, and chicken. You chuckled to yourself as you took a drink of your water.

Raleigh smiled, all his earlier menace disappearing the second he met your eyes. “What?”

“You’ve created a monstrosity on your plate.”

He laughed. “Hey, it’s all going to the same place. You should try it.”

“Tell that to my taste buds.”

“Aw, come on, it won’t hurt ya!” He reached over and dumped a forkful of your chicken into the mashed potatoes.

“Hey!” You shoved futilely at his hand while he took the other and spread some mashed potatoes on your bread like butter.

“There you go!”

“That looks disgusting,” you laughed.

Raleigh’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “Don’t knock it till you try it.”

You frowned in disgust, sticking out your tongue as he held your mashed potato-covered bread out to you.

“Don’t make me play airplane with your bread.”

Still frowning, but also trying not to laugh at how effortless your rapport felt, you slowly took the bread from him and took a bite. It wasn’t half bad, but you weren’t ready to let him know he won. “Plehhhh.”

“You liar, you like it!” he beamed triumphantly.

You scooped the chicken back out of your mashed potatoes and redeposited them in their section of the tray.

“Hey, that’s the best part!”

“Noooooo, you create as many monstrosities on your plate as you want, but leave mine alone.”

Herc chuckled. “How many kaiju guts have you helped the research team transport and this is what grosses you out?”

“Look at his plate, it’s practically its own kaiju!”

Raleigh laughed loud and bright, drawing the attention of several neighboring tables and you smiled, proud you’d been the one to draw that out of him. For a moment, the two of you just stared at each other with dopey grins on your faces and you couldn’t help but admire how his eyes lit up. When you’d first entered the elevator, before he’d noticed you, he carried the weight of someone who had seen too many horrors. Now, you felt like you were catching a glimpse of the man he’d been before—the carefree Raleigh that had his brother to guard his back and bring joy into his life. You only hoped that if you were chosen as his copilot, you could do the same.

December 2025

“Pretty sure Hermann’s about to run up the wall ’cause of Newt’s—hey, what’s wrong?” you asked as your bedroom door shut behind you with a clang.

Raleigh sat on the bed wearing an unfamiliar black jacket, holding an identical one in his hands. His brow was furrowed and he clutched the clothing like it might evaporate if he wasn’t careful.

“…Rals?”

Raleigh looked up at you in shock and it took you a moment to realize you’d called him by the nickname Yancy had always used for him. You hadn’t meant to; it had leapt from your mouth unbidden and the wounded animal look in your copilot’s eyes made you wish you could take it back.

“I’m sorry,” you muttered so quietly, you weren’t even sure he’d heard you.

His attention returned to the jacket in his hands. He turned it and you could see Gipsy’s symbol in a large white design on the back. You remembered seeing flashes of Raleigh and Yancy wearing jackets just like it before Alaska. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “I actually, um…” He stood, gently wrapping the jacket around your shoulders. “Here, put your arms through—oh, well, it sort of swallows you.”

“Don’t worry, I’m a good swimmer.” You smiled, hoping to ease some of his pain.

He chuckled, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “We can get it fitted. I thought they might be nice for the press tour—or just to have. You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want to.”

“I’ll wear it if you wear yours. We can match.”

He was quiet as his hands gently ran up and down your arms, sliding further down until his fingers were intertwined with yours. When he met your eyes again, you saw tears threatening to spill over.

You frowned. “Raleigh? Are you—”

“I, um,” he cleared his throat, shrugging off his jacket and throwing it on the bed, “need some air. I’ll be back.”

You watched for a moment as he rushed out of the room before something small and white on the inside of his jacket caught your eye. You picked it up to find his name stitched in white lettering on the inside corner. With a start, you checked your own jacket and your heart plummeted as you realized what had gotten him so emotional: there, on the inside of your own jacket, was the name “Yancy Becket.”

You immediately shucked your jacket off your shoulders, slinging it carefully over your arm before running out into the hallway. “Raleigh, wait!”

He turned halfway to the door at the end of the hall leading outside.

You held the jacket out to him. “I can’t take this.”

He gave you a watery smile, sniffling. “No, I want you to have it.”

“Rals, if anyone should have Yancy’s jacket, it’s you.”

He turned to face you fully and took the jacket from you. He stared at it for a moment before slinging it back around your shoulders, holding the lapels so you couldn’t remove it again. “It…” He licked his lips and closed his eyes for a moment before looking at you again. “It feels like this way…Yancy’s protecting you. You have no idea how much you’ve saved me, Y/N. It feels like you’re his way of cosmic apology and it just—it just feels right.”

Now it was your turn to get teary eyed. “Raleigh…”

He cupped your face in his hands, rubbing the rough pads of his thumbs over your cheeks before leaving a lingering kiss on your forehead. You pushed your arms through the jacket sleeves and wrapped them around his middle. He pulled you against him, resting his cheek against your hair as he took a shuddery breath.

A wolf whistle behind you made you jump and you turned to see Tendo walking past. You laughed, Raleigh’s arms still securely around your shoulders as you felt him shake with his own laughter. Despite Raleigh’s sweetness and the comments and whistles you got from your peers, you couldn’t help but still feel insecure. You weren’t sure what you and Raleigh were anymore, really—definitely more than friends, but did he really want to be with you like a boyfriend or even a lover? You two had just saved the world and were just about to do a grueling press tour; he had enough on his mind. The connection between pilots was always special, wasn’t it? Maybe that was all it was.

Raleigh pulled you from your thoughts as his hands fell back down to his sides. “I’m going on a walk…do you wanna join me?”

You smile and nod before following him to the door. Your heart skipped a beat as he jogged the last few steps just so he could hold the door for you, ever the gentleman. As you exited into the cold winter air, you could feel his warm hand slip into yours.

