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Aurora Borealis: The God’s (aka The Absolute, Hashem, Allah, etc.) response to the Putin’s – ROC crazy, ridiculous, ignorant FASCIST HOMOPHOBIA: THE RAINBOW PEOPLE ARE MY PEOPLE TOO, AND THE MOST BELOVED ONES! KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THEM! – Google Search

Tweets – The News And Times Review – TheNewsAndTimes.Blogspot.com

 North Korean leader: “We need to prepare for a nuclear war”

By Marco Respinti and Aaron Rhodes

There is no border between India and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the northwest and northeast, India adjoins Tibet. It is not necessary for your Indian interlocutor to be a die-hard nationalist to think this way. 

As a matter of fact, this is what a large number of Indians have believed since 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in Beijing. Their reasoning is that Tibet is a sovereign political entity occupied by the People’s Republic of China, and that it should regain independence within its historical borders.

On the other hand, the CCP claims that Tibet has always been a part of China. 

Powered by this claim, one of the weapons of the PRC’s foreign offensive are geographical maps where  boundary disputes are used as tools for sinicization of Tibet. In this pursuit, the CCP is indefatigable. 

On March 30, the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the PRC committed  its latest misappropriation of Indian toponyms, changing 30 placenames in the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. 

Eleven residential areas, 12 mountains, four rivers, one lake, one mountain pass and a piece of land were given new Chinese names in simplified Chinese ideograms, Tibetan script and pinyin rendering as well as in the Roman alphabet. 

Chinese names

For each of those places, geographical coordinates are also duly furnished as well as a high-resolution map. The CCP ceremoniously celebrated the event with all the technicalities needed to make it seem an important and legitimate operation..

The sinicization of toponyms in Arunachal Pradesh is only the latest offensive in an ongoing campaign that Beijing has launched in recent years. 

The inaugural step of the campaign took place on April 13, 2017, when the ministry officialized the change of six place names. The second move was made official on Dec. 29, 2021, and it included the change of 15 toponyms . The third came on April 2, 2023, when 11 place nameswere sinicized as well. 

It is noteworthy that the official announcement of the first change explicitly defines it as the “first batch,” implying there was more to come. However, nowhere is it written that the new March 2024 fourth batch in this series should be constructed as being the last one.

It is a bit like playing a board game. None of the newly renamed real places in Arunachal Pradesh came under the PRC’s sovereignty as a result of the contrived Chinese maps, and the occupation of sovereign Indian territory that the new toponyms seem to indicate has not happened. 

Chinese logic

But the CCP’s move is consciously aiming to achieve a clear psychological effect – achieved by presenting the change of names as the direct consequence of a specific logic. 

The territory that India calls Arunachal Pradesh doesn’t exist as such, the CCP asserts. It is just a portion of the PRC’s sovereign territory, it maintains. So, it concludes, place names can’t be Indian and must be Chinese, and new maps must show this  to the entire world.

The CCP’s claim that Arunachal Pradesh doesn’t exist is based on the view that the Indian state by that name is simply a part of Tibet, which, the CCP underlines, has always been an integral part of China. 

According to CCP propaganda, that part of “China’s Tibet” that Delhi Indianizes under the “fake” name of Arunachal Pradesh is simply a portion of Southern Tibet, or “Zangnan,” as the Chinese regime calls it.

This assertion has been continuously perpetrated by the PRC since 1950, with the annexation and then military occupation of Tibet, which was in fact, a different, independent country. 

Cultural genocide

The Chinese invasion of Tibet, completed with the Battle of Lhasa in 1959 and its suppression of Tibetan identity, harsh religious persecution and other serious encroachments on liberty amount to a cultural genocide, as Tibetan leaders in exile have repeatedly asserted.

Playing chess with the lives of millions of people has always been the policy of the Chinese regime in Tibet. This war of maps is rooted in the disputed border lines that separate India and PRC, where de facto, agreed-upon, and legal borders have not coincided since the time of British India.

This dispute was complicated by the emergence of a highly ideological and aggressive regime in China in 1949. The game of maps that the CCP plays is quite sophisticated: It alternates its claim that some Indian territories are Tibetan – therefore belonging to China – with the dismemberment of “ethnic Tibet.”

Thus, the sinicizing of Arunachal Pradesh is a cynical attempt to legitimize the permanent subjugation of an entire people as a fait accompli confirmed by an international border. 

This curtailment  and disrespect of India’s  sovereignty shows that what the PRC wants, the PRC gets – even if it comes at the price of culturally and politically attacking a foreign nation. 

For its part, India rebukes this aggression, repeating that any boundary dispute regarding Arunachal Pradesh or other bordering lines, these must be discussed with Tibet, not the PRC – because Tibet is not the PRC, and will never be.  

Totalitarian arrogance may pretend to change history and reality.  It devastates societies, traditions and individual freedom, but it will ultimately fail.   

