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US Embassy in Bangkok Helps Chinese Human Rights Lawyer Flee to America
U.S. Embassy officials reached the jail and whisked Chen and her daughters away
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BANGKOK – Stuck in a Bangkok jail with a deportation order against her, Chen Guiqiu waited with dread over what seemed certain to come next. A Thai immigration official showed her surveillance video of the jail entrance, where more than a dozen Chinese security agents were waiting.
Within minutes, Chen feared, she and her two daughters would be escorted back to China, where her husband, the prominent rights lawyer Xie Yang, was held on a charge of inciting subversion – and where punishment for attempting to flee surely awaited her.
After weeks on the run, Chen was exhausted, and so was her luck. A Christian, she prayed: “Don’t desert us now, not like this.”
Help arrived, from America.
U.S. Embassy officials managed to enter the facility just in time to whisk Chen and her daughters out a back door. The Chinese agents outside soon realized what had happened and pursued them, finally meeting in a standoff at the Bangkok airport where Chinese, Thai and U.S. officials heatedly argued over custody of the family.
Chen and her supporters disclosed details of her family’s March escape for the first time to The Associated Press. Their journey reveals the lengths that China’s government has been increasingly willing to go to reach far beyond its jurisdiction in the pursuit of dissidents and their families.
The saga also demonstrates that in at least some cases, American officials are willing to push back, even at a moment weeks before President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping were to meet in Florida. The Trump administration has been criticized for downplaying human rights in foreign policy, but may have viewed Chen’s case as special – if not for herself then for her youngest daughter, a 4-year-old American citizen.
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The family’s ordeal began July 9, 2015, when the Chinese government launched a nationwide crackdown on human rights lawyers. Chen’s husband, Xie, a lawyer who represented evicted farmers and pro-democracy activists, was among dozens detained in the “7-09 crackdown” and, months later, charged with crimes against the state.
In January, Chen helped release her husband’s account of being beaten, deprived of sleep and otherwise tortured while in detention – drawing further condemnation of Beijing by Western governments. Police summoned Chen for hours-long meetings where, she said, they threatened to evict her, deny her children schooling and have her fired from her job as a professor of environmental engineering at Hunan University.
By early February, the pressure was becoming unbearable. Seemingly unable to extract a confession out of Xie, the authorities turned up threats against Chen and, increasingly, those close to her.
When police detained Chen’s 14-year-old daughter as she tried to board a train for Hong Kong, Chen knew a travel ban had been placed on their names.
That was when she decided to contact Bob Fu, a Christian rights activist based in Texas who has helped several high-profile dissidents flee China, including Chen Guangcheng, a blind rights lawyer whose 2012 flight to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing sparked diplomatic tensions.
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“We’re going on a trip,” Chen told her daughters the morning of Feb. 19.
They headed south from their home in central China, then crossed into at least two countries without paperwork. There were nights, she said, when they had nowhere to sleep and days when they had nothing but a bag of chocolates to eat.
Traveling by foot and car for five days, they finally arrived at a safe house in Bangkok whose owners knew Fu.
Even though Chen took precautions, never turning on her phone or accessing the internet, Chinese authorities had gotten wind that she might be in Thailand. While she was in hiding, Chinese security agents forced her 70-year-old father, her sister, her university employer and other relatives and friends to fly with them to Bangkok in an unusual attempt to locate her.
Less than a week later, on March 2, Thai police, directed by a Chinese translator who Chen believed was from the Chinese Embassy, barged into the safe house, seized her belongings and sent the family to detention. It is unclear how they were located.
Chen appeared in immigration court the next morning. She was accompanied by the translator, who took away Chen’s phone and snapped pictures of Chen’s court documents with her own phone camera. A judge ruled that Chen had entered the country illegally and ordered her deported. The translator paid for her legal proceedings and fine.
An increasing number of Chinese in recent years have sought refuge in Thailand only to be sent back. In 2015, Thailand deported two Chinese dissidents who the United Nations recognized as refugees, a journalist who feared Beijing’s persecution and 109 minority Uighurs who said they had fled repression. Later that year, a Hong Kong publisher of books on Chinese political gossip vanished from his Thai home and into Chinese custody, alarming the international community.