Taglist: @that-girl-named-alex @wayward-avenging

#raleigh becket x reader #raleigh becket #pacific rim #pacific rim fanfiction #charlie hunnam fanfiction #raleigh becket imagine #raleigh becket fanfiction #a world without monsters #my writing

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no-passaran · 23 days

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Video transcription: warning racism & discrimination. Indian settlers dressed as Indigenous Jarawa in blackface dance at the official opening of Andaman airport. The Indian government's racist attitude to Andaman and Nicobar Islands' tribes is a threat to their lands and survival - like the uncontacted Shompen people, who won't survive the Indian government's plan to turn their island into the "Hong Kong of India".

From Survival International:

The indigenous peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India —including the Great Andamanese, Jarawa, Sentinelese and Shompen— have endured centuries of racism that has justified the theft of their land and their near-total annihilation. Indigenous peoples of India are still often treated with contempt, as racist displays like this video of Indian settlers wearing blackface shows. These attitudes continue to fuel land thefts today.

For example, the Indian government is set on using Indigenous land for development without consent. The Shompen who live on Great Nicobar Island are at risk of being wiped out if their forest is used for a mega-development project, which aims to settle over 650,000 people on the island— the equivalent of an 8,000% increase in population.

Without their forest, the Shompen, most of whom are uncontacted, could be totally wiped out.

More information on the Shompen, the Indian Government's mega-project for turning their island into a military, commercial and touristic base through ecocide and genocide, and a link to easily send a pre-written email to the government officials and companies involved here:

Some context to understand why Indian settlers are caricaturely dressed up as Jarawa people in this airport:

The Jarawa are a nomadic cultural group indigenous to the Andaman Islands, where nowadays indigenous peoples are outnumbered by settlers from India. Still, like most tribal peoples who live self-sufficiently on their ancestral lands, the Jarawa people thrive and their numbers are steadily growing. Research on their nutrition and health found that their nutrition is "optimal", in large part thanks to their deep knowledge of their natural surroundings (they have detailed knowledge of more than 150 plant and 350 animal species) and the well-being of the forests.

In the 1990s, the local Indian settler authorities revealed their long-term ‘master plan’ to settle the Jarawa in two villages with an economy based on fishery, suggesting that hunting and gathering could be their ‘sports’. This meant forcing the Jarawa, who are nomadic and get their food from hunting and gathering, to abandon their way of living. The plan was so prescriptive it even detailed what style of clothes the Jarawa should wear.

Forced settlement had been fatal for other tribes in the Andaman Islands, but a vigorous campaign brought success and in 2004 the authorities announced that the Jarawa would be able to choose their own future with minimal intervention. However, in the next years (most notably 2010), Indian settler authorities have again tried to force the Jarawa to abandon their way of life and become part of India's mainstream society. This pressure continues, including Indian MPs asking for residential schools to be created to take away Jarawa children from their families and strip them from their culture.

Indian government officials repeatedly refer to the Jarawa people as "primitive", "backwards" and "uncivilized".

Tribal peoples like the Jarawa are used as a tourist claim by Indian settlers, who organize "human safaris" for tourists to go see Jarawa people. Even though in 2002 India's Supreme Court ordered closing the highway that runs through Jarawa land, it's still open and used by thousands of outsiders who go watch them like they're wild animals in human safaris.

Outsiders, both local settlers and international poachers enter their rich forest reserve to steal the game the tribe needs to survive. Although in recent years many poachers have been arrested, none have been sentenced by the courts, despite the offence carrying a prison term of up to seven years.

Jarawa girls and women are sexually abused by poachers, settlers, bus drivers and others. Jarawa people report outsiders who get drunk on alcohol and high on marijuana going in Jarawa villages to rape Jarawa girls and women.

Vehicles queue to enter the Jarawa reserve along the Andaman Trunk Road © G Chamberlain/ Survival

Source: Survival International.

#shompen #great nicobar island #india #indigenous #racism #antiracism #imperialism #end the occupation #stateless nations #blackface #end the genocide #genocide #colonialism #human rights #self determination #💬#rape tw

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write-a-circle · 2 years

Text

crush headcanons

ft. seychelles, hong kong, lithuania

content warning: none

SEYCHELLES

It’s hard to tell exactly who, as Seychelles is so sweet and friendly to everyone, but if you look close enough, you’ll see that she’ll get shyer around them.

The signs are subtle: the way her lips quirk up when she sees them, that extra spring when she steps and dances, how she offers to stay and help them even after her own work had finished

Seychelles would get even clumsier around you, hands fumbling and tripping over herself every second. Sometimes Seychelles is glad that her skin isn’t pale, or her blush would be so bright and visible that someone standing from outer space could see it as bright as day.

Whenever she’s with them, Seychelles feels like she’s standing next to the gate to heaven. It was beautiful and dazzling, it calls to the bottom of her very soul. Yet her hands are tied. She couldn’t reach out nor move a step.

It would take her a very long time to confess, or maybe she wouldn’t even confess at all. She was dull and clumsy and was only good for her singing and dancing - she was useless. Why should someone so amazing deserve to be stuck with her?

Whether if her crush chooses to return her feelings or to give their love to another, Seychelles would be there to support them no matter what.

HONG KONG

Hong Kong’s crushes are usually on people that he’s already friends with, and he doesn’t realize it until someone points it out for him. Those lingering touches and short silences between sentences? Yeah, he’s definitely got it down.

He loves how their mind and his synchronizes, the way theirs and his thoughts bounce off of each other, and it’s very comforting for Hong Kong to know that he could relax around them at all times. He’s known, laughed and cried with them for so long that he feels like he could always be himself with them.

He doesn’t need to choose his words carefully when they talk, Hong Kong knows that he could share every thought with them, whether it be his interests and hobbies or his feelings on Yao’s insistence on not letting him become independent

He’s a straightforward person but deep down, Hong Kong doesn’t want to lose his friendship with them. He’ll tell them one day, he says to himself, yet seeing them cling to his shoulder for dear life as they laugh uncontrollably at a bad joke he made, Hong Kong realizes that he can’t keep his feelings down for much longer.

