It's news you can use from places with different views! (Don't misuse or abuse you yahoos.)
This isn't super-important for anyone here, but I found it notable that she is so young (27) and, thanks to the wages of colonization, she was nevertheless blessed with a Bible. That balancing act is always interesting to me.
EDIT: The wikipedia page on the Māori King movement (Kīngitanga) is here, if you'd like to learn more.
If anyone has a NYT memberhip, please give me a gift link or post the text, because on headline alone I am super-curious about this story:
Pope Finds Fervent Fans Among Indonesia’s Transgender Community
For many trans women living on the fringes of the nation’s society, the Catholic Church is a haven, and Pope Francis a personal hero.
Looks like Shinjiro Koizumi, son of former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has officially declared his candidacy to become LDP leader and Japan’s next prime minister.
Good lord, the q's you get at these press conferences.
"Koizumi-san, everyone is worried that if with your low intellect, if you attend the G-7 as prime minister you will embarrass the country," asks one freelancer journalist. "Even so, will still try to become prime minister?"
To be fair iIt's a question that should be asked a lot more often than it is 
Yeah, can we send some American journos to Japanese journalism school please, like STAT?
China ends most international adoptions, leaving many children, families in limbo
The Chinese government plans to mostly end its international adoption program — a devastating blow for hundreds of families from the U.S. and around the world who had been hoping to adopt from the country.
China's Foreign Ministry formally announced the decision Thursday, adding the the only exception will be for families who are adopting the children or stepchildren of blood relatives in China.
It ends a three-decade program that began as a result of China's strict one-child policy, which forced many families to put their children up for adoption. Many couples chose to put girls up for adoption, favoring male children. Over the past decade, the government has eased its limitations and allowed married couples to have up to three children.
But since China formally opened its doors for international adoptions in 1992, more than 160,000 children have been adopted by families abroad— half of whom were adopted by families in the U.S. Many of the adoptees from China have been children with disabilities.
The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to NPR's request for comment. But according to The Associated Press, State is seeking clarification on what this policy change will mean for families with pending applications; Chinese officials told U.S. diplomats in a phone call that they “will not continue to process cases at any stage” other than those covered by the exception clause.
Cherish Children Adoption International said they were heartbroken by the decision, both for the families who have been in the adoption process and the children who were matched with families abroad. As of 2019, there were 343,000 orphans in China, according to Chinese government officials.
"We have been spending our day grieving with our waiting China families on the phone and will continue to do so in the coming weeks and months," Cherish Children Adoption International said in a statement.
Touristy places have always been tired of asshole tourists, the biggest difference is that it's being reported on a lot more now. Kind of like how every few years shark attacks become big news and send people into a panic despite there being no more attacks than usual.
I suspect part of the reason for all the reports is that we had a lull in tourism due to covid, so people got a summer where they see what it could be like without tourists everywhere. Now that covid is "over" tourists are back with a vengeance. Sprinkle some entitled idiot influencers acting like entitled idiot influencers on top and you get a lot of people being more vocal about their hatred of tourists than usual.
Mexico’s Senate approves a contentious judicial overhaul after protesters storm the chamber
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s Senate voted early Wednesday to overhaul the country’s judiciary, clearing the biggest hurdle for a controversial constitutional revision that will make all judges stand for election, a change that critics fear will politicize the judicial branch and threaten Mexico’s democracy.
The approval came in two votes after hundreds of protesters pushed their way into the Senate on Tuesday, interrupting the session after it appeared that Morena, the ruling party of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had lined up the necessary votes to pass the proposal.
Judicial employees and law students had protested for weeks, saying the plan, under which all judges would be elected, could threaten judicial independence and undermine the system of checks and balances.
The legislation sailed through the lower chamber, where Morena and its allies hold a supermajority, last week. Approval by the Senate posed the biggest obstacle and required defections from opposition parties.