As Chen was taken back to the jail to pick up her children and things, with Chinese officials waiting for her outside, she appeared likely to meet a similar fate.
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In Texas, Fu was dumbfounded by news of Chen’s arrest. He sprang into action to alert the State Department, and his associates in Thailand, who quickly located her in the jail.
According to Fu, U.S. officials made it into the facility on March 3 while Chen was in court, found Chen’s daughters and stayed with them while they searched for the mother. Finally, through their Thai contacts in the jail, the Americans located her and convinced Thai officials to let them whisk her out the back, said Fu and another person with knowledge of the operation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly.
The family piled into a car and sped through Bangkok’s congested streets headed for the airport while Fu, 12 time zones away, frantically tried to book flights and prepare the family’s requisite U.S. paperwork.
But the Chinese agents were not far behind.
Despite her deportation order, Chen was stopped at the airport by Thai immigration officials who explained that they were under immense Chinese pressure to prevent her departure. In an hours-long standoff at the airport, the person with knowledge of the operation said, the confrontation between the Chinese, American and Thai officials nearly boiled over into a physical clash.
Chen and Fu declined to explain what happened next, citing diplomatic sensitivities, other than that the family eventually made it to the U.S. on March 17.
It is unclear whether Chen was housed in the U.S. Embassy in the intervening weeks or whether and how a deal was negotiated to allow Chen’s departure from Thailand.
A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said Monday he was not aware of the matter. The Ministry of Public Security did not respond to faxed requests for comment. Thai and U.S. authorities declined to comment on Chen’s experience.
Justin Higgins, a State Department spokesman for East Asia, said that in general the U.S. “urges China to release all of the lawyers and activists detained in the July 9, 2015, crackdown and remove restrictions on their freedom of movement and professional activities.”
It’s unusual for U.S. officials to take such bold action to help Chinese citizens – in Chen’s family’s case, human rights workers say. But the citizenship of Chen’s younger daughter, who was born 4 years ago in the U.S. while Xie was studying in the country on a sabbatical, was likely a key factor.
Compared to previous years, when China’s diplomacy with its neighbors touched mostly on economic and national security issues, Beijing increasingly demands foreign governments’ cooperation when it hunts for fugitives, even those whom other countries may view as political dissidents.
“China is exporting its human rights abuses beyond its borders,” said Susan Shirk, chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, and former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia.
“The Thai government has always tried to maintain good relations with the U.S. and with China,” Shirk said, “but these kinds of cases make that balancing act very difficult.”
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The U.S. may be changing its stance on China, given Trump’s effusive praise for Xi and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent remarks that Washington will not force human rights issues on other nations. Yet Chen’s case suggests that America is still willing to confront China on thorny rights issues, at least when U.S. citizens are involved.
“This administration appears to be more muscular, more assertive, and we’re seeing ‘Putting Americans First’ play out,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation in San Francisco who has advised U.S. administrations on Chinese human rights issues. “But what I’m hoping is that ‘Putting Americans First’ doesn’t mean putting other people last.”
Kamm noted that two U.S. citizens – Texas businesswoman Sandy Phan-Gillis and aid worker Aya Hijazi – were released by China and Egypt, respectively, in recent weeks in response to high-level pressure from U.S. officials. Yet the U.S. notably did not sign onto a letter from 11 Western countries who, spurred by Xie’s allegations, protested the torture of Chinese human rights lawyers, he added.
Now safe in Texas, Chen said she wanted to thank the State Department and the Trump administration. But her sense of relief has been tempered by a painful reckoning of the ruin and chaos she left behind.
Xie’s trial began Monday and was expected to be completed by day’s end. A government-appointed defense lawyer is representing him.
Chen Jiangang, Xie’s former lawyer who helped release his account of torture, was detained last week in a Chinese province near Myanmar, human rights observers say.