LITHUANIA

This is a tough one. Lithuania doesn’t crush often, but once he does, he crushes hard. It might even last for centuries, especially when it’s one-sided (see: Belarus). He can’t help it, his heart can’t let things go easily, even more when it’s someone so beautiful yet so untouchable.

Lithuania definitely gets nervous, stumbles on his words, nods at everything his crush says and might be even more of a pushover than he usually is.

Like Seychelles, he tries to help them out as much as he can. Document overloading? Yeah, he’ll help them sort them out. They’re tired? He’ll cook and finish chores for them, they should go and get some sleep, he’ll be fine.

Lithuania tries to become some sort of figure for them to depend on, and that takes a massive toll on him. His schedule is already jam-packed with work, work, work, work, and even more work from trying to help his crush out? Lithuania convinces himself that he’s getting sleep every time he blinks.

The stress he gets from putting way too much on his plate worsens his already bad mental health, and everything just gets worse and worse and worse. It isn’t even the crush’s doing, Lithuania himself is the center of the problem.

Estonia and Latvia eventually notices the dark circles and greying hair. They ask Lithuania what’s going on, only to be pushed away. And it’s not Poland? They delved into investigation and all signs pointed to Lithuania pushing himself around for someone he liked.

A confrontation between the two Baltics and Lithuania’s crush is inevitable, even if Tolys himself denies everything that was going on.

Overall, Lithuania needs to get his shit back together before attempting to enter a relationship, but when he does, he is going to be the absolute best at courtship.

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panicinthestudio · 1 year

Video

youtube

COVID rapidly spreads in China as government eases strict quarantine rules, December 27, 2022

China is grappling with the rapid spread of COVID-19 after the government began rolling back its zero-COVID restrictions earlier this month. Now, cases are spiraling across towns and cities, hospitals are overburdened, medical staff are outnumbered and crematoriums are running out of space. Judy Woodruff reports.

PBS NewsHour

There is no nuance left in politics or public health policy when there is either an absolute and strict inflexibility of zero COVID or wholesale dismantling of safeguards before the healthcare or support systems are prepared for the waves that have been forcibly suppressed. The political insistence on using their own less effective, non-mRNA vaccines based on the original strains rather than Delta or Omicron, coupled with a low vaccination rate of the vulnerable and elderly is not helping easing the transition at all.

The way they’ve been counting mortality from COVID diverged from nearly every other country since early 2020. A death had to be directly attributable to SARS-CoV-2 eliminating cases of many preexisting or undiagnosed conditions, chronic illnesses, and other high risk factors that may have been exacerbated by the virus which became listed as the direct cause or if they simply tested negative in the few days before dying. The policy as of this week will further limit the count only to deaths caused by pneumonia or respiratory failure after contracting COVID, in addition to dropping much of the remaining inbound quarantines and regular case counts becoming even more inconsistent with lived reality.

It appears the PRC was prepared to stay in suspended animation within an onionskin of self-isolation layers indefinitely, maintaining the appearance of control and adherence to policy that was left to different local officials to execute. Downgrading the classification removes the local, emergency-style powers to lockdown and quarantine which were used capriciously. Residential buildings, offices and commercial areas such as malls, and even theme parks could be suddenly cordoned without warning, causing panic due to the stringency of testing and knock-on effects if a positive case was found rather than fear of having contacted or contracted the virus. Becoming listed as a close contact or a complete stranger’s positive result could mean further quarantining and repeated testing, as well any change in one’s COVID passport status severely restricting mobility for work or education, travel, or even basic necessities. The protests spread because “dynamic zero” was anything but dynamic, refusing to change or amend course in preparation for a transition to an endemic or post-epidemic state. People were simply fed up and the building momentum was becoming a potential danger to a regime that had just renewed its own political mandates.

These things aren’t happening in isolation, China is also changing tact on its travel restrictions domestically and internationally. The Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau have been trying to reopen ports and travel with the Mainland for years now for travel and economic reasons. Both were forced into accepting one-way policies where it was difficult for their citizens to enter China or even between one another, while rules were softened for travelers and politicians entering from and returning to the Mainland for short trips with the reason that the pandemic was less well-contained than within the Mainland.

As news of the highly visible current outbreak within China is continuing to emerge, the Hong Kong SAR is now proudly announcing agreements have been made with the Mainland to drop their travel restrictions posthaste. It’s being reported that many are travelling specifically for mRNA vaccines which are approved in Macau and Hong Kong.

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undertakers-witchy-mermaid · 3 months

Text

Welp, I finally caught a case of the ague; the germs always come to get me in February. 😷

But since I'm sick and need some character comfort, I decided to write some purely indulgent headcanons. I literally NEVER post my writings, like, ANYWHERE.

However, there is a sadly small amount of content for You're My Loveprize In Viewfinder, and I've been craving the characters like mad because I've been re-reading it. Plus I thought it could make a sick fan's day someday, so spreading the love. 💓

Slight N$FW Content Warning

Nothing major, only hinting, but better to be safe than sorry.

Also a slight c0c@!n3 reference.

So I hope you guys like it:

You're My Loveprize In Viewfinder Characters when you're sick...

Feilong:

(I love him so much, he's my absolute favorite, my pretty boy.)

Upon his orders, Tao brings you a cup of medicinal tea probably every hour. It's awful, but Feilong insists it will help, and it very much does.

Feilong rests by your side in his bed, dabbing the sweat from your fever with a cool, cold cloth.

He sings softly to you in Cantonese to soothe you when you're squirming and fussing, because God, you're body is so uncomfortable to be in right now.

He wraps you in his robes so you're warm and cozy, and also to help you sweat out the fever.

Feilong is constantly by your side. There isn't ever a moment he isn't at least within your sight while you're ill. Even if he takes a business call, he only goes as far as the window that looks out over Hong Kong.

You try to tell him that if he constantly lingers by your side he'll get sick, too.