One came Tuesday from the conservative opposition National Action Party (PAN) after a lawmaker who had previously spoken out against the overhaul took leave for medical reasons and his father, a former governor, suggested he would vote for the proposal. The lawmaker ended up returning to his seat to give the proposal the last vote it needed.
Both of the Senate votes were 86-41. The chamber erupted into cheers and chants of “Yes, we could!”
The legislation must now be ratified by the legislatures of at least 17 of Mexico’s 32 states. The governing party is believed to have the necessary support after major gains in recent elections. Oaxaca’s legislature became the first to ratify it just hours after the Senate’s approval.
López Obrador, a populist long averse to independent regulatory bodies who has ignored courts and attacked judges, says the plan would crack down on corruption by making it easier to punish judges. Critics say it would handicap the judiciary, stack courts with judges favoring the president’s party, allow anyone with a law degree to become a judge and even make it easier for politicians and criminals to influence courts.
It has spooked investors and prompted U.S. Ambassador Ken Salazar to call it a “risk” to democracy and an economic threat, after which López Obrador said relations with the U.S. Embassy were put “on pause.”
Experts said the overhaul is almost set in stone, and that it would be very difficult for courts or any other body to stop it from moving forward.
The plan could be challenged in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights because it may violate international treaties where Mexico commits to having an independent and impartial judiciary. But the process would be slow and likely receive a backlash, said Georgina de la Fuente, an academic member of the Observatory of Political Reforms in Latin America.
“Any order coming from abroad will be manipulated in the public discourse as interference or violation of national sovereignty,” she said.
That same argument of violating international treaties could be taken to Mexico’s Supreme Court, said Laurence Patin, director of the Mexican legal NGO Foundation for Justice, but said it would be complicated to annul a constitutional reform with that argument. Another possibility would be to appeal to irregularities in the process if the changes are confirmed.
President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, who takes office Oct. 1, congratulated lawmakers on passing the overhaul.
The election of judges “will strengthen the delivery of justice in our country,” Sheinbaum wrote on the social media platform X. “The regime of corruption and privileges each day is being left farther in the past and a true democracy and true rule of law are being built.”
López Obrador acknowledged Wednesday that many are against the plan, but said “it’s incredibly important to put an end to corruption and impunity. “We’re going to make a lot of progress when the people can freely elect judges, magistrates and ministers,” he said.
Some experts and observers, however, have suggested that the overhaul could have the opposite effect, and allow corrupt individuals and criminals to have more sway over the justice system.
On Tuesday evening, just hours after the governing party appeared to have wrangled the votes it needed, protesters with pipes and chains broke into the Senate chamber. At least one person fainted.
The protesters said lawmakers were not listening to their demands.
Nation With Lowest Birthrate Is Rocked by Soaring Sales of Dog Strollers
(WSJ Paywall)
In 2023, sales of strollers for dogs outpaced sales of strollers for babies, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing data from Korean e-commerce platform Gmarket. It looks as if the trend will continue in 2024 as well. There’s been a turning of the tables since the website conducted the study in 2021, when baby strollers stood at 67% and puppy prams at 33%,per the Korea Times.
Some politicians have taken umbrage at these alternative bundles of joy. “What I worry about is young people not loving each other,” said South Korea labor minister Kim Moon-soo in 2023, according to the WSJ. “Instead, they love their dogs and carry them around. They don’t get married, and they don’t have children.”
Given the long-term economic ramifications of an aging and shrinking population, the also childless and dog-owning South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol declared the phenomenon a “demographic national emergency.”
“The birth strike is women’s revenge on a society that puts impossible burdens on us and doesn’t respect us,” Jiny Kim, an office worker in her thirties, told the New York Times. Indeed, there are larger societal issues at play to which politicians seemingly turn a blind eye.
Low birth rates have become a conservative talking point, not just in South Korea. The United States, too, faces a steadily declining birth rate, which Elon Musk has taken an interest in along with Republican Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance. Vance belittled Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats, calling them “childless cat ladies.”