The relatives of Chen who were pressed by the government to travel to Thailand have had their passports confiscated upon their return to China. They have been repeatedly interrogated, and their jobs have been threatened, she said.
The electricity at Chen’s apartment has since been cut, forcing her elderly father to move back to his village. Authorities have emptied her Chinese bank accounts, she said.
For now, Chen and her daughters are living off the charity of her supporters. The former professor plans to seek a job, a home, and school for the girls. Chen said she was happy to start over in America. She has little money, but still has her voice.
“All the things we tried to expose, all the articles we used to write about the truth of 7-09 – the harassment, the torture, the denial of our children’s schooling, the forced evictions – we were always smeared so quickly,” she said.
“If I’ve escaped the country, they can’t control the situation anymore. Now, what can they do?”
By GERRY SHIH
The Associated Press
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AP writers Gillian Wong in Beijing, Matthew Pennington in Washington and Grant Peck in Bangkok contributed to this report.
A recent report indicates that since Trudeau’s announcement of his gun buyback program four years ago, almost none of the banned firearms have been surrendered.
The federal government plans to purchase 2,063 firearm models from retailers following the enactment of Bill C-21, which amends various Acts and introduces certain consequential changes related to firearms. It was granted royal assent on December 15 of last year.
This ban immediately criminalized the actions of federally-licensed firearms owners regarding the purchase, sale, transportation, importation, exportation, or use of hundreds of thousands of rifles and shotguns that were previously legal.
The gun ban focused on what it termed ‘assault-style weapons,’ which are, in reality, traditional semi-automatic rifles and shotguns that have enjoyed popularity among hunters and sport shooters for over a century.
In May 2020, the federal government enacted an Order-in-Council that prohibited 1,500 types of “assault-style” firearms and outlined specific components of the newly banned firearms. Property owners must adhere to the law by October 2023.
Trudeau’s Buyback Hasn’t Happened
“In the announcement regarding the ban, the prime minister stated that the government would seize the prohibited firearms, assuring that their lawful owners would be ‘grandfathered’ or compensated fairly.” “That hasn’t happened,” criminologist Gary Mauser told Rebel News.
Mauser projected expenses ranging from $2.6 billion to $6.7 billion. The figure reflects the compensation costs amounting to $756 million, as outlined by the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO).
“The projected expenses for gathering the illegal firearms are estimated to range from $1.6 billion to $7 billion.” “This range estimate increases to between $2.647 billion and $7 billion when compensation costs to owners are factored in,” Mauser stated.
Figures requested by Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs concerning firearms prohibited due to the May 1, 2020 Order In Council reveal that $72 million has been allocated to the firearm “buyback” program, yet not a single firearm has been confiscated to date.
In a recent revelation, Public Safety Canada disclosed that the federal government allocated a staggering $41,094,556, as prompted by an order paper question from Conservative Senator Don Plett last September, yet yielded no tangible outcomes.
An internal memo from late 2019 revealed that the Liberals projected their politically motivated harassment would incur a cost of $1.8 billion.
Enforcement efforts Questioned
By December 2023, estimates from TheGunBlog.ca indicate that the Liberals and RCMP had incurred or were responsible for approximately $30 million in personnel expenses related to the enforcement efforts. The union representing the police service previously stated that the effort to confiscate firearms is a “misdirected effort” aimed at ensuring public safety.
“This action diverts crucial personnel, resources, and funding from tackling the more pressing and escalating issue of criminal use of illegal firearms,” stated the National Police Federation (NPF).
The Canadian Sporting Arms & Ammunition Association (CSAAA), representing firearms retailers, has stated it will have “zero involvement” in the confiscation of these firearms. Even Canada Post held back from providing assistance due to safety concerns.
The consultant previously assessed that retailers are sitting on almost $1 billion worth of inventory that cannot be sold or returned to suppliers because of the Order-In-Council.
“Despite the ongoing confusion surrounding the ban, after four years, we ought to be able to address one crucial question.” Has the prohibition enhanced safety for Canadians? Mauser asks.