He informs you he does not care by kissing you full on the lips, telling you afterwards as he looks in your eyes that he isn't going anywhere.

Of course, he does get sick.

But you're better by this time, so you and Tao lovingly nurse him back to health, too. 🩵

Asami:

He insists that s3× is the best way to help you sweat out your fever.

You decline the first few times, but being as persistent as he is, you eventually consent.

It does actually help.

Avoids smoking around you, so he goes onto the balcony if he really needs a drag; but he leaves the door open so he can hear you in case you need anything.

Like Feilong though, he doesn't leave your side if he can help it, and has his men run out for things from the pharmacy, the grocery store, etc.

And if he has to leave, he asks you if you want anything while he's gone, kissing your forehead before he goes.

He leaves his men with you, should you need anything.

But mostly you just sleep if he's gone.

Comes back home with flowers and any kind of indulgent food you like; even if you requested the most simple food, he'll bring you the most expensive and extravagant version of it he can find.

Makes sure you shower every day to help you in feeling better.

Surprisingly, he never gets sick. Not even once.

Lucky bastard.

Bonus:

Takaba:

He becomes a retriever in every sense of the word.

The second you indicate any kind of sickness setting on, the very first thing he does is run to the nearest store to get you literally every cold, flu, and cough medicine on the shelves and your favorite kind of soup, and any other foods you like.

Stays by you to get you comfy in your bed, lovingly pats your forehead when you sweat, makes sure you have the TV on, makes sure you have tissues and a small army of pills on your nightstand.

He gets sick quite literally the second after you do, but he pushes through it to nurse you back to health.

Will tend to you to the point of exhaustion.

Mikhail:

(Yeah, I think he's kinda hot too.)

Insists that having a snort of c0c@!n3 will help.

It doesn't.

So much for that.

Next, he has you try out the sauna.

This actually does help.

Good job, Mikhail.

You wake up sweating with him literally wrapped all the way around you.

He sleeps like a rock so you just lay there and sweat out toxins.

Unlike Fei and Asami, he usually goes on with business as usual, so you really only see him at night. During the daytime Yuri sits with you.

Yuri doesn't really know what to do so he just sits and plays cards with you.

You lose, because there's more congestion in your head than brain right now.

Yuri gets angry because he thinks you're not trying.

Luckily Mikhail comes back and tells Yuri you're supposed to be nice to sick people as he kisses you hello.

He makes Yuri apologise.

He does.

Mikhail doesn't understand that you're not supposed to make out with someone who is sick.

So, naturally, it all ends with you and Yuri tending to Mikhail once you're well.

You love him but he's a literal child when he's sick, so you have to keep Yuri from blowing his stack while also taking care of Mikhail's needs.

You throw in the towel when Yuri gets sick, too.

Mikhail's ended up being more satire, but he seems so immature, I really couldn't help myself. I hope you enjoyed, and knowing me, I'll think of something or get further in the series and end up making edits to this post. Have a nice day, and feel better! 💙

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beardedmrbean · 6 months

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President Sauli Niinistö has warned of jumping to hasty conclusions in regard to the damaged gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia.

Speaking to Finnish journalists in Rome, Niinistö's comments related to recent interest in the movements of the NewNew Polar Bear, a Hong Kong flagged ship owned by a Chinese firm, that coincided with the time and place the Balticconnector was damaged.

"What we know now is that the Chinese vessel has been on-site, specifically on top of where the damage occurred. This is the direction the investigation has taken, and the vessel has not shown a great desire to clarify its movements," Niinistö told reporters during his state visit to Italy, according to Helsingin Sanomat.

Data labour

Language AIs draw on a large amount of human labour. This type of click work is often done in poorer countries, but in Finland, a special group does the job: convicted criminals.

Prisoners are training artificial intelligence language models for a Finnish company called Metrocs, reports Hufvudstadsbladet.

A few times a week, inmates work on specially-equipped laptops in three-hour sessions. The task at hand could best be described as reading comprehension, with a particular focus on construction industry terminology.

But it's not a language lesson, says the Swedish-language daily, they're actually training artificial intelligence.

Finland mourns disco queen

Finnish papers are looking back at the life of Aira Samulin, after she passed away on Monday at the age of 96.

Samulin was known for running a dance school, which she sold in the late 1980s. With her fiery coif, she was famous for her energy and youthfulness and was active on many fronts, including local politics. More recently, she devoted time to supporting mental health work and the elderly's right to live at home. Samulin outlived her schizophrenic daughter who spent her life in institutional care.

A former model, she was also open about topics previously taboo in Finnish society, such as domestic abuse, alcoholism and divorce, which she filed for in 1963 from her first husband, according to Iltalehti. No-fault divorce was not introduced in Finland until the late 1980s.

#nunyas news #updates from up north

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mariacallous · 9 months

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Internal dissent within the mostly volunteer disease-news network known as ProMED—which alerted the world to the earliest cases of Covid, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and SARS—has broken out into the open and threatens to take down the internationally treasured network unless an external sponsor can be found.

The struggle for the future of the low-tech site, which also sends out each piece of content on a no-reply email list with 20,000 subscribers, has been captured in dueling posts to its front page. On July 14, a post by ProMED’s chief content officer, a veterinarian and infectious-disease expert named Jarod Hanson, announced that ProMED is running out of money. Because it is being undermined by data-scraping and reselling of its content, Hanson wrote, ProMED would turn off its RSS and Twitter feeds, limit access to its decades of archives to the previous 30 days, and introduce paid subscriptions.

Hanson is at the top of ProMED’s masthead, and the post was signed “the ProMED team,” which gave the announced changes the feeling of a united action. That turned out not to be the case. Very early on August 3, a post addressing “Dear friends and readers of ProMED” appeared on the site’s front page. The open letter was signed by 21 of its volunteer and minimally paid moderators and editors, all prominent physicians and researchers, and it makes clear that no unity existed.