Marco Respinti is director-in-charge of  Bitter Winter, an online publication that promotes religious freedom and human rights.  Aaron Rhodes is president of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe, and author of The Debasement of Human Rights. The views expressed here are their own and do not reflect the position of Radio Free Asia.

In the BBC’s continuing China series, the latest story is titled: “Domestic tourism soars in China but foreigners stay away.”  See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-68982645

So why are foreigners staying away?

Tucked away in the story is the observation that most individuals in Western nations hold unfavourable views towards China. Further it argues that the Chinese government’s tightening grip on societal regulations could potentially cause discomfort for foreign travellers in China.

However, nowhere in the article is there evidence provided of foreign travellers being worried about or discomforted by this allegation of “tightening grip”.

Instead the article goes to lengths to inform that foreign travellers are turned off by the country’s state of the art phone app payment and booking system. Quoting an expatriate authority on the economics of tourism in China, the article relates: 

“Technologies such as social network websites, online maps, payment apps, among others, which foreigners have long been accustomed to using, are either unavailable or inaccessible when they travel to China.

On the other hand, there are Chinese alternatives to these technologies that remain inaccessible to foreigners due to language barriers and differences in user habits.”

The reporter has added the observation that an Italian couple found the process of using China’s payment apps a challenge and informed that it is “much, much, much easier” if you have a Chinese friend to help you. Any discerning reader will be wondering whether the quotation with its unnamed informant and triple “much” has been inserted to sex up the storyline to make it appear insurmountable for foreigners to travel in China.

It may be that the reporter has not been embellishing the story but has  been talking to the wrong people. However, a quick visit to the numerous youtube and tik tok videos put out now by what is now a small army of foreign vloggers travelling in China reveals a reality that contradicts the  allegations of foreign travellers being put off by China’s social regulations and government – the latter as implied – or by China’s homegrown apps.

It is not only the videos running into many viewing hours that depict a safe nation with a largely happy and contented people throughout all the provinces of the country including in Xinjiang where the BBC has been a main channel for the lies, falsehoods and duplicity with regard to the alleged genocide inflicted upon the Uyghur community and the groundless slanders about the ‘pervasve’ prison camps, detention centers and absence of civil liberties and human rights in China.

It is also the comments from the multitude of commentators in the unfiltered and uncensored China exchange – some are visitors from past and more recent trips – which provide opposed views to the propaganda cranked out by western media on China. The commentators also contrast what is taking place in their own countries with what they have discovered in China. More than a few write to lament about how they have lost faith in their own leaders and societal development and how impressed they are with developments in China.

These two comments typify much of the feedback from independent recent travellers to China coming from countries around the world, some of which relate to geopolitics and which, for obvious reasons, are not available from the BBC.

I visited China last year to see if they are collapsing in the last 20yrs, they are still moving along nicely. Beautiful infrastructure, amazing landscapes, transport efficiency, people are rich, high tech, all the cars on the road are brand new, high end vehicles. Seeing is believing. Don’t listen to all the BS lies in Australia or America. Go visit yourself, very safe and clean.

Fear is the only reason the U.S. wanted to contain China. When tariffs failed, technology sanctions followed. When both tariffs and sanctions failed, de-coupling became the buzzword. And when de-coupling was found to hurt the U.S. economy more than China’s, it was changed to de-risking which in effect means a “slow de-coupling” until a more appropriate time. And now, fear has invaded European minds and the Europeans want to adopt the American low-life tactics.

To its credit, the BBC article has identified one important reason for the slow return of foreign travellers to China though it failed to discuss this more. Thus it noted

Washington warns potential travellers to “reconsider travel to Mainland China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, including in relation to exit bans, and the risk of wrongful detentions”.

Australia advises “a high degree of caution” warning that “Australians may be at risk of arbitrary detention or harsh enforcement of local laws, including broadly defined National Security Laws“. 

Why even the better BBC reporters engage in slanted writing and why we cannot expect fair reporting from western media organisations has been identified succinctly by a recent commentator in Foreign Policy in an article subtitled, “Why are China hawks exaggerating the threat from Beijing”.

See https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/07/cold-war-cold-peace-united-states-china-xi-decoupling-trade/

Over the past few years, the Pundit Industrial Complex has gone into high gear on China. A new generation of scholarly, governmental, and journalistic reputations is being built on the idea that the United States has entered a new cold war, with China in the role of the Soviet Union and a reduced Russia as its eager helpmate. Scores of books and articles are being sold, weapons systems developed (including the United States’ first new nuclear warheads in decades), promotions and tenure awarded, and so forth.

Next anti-China target for the BBC’s version of fair and independent news:

The Paris Olympics

By Andrew Hammond

US President Joe Biden has faced criticism for making “revitalizing democracy the world over” a key goal of his administration. Yet his agenda might be taking stronger root across much of the West and beyond, and could outlive his administration, whether it ends in 2025 or 2029.