Illegally Obtained Firearms are the Problem
Statistics Canada reports a 10% increase in firearm-related violent crime between 2020 and 2022, rising from 12,614 incidents to 13,937 incidents. In that timeframe, the incidence of firearm-related violent crime increased from 33.7 incidents per 100,000 population in 2021 to 36.7 incidents the subsequent year.
“This marks the highest rate documented since the collection of comparable data began in 2009,” the criminologist explains.
Supplementary DataData indicates that firearm homicides have risen since 2020. “The issue lies not with lawfully-held firearms,” Mauser stated.
Firearms that have been banned under the Order-in-Council continue to be securely stored in the safes of their lawful owners. The individuals underwent a thorough vetting process by the RCMP and are subject to nightly monitoring to ensure there are no infractions that could pose a risk to public safety.
“The firearms involved in homicides were seldom legally owned weapons wielded by their rightful owners,” Mauser continues. The number of offenses linked to organized crime has surged from 4,810 in 2016 to a staggering 13,056 in 2020.
“If those in power … aim to diminish crime and enhance public safety, they ought to implement strategies that effectively focus on offenders and utilize our limited tax resources judiciously to reach these objectives,” he stated.
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Google is so closely associated with its key product that its name is a verb that signifies “search.” However, Google’s dominance in that sector is dwindling.
According to eMarketer, Google will lose control of the US search industry for the first time in decades next year.
Google will remain the dominant search player, accounting for 48% of American search advertising revenue. And, remarkably, Google is still increasing its sales in the field, despite being the dominating player in search since the early days of the George W. Bush administration. However, Amazon is growing at a quicker rate.
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
Amazon will hold over a quarter of US search ad dollars next year, rising to 27% by 2026, while Google will fall even more, according to eMarketer.
The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the forecast.
Lest you think you’ll have to switch to Bing or Yahoo, this isn’t the end of Google or anything really near.
Google is the fourth-most valued public firm in the world. Its market worth is $2.1 trillion, trailing just Apple, Microsoft, and the AI chip darling Nvidia. It also maintains its dominance in other industries, such as display advertisements, where it dominates alongside Facebook’s parent firm Meta, and video ads on YouTube.
To put those “other” firms in context, each is worth more than Delta Air Lines’ total market value. So, yeah, Google is not going anywhere.
Nonetheless, Google faces numerous dangers to its operations, particularly from antitrust regulators.
On Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Google must open up its Google Play Store to competitors, dealing a significant blow to the firm in its long-running battle with Fortnite creator Epic Games. Google announced that it would appeal the verdict.
In August, a federal judge ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly on search. That verdict could lead to the dissolution of the company’s search operation. Another antitrust lawsuit filed last month accuses Google of abusing its dominance in the online advertising business.
Meanwhile, European regulators have compelled Google to follow tough new standards, which have resulted in multiple $1 billion-plus fines.
Pixa Bay
Google’s Search Dominance Is Unwinding
On top of that, the marketplace is becoming more difficult on its own.
TikTok, the fastest-growing social network, is expanding into the search market. And Amazon has accomplished something few other digital titans have done to date: it has established a habit.
When you want to buy anything, you usually go to Amazon, not Google. Amazon then buys adverts to push companies’ products to the top of your search results, increasing sales and earning Amazon a greater portion of the revenue. According to eMarketer, it is expected to generate $27.8 billion in search revenue in the United States next year, trailing only Google’s $62.9 billion total.
And then there’s AI, the technology that (supposedly) will change everything.
Why search in stilted language for “kendall jenner why bad bunny breakup” or “police moving violation driver rights no stop sign” when you can just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT, “What’s going on with Kendall Jenner and Bad Bunny?” in “I need help fighting a moving violation involving a stop sign that wasn’t visible.” Google is working on exactly this technology with its Gemini product, but its success is far from guaranteed, especially with Apple collaborating with OpenAI and other businesses rapidly joining the market.
A Google spokeswoman referred to a blog post from last week in which the company unveiled ads in its AI overviews (the AI-generated text that appears at the top of search results). It’s Google’s way of expressing its ability to profit on a changing marketplace while retaining its business, even as its consumers steadily transition to ask-and-answer AI and away from search.