“Although the [July post] was signed by ‘The ProMED Team,’ we the undersigned want to assure you that we had no prior knowledge,” the open letter stated. “With great sadness and regret … we, the undersigned, are hereby suspending our work for ProMED.”

The letter was taken off the site within a few hours, but the text had already been pushed to email subscribers. (WIRED’s copy is here.) On Friday, signers of the open letter said they had been locked out of the site’s internal dashboard. The site’s regular rate of posting slowed Friday and Saturday, but appeared to pick up again on Sunday.

Maybe this sounds like a small squabble in a legacy corner of the internet—but to public health and medical people, ProMED falling silent is deeply unnerving. For more than 20 years, it has been an unmissable daily read, ever since it received an emailed query in February 2003 about chat-room rumors of illnesses near Hong Kong. As is the site’s practice, that initial piece of intel was examined by several volunteer experts and cross-checked against a separate piece of news they found online. In its post, which is not currently accessible, ProMED reproduced both the email query and the corroborating information, along with a commentary. That post became the first news published outside China of the burgeoning epidemic of SARS viral pneumonia, which would go on to sweep the world that spring and summer—and which was acknowledged by the regional government less than 24 hours afterward.

Using the same system of tips and local news sources, combined with careful evaluation, ProMED published the first alerts of a number of other outbreaks, including two more caused by novel coronaviruses: MERS and Covid, which was detected via two online articles published by media in China on December 30, 2019. Such alerts also led the World Health Organization to reconsider what it will accept as a trustworthy notice of the emergence of epidemics. When the organization rewrote the International Health Regulations in the wake of SARS, committing member nations to a public health code of conduct, it included “epidemic intelligence from open sources” for the first time.

On the surface, the dispute between ProMED’s moderators and its leadership team—backed by the professional organization that hosts the project, the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID)—looks like another iteration of a discussion that has played out online for years: how to keep publishing news if no one wants to pay for it. But while that is an enduring problem, the question posed by the pause in ProMED’s operations is bigger than subscriptions. It looks more like this: How do you make a case for the value of human-curated intelligence in a world that prefers to pour billions into AI?

“ProMED might not always be the fastest, but it always provides important context that would not come through a news report,” says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital, who cofounded the automated online outbreaks database HealthMap and has collaborated with ProMED. “It’s the anti-social media, in a way. It’s a trusted voice.”

“ProMED possesses trained scientists that are able to discern what is really a problem and what is fake news,” says Scott J. N. McNabb, a research professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and a former chief of public health surveillance at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “That's a tremendous advantage. So the reports are not coming from uninformed individuals, they're coming from professionals that have the medical expertise and public health expertise to really discern: ‘Is this genuine or not?’”

To understand why the fate of ProMED feels momentous, it helps to know a little bit about its history. The deliberately Web 1.0 site—it has no comment section and runs no graphics, so as not to stress the bandwidth in low-income nations—was created in 1994 and began being hosted by ISID in 1999. Its chief founder was the late John Payne Woodall, an entomologist and virologist who had a hand in most of the post-World War II build-up of global public health infrastructure, working for the Rockefeller Foundation, the WHO, and the CDC. (Cofounders were Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a biological weapons expert and former professor of microbiology at SUNY Purchase.)

Woodall believed that everyday people’s reports of events could constitute important early warnings of looming problems. The value of open source intelligence might seem obvious today, with every movement of the war in Ukraine, for instance, tracked on Twitter. But at the time, Woodall was challenging the accepted view that official public health surveillance data, gathered by governments and nongovernmental entities, was the key to understanding the havoc diseases can create. And he was leveraging early civilian access to the internet to do it. The site was established and scored its momentous early success exposing SARS all before Twitter launched and Facebook opened to the general public in 2006, and before the first iPhone went on sale in 2007.

The arrival of social media made it possible to instantly share information on all kinds of emergencies, from the Arab Spring to the Fukushima nuclear disaster to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and many accounts built audiences and monetization by conveying real-time alerts on arrays of subjects, often with no sourcing attached. The speed of Twitter (now known as X) could make ProMED’s careful verification look slow; though the organization pushed its content to its own Twitter account, those posts would often arrive after a breaking-news account got there first.

That left the site in a battle for funding. Its online host ISID lost revenue during the pandemic, as professionals stayed home from the conferences it had hosted. Internally, money began to dry up. One of the complaints aired in the open letter is that payments to the moderators, who receive a small stipend, are already in arrears and will be delayed for two more months.

“We are really up against a challenge of long-term, sustainable funding for operating ProMED,” says ISID’s CEO, Linda MacKinnon, who described the organization as sipping from project grants to keep core operations going on a budget of about $1 million a year. (MacKinnon spoke after the July 14 announcement but before the open letter was published.) “We have sort of grown organically over the years, from project to project that were all cobbled together, but not stepping back and putting together a business case of how to sustain, how to innovate. We have found ourselves partnering or collaborating with hospitals and academic institutions, but [not finding a] long-term home.”

Hanson, who published the post outlining the changes, told WIRED by email Friday evening: “Not a single entity has stepped forward with any type of funding to allow ProMED to continue to operate as it has for 28 years, which is to say open and free to the public. We have diligently pursued funding and messaged our plan for the past year and made our financial situation widely known.” He added, “Funders are primarily interested in the latest and greatest tools, so from their strategic perspective there's little value in ProMED—an aging but highly effective email surveillance system—to show to their leadership/benefactors.”

A deeper look at recent history shows that the battle over ProMED is not only about money, no matter how critical that might be. After Woodall, ProMED was led for years by Larry Madoff, an infectious disease physician and professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who built a wide network of collaborators. Madoff was abruptly dismissed by ISID two years ago, and both he and moderators who worked with him say they do not know why. MacKinnon will only say the action was “a board decision.” Madoff held the title of editor in chief; according to the site’s team listings, that title is not now in use.