An illustration of the appealing nature of his message was on display on Tuesday and Wednesday this week at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit. This global event, the brainchild of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former NATO secretary-general and Danish prime minister, featured keynote speakers from around the world, from the Asia Pacific to the Americas.

The speakers included Republican US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen and President-elect Lai Ching-te, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The event coincided with the publication of research based on interviews with almost 70,000 people worldwide, which found that faith in democracy remains high around the globe, with 85 percent of those polled agreeing that democracy is important to their country.

This is a timely reminder, given that 2024 is a banner year for elections, during which an estimated 2 billion people in dozens of nations will go to the polls.

The research also found, however, that governments generally were not seen to be living up to the democratic expectations of their citizens; only a little more than half of those polled were satisfied with the state of democracy in their country. This dissatisfaction was not limited to nondemocratic nations; it was also prevalent in several Western countries with long democratic traditions.

A good example was the US, where former President Donald Trump will once again be on the ballot for the Republican Party in the presidential election in November. Still tarred by the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, he has openly stated that should he win, he will be a dictator on the first day of his second term.

The consequences of a Trump victory are not only important domestically but internationally. During his first term, foes of the US around the world, from Venezuela to Iran and Russia, relished the disorder he brought to Washington. In particular, the Jan. 6 debacle was watched with glee by those nationalist populists around the world who try to defy calls for the rule of law and democratic norms to be respected.

Other think tanks, such as the US-based Freedom House, in recent years have also regularly highlighted the hostile environment democratic governance faces around the globe. A key challenge, especially following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is the growing concern about the increasing influence of Moscow and other authoritarian and/or autocratic states.

According to Rasmussen, there is a “trend which shows we risk losing the Global South to the autocracies. We are witnessing an axis of autocracies forming, from China to Russia to Iran. We must act now to make freedom more attractive than dictatorship, and unite through an alliance of democracies to push back against the emboldened autocrats.”

Yet there are some in the US, and beyond, who would prefer Biden not to overemphasize democracy-based political rhetoric. They argue, for example, that such ideas sometimes make a simplistic, binary distinction between “good” and “bad” that can sit awkwardly in a fast-changing, complex world of ambiguity and uncertainty, where there is frequently a need to work with states that lack democratic traditions but with which the US has shared interests.

Some critics instead favor an international approach by Washington based more on classic, quantifiable national interests. They argue that other states, especially developing ones, might be more likely to aspire to emulate the US because of its material prosperity, rather than any appeals based on its democratic virtues.

Economic modernization and liberalism, it is suggested, will be the impulse for future democratic reforms and help counteract the appeal of alternative, authoritarian models of development that have brought significant indebtedness to key US allies.

The implication is that Biden’s agenda might best be delivered by putting significantly more emphasis on new economic-reform and infrastructure packages for Africa, Asia, and the Americas, including signature initiatives such as the G7-backed Build Back Better World initiative, to demonstrate in a practical way the US intent to invest in low and middle income countries.

Yet, as important as this economic agenda is, it is not incompatible with an agenda for democracy. Indeed, value-driven, high-standard, and transparent partnership schemes that address the developing world’s huge infrastructure-funding challenges, such as Build Back Better World, can reinforce Biden’s wider agenda.

This is important because there is recognition that a broad, multifaceted approach is needed to ensure that freedom and democracy flourish. This is why it is so important that Biden now embeds in his agenda for the remainder of his presidency the need to make democracy “more responsive and resilient.”

The truth behind Biden’s assertion that “proving democracy is durable and strong” is a central challenge of our age is highlighted in the important book “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

Its core concept is that in recent generations democracies have not, generally speaking, collapsed as a result of a military coup or armed revolution. Rather, they have broken down gradually as public institutions and political norms have been weakened from within.

This is why, during his time as vice president between 2009 and 2017, Biden was given an active role in issues relating to several countries, including NATO and EU ally Hungary, in which he spoke out against corruption and in support of the consolidation of democratic institutions, with an emphasis on the independence of the judiciary.

In this key election year, a boost to the US promotion of democracy around the world is to be welcomed. Biden’s support for this long-standing agenda will outlast his administration in what might be a long battle for fresh ideas in the field of international relations.

• Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.

(RFE/RL) — The situation in Bishkek was stable late on May 18, police said, after mob violence against foreign students injured at least 29 people, including several foreigners, and triggered diplomatic tensions with Pakistan and India.

RFE/RL correspondents reported that the situation near the dormitory where foreigners live at Kyrgyz International University in the eastern part of Bishkek was calm on the evening of May 18 and said security measures had been strengthened.

Kyrgyz authorities said the Pakistani Embassy and a dormitory where foreigners live were put under strict security.