Google has long used a single catchphrase to defend itself against opponents who claim it is a monopoly abusing its power: competition is only a click away. Until recently, that seemed comically obtuse. Really? We are going to switch to Bing? Or Duck Duck Go? Give me a break.
But today, it feels more like reality.
Google is in no danger of disappearing. However, every highly dominating company faces some type of reckoning over time. GE, a Dow mainstay for more than a century, was broken up last year and is now a shell of its previous dominance. Sears declared bankruptcy in 2022 and is virtually out of business. US Steel, long the foundation of American manufacturing, is attempting to sell itself to a Japanese corporation.
SOURCE | CNN
(VOR News) – A ruling that prohibits emergency abortions that contravene the Supreme Court law in the state of Texas, which has one of the most stringent abortion restrictions in the country, has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court upheld this decision.
The justices did not provide any specifics regarding the underlying reasons for their decision to uphold an order from a lower court that declared hospitals cannot be legally obligated to administer abortions if doing so would violate the law in the state of Texas.
Institutions are not required to perform abortions, as stipulated in the decree. The common populace did not investigate any opposing viewpoints. The decision was made just weeks before a presidential election that brought abortion to the forefront of the political agenda.
This decision follows the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended abortion nationwide.
In response to a request from the administration of Vice President Joe Biden to overturn the lower court’s decision, the justices expressed their disapproval.
The government contends that hospitals are obligated to perform abortions in compliance with federal legislation when the health or life of an expectant patient is in an exceedingly precarious condition.
This is the case in regions where the procedure is prohibited. The difficulty hospitals in Texas and other states are experiencing in determining whether or not routine care could be in violation of stringent state laws that prohibit abortion has resulted in an increase in the number of complaints concerning pregnant women who are experiencing medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms.
The administration cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in a case that bore a striking resemblance to the one that was presented to it in Idaho at the beginning of the year. The justices took a limited decision in that case to allow the continuation of emergency abortions without interruption while a lawsuit was still being heard.
In contrast, Texas has been a vocal proponent of the injunction’s continued enforcement. Texas has argued that its circumstances are distinct from those of Idaho, as the state does have an exemption for situations that pose a significant hazard to the health of an expectant patient.
According to the state, the discrepancy is the result of this exemption. The state of Idaho had a provision that safeguarded a woman’s life when the issue was first broached; however, it did not include protection for her health.
Certified medical practitioners are not obligated to wait until a woman’s life is in imminent peril before they are legally permitted to perform an abortion, as determined by the state supreme court.
The state of Texas highlighted this to the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, medical professionals have criticized the Texas statute as being perilously ambiguous, and a medical board has declined to provide a list of all the disorders that are eligible for an exception. Furthermore, the statute has been criticized for its hazardous ambiguity.
For an extended period, termination of pregnancies has been a standard procedure in medical treatment for individuals who have been experiencing significant issues. It is implemented in this manner to prevent catastrophic outcomes, such as sepsis, organ failure, and other severe scenarios.
Nevertheless, medical professionals and hospitals in Texas and other states with strict abortion laws have noted that it is uncertain whether or not these terminations could be in violation of abortion prohibitions that include the possibility of a prison sentence. This is the case in regions where abortion prohibitions are exceedingly restrictive.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resulted in restrictions on the rights of women to have abortions in several Republican-ruled states, the Texas case was revisited in 2022.
As per the orders that were disclosed by the administration of Vice President Joe Biden, hospitals are still required to provide abortions in cases that are classified as dire emergency.
As stipulated in a piece of health care legislation, the majority of hospitals are obligated to provide medical assistance to patients who are experiencing medical distress. This is in accordance with the law.
The state of Texas maintained that hospitals should not be obligated to provide abortions throughout the litigation, as doing so would violate the state’s constitutional prohibition on abortions. In its January judgment, the 5th United States Circuit Court of Appeals concurred with the state and acknowledged that the administration had exceeded its authority.
SOURCE: AP
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