Asked for comment, Madoff said this: “ProMED is a public good, and it ought to be freely available and remain so. It would be a shame if it lost large segments of its audience, many of whom are in low-resource settings, because of a failure of the parent organization to adequately provide resources.” He added: “Losing subscribers will hobble ProMED because it depends on its readers to send information. By not having that big subscriber base, by restricting your base through a paid model, you’re going to lose that.”

In 2020, Madoff told WIRED the site’s subscriber base was about 83,000 addresses (which cannot now be confirmed), whereas MacKinnon’s team set the current count at about 20,000. The open letter, among other demands, asks ISID to “ensure the administrative and editorial independence of ProMED's content and subscription policies. This could largely be accomplished by restoring a true Editor-in-Chief position with independent executive authority.”

WIRED reached out to all 21 signatories of the open letter to verify that it is authentic. As of Monday, six—Marjorie P. Pollack, Leo Liu, Maria Jacobs, Martin Hugh-Jones, Pablo M. Beldomenico, and Thomas Yuill—confirmed that it represents their views. “In the first six months of Covid, I averaged three hours of sleep a night,” says Pollack, an infectious disease physician who first joined the site in 1997, and wrote the December 30, 2019 post that first flagged the emergence of Covid. “We have been a collegial group of people, and we understood that ProMED represented a labor of love.”

Asked for comment on the open letter, MacKinnon emailed a statement Friday afternoon that was also posted to the ProMED site. ”We recognize that members of the ProMED community are concerned about the continuation of the platform,” it says in part. “We also know that we could have communicated changes more clearly to the community and apologize for any confusion and distress caused.” The statement went on to enumerate the site’s financial challenges and ended with a plea for “unrestricted operational funding and investment.”

The irony is that ProMED may have run out of runway just as past obstacles to its growth begin to evaporate. Unmeasured but apparently substantial portions of medical and public health users have departed Twitter following the shifts in its ownership and politics, and none of its replacements—Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or others—have accumulated the velocity or density to match. That could allow a revived ProMED to reestablish its utility as a trusted source that deserves broader support. But as even ProMED insiders acknowledge, that will need some kind of partner. Last week, supporters said they were hoping to lobby major public health graduate schools, or even the WHO’s new Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence, based in Berlin, to lend ProMED financial support or a new institutional home.

“ProMED needs to be saved,” McNabb says. “We can move it into an academic setting, or into a broader context like a WHO collaborating center—wherever people feel comfortable and it can be funded appropriately. But we need to save it. It’s too important for public health.”

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1mysteriousstranger · 2 years

Text

Stevia

Early regulation[edit]

During the 1990s, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) received two petitions requesting that stevia be classified as generally recognized as safe (GRAS), but the FDA "disagreed with [the] conclusions [detailed in the petitions]".[14] Stevia remained banned for all uses until the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, after which the FDA revised its stance and permitted stevia to be used as a dietary supplement, although still not as a food additive.[15] In 1999, prompted by early studies, the European Commission banned stevia's use in food products within the European Union pending further research.[16] In 2006, research data compiled in the safety evaluation released by the World Health Organization found no adverse effects.[17]

In December 2008, the FDA gave a "no objection" approval for GRAS status to Truvia[b] and PureVia,[c] both of which use rebaudioside A derived from the Stevia plant.[18] However, the FDA said that these products are not stevia, but a highly purified Stevia-extract product.[19] In 2015, the FDA still regarded stevia as "not an approved food additive", and stated that it "has not been affirmed as GRAS in the United States due to inadequate toxicological information".[20] In June 2016, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued an order of detention for stevia products made in China based on information that the products were made using prison labor.[21] As of 2017, high-purity Stevia glycosides are considered safe and allowable as ingredients in food products sold in the United States.[7]

Safety and regulations[edit]

A 2011 review found that the use of Stevia sweeteners as replacements for sugar might benefit children, people with diabetes, and those wishing to lower their intake of calories.[44]

Although both steviol and rebaudioside A have been found to be mutagenic in laboratory in vitro testing,[45] these effects have not been demonstrated for the doses and routes of administration to which humans are exposed.[17][46][47] Two 2010 review studies found no health concerns with Stevia or its sweetening extracts.[44][48]

The WHO's Joint Experts Committee on Food Additives has approved, based on long-term studies, an acceptable daily intake of steviol glycoside of up to 4 mg/kg of body weight.[49] In 2010, The European Food Safety Authority established an acceptable daily intake of 4 mg/kg/day of steviol, in the form of steviol glycosides. Meanwhile, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center warns that "steviol at high dosages may have weak mutagenic activity,"[50] and a review "conducted for" the Center for Science in the Public Interest notes that there are no published carcinogenicity results for rebaudioside A (or stevioside).[45]

In August 2019, the US FDA placed an import alert on Stevia leaves and crude extracts – which do not have GRAS status – and on foods or dietary supplements containing them due to concerns about safety and potential for toxicity.[51]

Availability and legal status by country or area[

The plant may be grown legally in most countries, although some countries restrict its use as a sweetener. The legally allowed uses and maximum dosage of the extracts and derived products vary widely from country to country.

Argentina: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain[52]

Australia:

Brazil: stevioside extract approved as food additive since 2005.[54]

Canada (as of November 2012)

Chile: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain[52]

China: available since 1984, regulatory status uncertain

Colombia: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain[52]

European Union: Steviol glycosides were approved and regulated as food additives by the European Commission on 11 November 2011.[8][56][57]

Hong Kong: steviol glycosides approved as food additives since January 2010[58]

India: In a notification dated 13 November 2015, FSSAI has permitted its use in a range of products. This includes carbonated water, dairy-based desserts and flavoured drinks, yoghurts, ready-to-eat cereals, fruit nectars and jams.[d][59]

Indonesia: (2012)

Israel: approved as food additive since January 2012.[61]

Japan: widely available since the 1970s and regulated as an existing additive since 1995.[62]

Korea: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Malaysia: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Mexico: mixed steviol glycoside extract (not separate extracts) approved since 2009.[third-party source needed]

New Zealand:

Norway:

Paraguay: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Peru: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Philippines: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Russian Federation: stevioside approved as food additive since 2008, in the "minimal dosage required" to achieve the goal.[64]

Saudi Arabia: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Singapore: steviol glycosides approved as food additive in certain foods, since 2005[65] Previously it was banned.[66]

South Africa: approved since September 2012 and widely available.[67]

Taiwan: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Thailand: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Turkey: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

United Arab Emirates: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

Uruguay: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

United States (as of April 2017):

Vietnam: available as of 2008, regulatory status uncertain.[52]

All steviol glycoside extracts were approved in 2008.[53]

Steviol glycosides became available as a food additive on 30 November 2012.[55]

Stevia rebaudiana leaf and extracts are available as dietary supplements.