The Health Ministry said on May 18 that 15 of the 29 people injured in a brawl the night before were taken to the Bishkek City Emergency Hospital and the National Hospital and the rest were treated on the spot.

Health Minister Alymkadyr Beishenaliev said three foreign students were hospitalized, one in the maxillofacial department and two in the trauma department.

The nationality of the injured students was not released, but students confirmed to RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal that Pakistani students were involved in the incident and some of them were injured.

Indian media reported that Indian and Pakistani students were injured, and Indian Foreign Minister Subramanyam Jaishankar said he was monitoring the situation.

About 140 students and 40 other Pakistanis flew out of Bishkek late on May 18. The students were received by Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi at Lahore International Airport, Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) officials told RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal. A second flight is arriving on May 19, the CAA officials said.

Pakistani Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar, who is also foreign minister, and Minister for Kashmir Affairs Amir Muqam, will leave for Bishkek from Islamabad on May 19 at the direction of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to accelerate the evacuation of the students, officials told RFE/RL.

The Kyrgyz government said earlier that four foreign nationals born between 1993 and 2003 had been arrested following the violence. It said they were placed in a temporary detention facility as part of a criminal case for hooliganism without stating their nationalities or the circumstances of their arrests.

Those found guilty will be punished, the Kyrgyz government said in a statement, rejecting what it said were “insinuations aimed at inciting intolerance toward foreign students.” But it appeared to lay the blame for the violence on illegal migrants, saying authorities had been taking “decisive measures to suppress illegal migration and expel undesirable persons from Kyrgyzstan.”

The Kyrgyz Interior Ministry said in a statement on May 18 that the violence was triggered by the appearance on social media of a video purportedly showing a group of “persons of Asian appearance” harassing foreign students on the night of May 13 and then pursuing them to their dormitory, where at least one foreign student was assaulted by several men and dragged on the floor.

The ministry claimed security forces cordoned off the area where people had gathered at the intersection of Kurmanjan-Datka Street and Chui Avenue. “Explanatory work was carried out onsite, and after some time, the crowd dispersed,” the statement said.

However, the statement does not explain how dozens of people were injured on the night of May 17, while the official account was contradicted by video footage appearing to show attackers ransacking a student hostel and beating up people, as well as riotous crowds in different parts of the city.

It also did not clarify why authorities took four days to intervene and identify the alleged suspects.

Muhammad Ihtisham Latif, a Pakistani medical student in Bishkek, told RFE/RL’s Radio Mashaal, “The situation is bad here. The situation started when Egyptian students clashed with locals here. The locals are now protesting and they are beating Indian and Pakistani students…. They chase them in their hostels and houses…hostel [doors] were broken. I am locked up in the university along with other students since yesterday and I am sharing my voice with you.”

Syed Shah Rukh Khan, a medical student in his final year, told Radio Mashaal the past night had been “living hell.”

“Our hostel and many other hostels were attacked. The locals beat whoever came their way, boys or girls, and they were dragged to the ground. Even outside the universities, they went after the Pakistani and Indian students and beat them,” Khan said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed “deep concern” over the situation of Pakistani students in Kyrgyzstan, saying in a statement that he directed Pakistan’s ambassador to provide all necessary help and assistance to the students.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar said on X, formerly Twitter, that the reports of mob attacks on students in Kyrgyzstan are extremely concerning.

“We have established contact with the Kyrgyz authorities to ensure protection of Pakistani students. I have instructed our ambassador to Kyrgyzstan to fully facilitate them,” Dar said.

In a separate statement, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said the charge d’affaires of the Kyrgyz Embassy to Islamabad, Melis Moldaliev, was summoned to the ministry, where he “was conveyed the deep concerns of the government of Pakistan about the reports of last night’s incidents against Pakistani students studying in the Kyrgyz Republic.”

Moldaliev was told that Islamabad expects the Kyrgyz government to take all possible measures to ensure the safety and security of Pakistani students and citizens in Kyrgyzstan.

The head of Kyrgyzstan’s State Committee on National Security (UKMK), Kamchybek Tashiev, appeared to try and lay the blame for the violence on illegal migrants, saying protesters were demonstrating against migration.

Tashiev claimed Kyrgyzstan has been grappling with an influx of illegal migrants coming to the country, mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh, many of whom “break the law.”

“We identify at least 20-30 or 50 illegal migrants per day and try to expel them from the country. Based on official statistics, most of the foreigners who break the law are citizens of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Of these, we returned about 1,500 people from Pakistan and about 1,000 people from Bangladesh to their countries.”

The incident comes amid a drive by Kyrgyz authorities to expel foreign workers. On May 16, the UKMK announced the arrest of 28 alleged illegal Pakistani workers from a sweatshop. On May 15, Bishkek police shut down delivery services conducted by more than 400 foreign students on motorcycles and scooters, citing traffic safety concerns.