Steviol glycosides are available as food additives since 2012.[60]

Stevia leaf is available as a dietary supplement.

All steviol glycoside extracts were approved in 2008.[53]

Steviol glycoside approved as food additive (E 960) since June 2012.[63]

The plant itself has not been approved as of September 2012.

Purified rebaudioside A has been allowed since December 2008 as a food additive (sweetener), sold under various trade names, and classified as "generally recognized as safe" ("GRAS").[7][68]

Stevia rebaudiana leaf and crude extracts have been available as dietary supplements since 1995, but the 2008 FDA authorization does not extend to them, and they do not have GRAS status.[7] In 2019, leaves and crude extracts were included in an FDA import alert with concerns about their safety for use in foods or supplements and potential for toxicity.[51]

#Safety #stevia #health #psa #wellness #well-being #toxicity #food #food additives #fda

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ramtracking · 4 days

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Low herd immunity in Hong Kong may prolong flu season, experts warn [ Flu season ]

Low herd immunity in Hong Kong may prolong flu season, experts warn [News Summary] Low vaccination rate may make it easier for dominating flu virus strain to shift, medical professors say. Stay alert: dh urges vigilance against influenza and respiratory infections. The Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of… It is hard to predict when the flu surge will end as influenza A…

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tearsinthemist · 4 days

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But the agency said that commercial milk is still safe

because of the pasteurization process, which kills bacteria, and the destruction of milk from cows infected with the virus, which are two federal and state measures taken to ensure milk safety for consumers.

“Even if [the] virus is detected in raw milk, pasteurization is generally expected to eliminate pathogens to a level that does not pose a risk to consumer health,” the FDA said.

The H5N1 bird flu is not a new virus. According to the World Health Organization, the virus was first found in humans in 1997 in Hong Kong. But researchers say that the virus has primarily infected birds on poultry farms.

Since 2022, more than 58 million domestic birds like chickens, ducks and turkeys in the United States have died from H5N1.

Scientists have also found that other mammals have been infected by the virus. In October 2022, a mink fur farm in Spain had an outbreak of the virus, indicating to researchers the potential for mammal to mammal transmission, as well as transmission to humans.

Between 2003 and 2016, more than 800 people were infected with H5N1, with the mortality rate at more than 50%, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. There have been five confirmed human cases worldwide and one death since October 2021, BBC reported.

Experts worry about the possibility of an H5N1 pandemic among humans, warning that the lack of clear and timely updates on the outbreak by some federal agencies, including failures to provide updates on the spread of H5N1 in cows and the safety of milk supplies, is reflective of the miscommunication steps at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Washington Post reported.

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wallpuckett59 · 21 days

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Forgiveness - Moving From Bitter Much Better And Gaining Better Life

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gazettereview · 23 days

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Hong Kong Man in Critical Condition After Contracting B Virus From Wild Monkeys -Read more at https://gazettereview.com/hong-kong-man-in-critical-condition-after-contracting-b-virus-from-wild-monkeys/ - https://gazettereview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/macaque-monkeys.jpg #World

Hong Kong Man in Critical Condition After Contracting B Virus From Wild Monkeys

Experts are warning individuals not to feed or touch the wild monkeys in Hong Kong after a man was injured by the animals and contracted a deadly virus. According to local health officials, the 37-year-old man, who was previously in good health, was injured by a group of wild macaque monkeys while visiting Kam Shan […]

https://gazettereview.com/hong-kong-man-in-critical-condition-after-contracting-b-virus-from-wild-monkeys/

#World

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sporadicengineerdreamer · 1 month

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The False Study of Yan Limeng

In just eight months, Yan went from being a postdoctoral felow in virology and immunology at the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Hong Kong's School of Public Health to being hailed as a hero by Trump's top advisers and conservative pundits.

As early as mid-January 2019, Yan Limeng, researcher in Hong Kong, had heard rumors that a dangerous new virus had emerged in mainland China and that the government was playing it down. Ms. Yan feeds Wang Dinggang, the host of her favorite Chinese-language YouTube show.

Yan Limeng fled Hong Kong on April 28th and left for the United States. Guo Wenguan and Ban Nong put her in a "safe house" in New York City. They hired a communications coach for her to teach her how to deal with media questions, asked her to submit several papers, and disguised her as a "whistler" before aranging her to acept media interviews. On July 10, Yan made her first appearance on the Fox News Channel, in which she confesed her journey to the United States and accused the University of HongKong of helping to cover up the epidemic. But she did not mention her relationship with Guo and Ban Nong.

After her first Fox interview, Ms. Yan embarked on a whirlwind right-wing media tour, repeating conservative talking points.She said she took hydroxychloroquine to fight the virus, despite warnings from the US Food and Drug Administration that it had no efect.She suggested that U.S. health agencies had conspired with the World Health Organization to cover up the outbreak.

In early September, Ms. Yan met with Ms. Lu, an infectious disease expert at Georgetown University, through an anonymous middleman. Lu had suggested in the past that the coronavirus could be created in the lab, and Yan told him about her research in the hope of winning support.Even after Facebook tagged Carlson's Sept 15 interview with Ms. Yan as "false information" and Twiter suspended Ms. Yan's account, Ms. Carison, Ms. Bannon and Ms. Yan didn't give up.

Yan published a second paper on Oct. 8, titled "Novel coronavirus is an unrestrictedbiological weapon," which further emphasizes the idea that the virus that has spread around the world is man-made, adding that the virus was intentionaly "released," and that the paper also contains material that appears to come from the same anonymous blogger's article. Both of Yan's controversial papers are related to GuoWenqui. The papers -- below the title and author's name, where university institutions and tunding Sources are often listed --prominently teature the names of the "Rule of Law Society" and the "Rule of Law Foundation," two nonprofit groups supported by Mr. Guo and others.

The novel coronavirus is widely believed to come from bats, and there is no evidence that the virus is artificial. Although the scientific community was quick to dismiss the paper as pseudoscience based on guesswork, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson invited Yan to appear on the show on Sept.15 to promote the paper. Even though the access to the film was tagged as fake news on social media like Facebook, it stil recorded a minimum of 8.8 milion views and entered the mainstream. It tookseveral weeks after the interview for Carlson to make it clear that he disagreed with Ms.Yans claims.

Ms.Yan's evolution from researcher to whistler is the product of the colaboration of two unrelated but increasingly united groups spreading disinformation: a smal but active overseas Chinese group, and a highly influential far-right group in the United States. Both groups see an opportunity to advance their agendas in the novel coronavirus pandemic. For overseas Chinese, Ms.Yan and her baseless claims provide a weapon for those seeking to overthrow the Chinese government. For American conservatives, it allows them to pander to rising anti-China sentiment in the West and distract attention from the Trump administration’s failure to respond to the epidemic.

Angela Rasmussen,a virologist at Columbia University,said she thought Yan’s paper was "political propaganda" designed to deceive."The paper is extremely deceptive to people without a scientific background because it is writen in very technical language, with a lot of jargon, and looks like a legitimate scientific paper. But to anyone with a background in virology or molecular biology who reads this paper, it is clear that much of it is nonsense."

From the discovery in January to the peak in September, the online political activity of "Virus Source Theory" directed by Guo Wengui and Bannon achieved great succes, whichgreatly influenced the views and lives of the local people in the United States, and ex posed the power of "fake news" to the world at a sinle sight.

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thetobaccomarketaustralia · 2 months

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How to Find the Cheapest Cigarettes in Australia

Smokers in Australia are paying an astronomical price for their cigarettes. With a pack of 20 costing upwards of $40, it’s no wonder that some are turning to illegally imported cigarettes to save money.

Tobacco prices in high-income countries are generally rising faster than purchasing power. Despite this, smoking rates have declined in many of these countries.

Illegally Imported Cigarettes

Illegal tobacco store online imports are a global problem fuelled by organised crime groups. This black market trade encourages addiction and robs governments of billions in tax revenue. Border Force has been processing record amounts of illicit cigarettes and tobacco in recent months.

The Australian government taxes tobacco products to make them less affordable, based on the average weekly ordinary time earnings (AWOTE). It also requires all cigarettes sold in Australia to be sold in plain packaging with graphic health warnings.

After a Herculean battle against the might of multinational big tobacco, Australia’s anti-tobacco laws are now the world’s gold standard in cutting cancer and premature death from smoking. But the easy availability of cheap, illegally-imported cigarettes undermines these programs. This can be frustrating for the police who work tirelessly in the field. They raid industrial storage sheds and rural safe houses smuggling cigarettes and nicotine-fuelled vapes. They also comb industrial ports in the hunt for boats loaded with contraband.

Chinese Counterfeit Cigarettes

Despite the fact that Australia has one of the lowest rates of daily smoking in the world, criminal syndicates continue to flood the country with illegal cigarettes. Smugglers are bringing them in through sea and air cargo, as well as hiding them in passenger luggage.

The average price of a pack of cigarettes in Australia is more than double that of the top-selling brands in Ireland and New Zealand, according to Numbeo data. However, a pack of cigarettes costs less in Singapore and Hong Kong.

A Chinese man who was arrested in Melbourne last March is awaiting extradition to the US over his role in a tobacco smuggling scheme that generated more than $700 million for North Korea. The Federal Bureau of Investigation alleges that Jin Guanghua helped Pyongyang manufacture counterfeit Western cigarettes to raise money for its nuclear weapons program. He is now facing charges of sanctions violations, bank fraud, and conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty to the US charges.

Black Market

When people shop online for their online tobacco store Australia products they can explore a much wider selection than what is available in local brick-and-mortar stores. This can be especially beneficial for smokers who are looking for a particular brand or variety of product that is not readily available locally.

Cigarette prices in Australia have risen dramatically following government increases in excise taxes and customs duties. In fact, the country has one of the highest cigarette prices in the world.

Cigarette price hikes are supposed to be an important tool in preventing young people from taking up smoking. But they should not be the only measure that is relied upon, according to public health expert Coral Gartner.

ecChoice

Cigarette taxes in Australia are among the highest in the world, and many smokers have had to turn to illegal websites to find affordable cigarettes. These sites sell packs of the cheapest cigarettes in Australia from overseas for a fraction of the retail price, and will ship them to Australia in discreet packages, gift wrapped to circumvent customs inspections.

Increasing tobacco excise is a widely accepted strategy to reduce smoking rates, but these increases also impact different groups of smokers. For example, younger smokers are more likely to be affected by higher prices than older smokers, since they are less accustomed to paying for their habit.

Tobacco tax increases are one of the main factors driving prices of cigarette store online in Australia, which are among the highest in the world. But some smokers are looking for alternatives to traditional cigarettes, such as e-cigarettes, which are available at a range of prices. Some of these devices are disposable, while others are reusable and offer a range of fruity flavours.

#cheapest cigarettes in Australia #online tobacco store Australia #tobacco store online #marlboro red cigarettes

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