But politicians might as well be shaking their fists at the sky, as long as they continue to shirk the actual root of falling birth rates. Experts have diagnosed the issue as the fallout from the skyrocketing cost of raising children, bleak labor markets, and the sexism rooted in these environments that leads to the motherhood penalty. South Korean women cited financial and cultural barriers as reasons for not having children, explaining to the BBC that one major fear is career consequences for taking time off from work.
Meanwhile, pets simply cost less than children, especially in countries like the U.S. and South Korea where the price tag for private or higher education is exorbitant. The pet industry, therefore, booms as young adults are barred from affording a family.
"THEY'RE PARENTING THE DOGS!"
"Please say my name."
*bow* Yes, Haizenbuguru-sama." *double bow*
Widespread adoption fraud separated generations of Korean children from their families
South Korea’s government, Western countries and adoption agencies worked in tandem to supply some 200,000 Korean children to parents overseas, despite years of evidence they were being procured through questionable or downright unscrupulous means, an investigation led by The Associated Press found. Those children grew up and searched for their roots — and some realized they are not who they were told.Their stories have sparked a reckoning that is rocking the international adoption industry, which was built in South Korea and spread around the world. European countries have launched investigations and halted international adoption. The South Korean government has accepted a fact-finding commission under pressure from adoptees, and hundreds have submitted their cases for review.
The AP investigation, done in collaboration with Frontline (PBS), was based on interviews with more than 80 adoptees in the U.S., Australia and six European countries, along with parents, agency employees, humanitarian workers and government officials. It also drew on more than 100 information requests and thousands of pages of documents — including many never publicly seen before and some the AP got declassified — from courts, archives, government files and adoption papers.
In dozens of cases AP examined with Frontline, it found: Children were kidnapped off the streets and sent abroad. Parents claim they were told their newborns were dead or too sick to survive, only to have them shipped away. Documents were fabricated to give children identities that belonged to somebody else, leading adoptees to anguished reunions with supposed parents — to later discover they were not related at all.
The agencies and governments each played a part in keeping the baby pipeline pumping. Adoption agencies created a competitive market for children and paid hospitals to supply them, documents show. The South Korean government not only knew of fraudulent practices but designed laws to speed up the exportation of children it deemed undesirable. Western governments turned a blind eye, sometimes even pressuring South Korea for children, while promoting the narrative that they were saving orphans with no other options.
And now they have a full on population collapse in progress
Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei’s austerity measures hit hard
Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population.
The new poverty rate, reported by the government’s statistics agency on Thursday, is the highest level for two decades, when the country reeled from a catastrophic economic crisis, and means 3.4 million Argentinians have been pushed into poverty this year.
Since taking office in December, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” – who campaigned with a chainsaw in hand to symbolise the cuts he would make – has slashed public spending in a bid to tame chronic inflation and eliminate the budget deficit.
His administration has frozen pensions, reduced aid to soup kitchens, cut welfare programmes and stopped all public works projects. Tens of thousands of public employees have been fired, reduced energy and transportation subsidies have pushed costs up, and purchasing power has eroded.
Kirsten Sehnbruch, an expert on Latin America at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said she had never seen such a large jump in poverty rates. “This new economic programme is not protecting the poor,” she said. “The jump is absolutely horrendous.”
Milei’s cuts, however, have been cheered by markets, investors and the International Monetary Fund, to which Argentina owes $43bn. Monthly inflation has also decreased from about 26% in December to about 4% in June, where it has remained, although annual inflation still remains one of the highest in the world, exceeding 230%.
The likely next PM of Japan:
Politics!
Japan’s new premier vows to push strong defense under Japan-US alliance and boost economy
TOKYO (AP) — The newly elected Japanese prime minister pledged Tuesday night to stick to the vital Japan-U.S. alliance amid growing tension in the region while calling for it to be more equitable. This comes as the new premier tries to boost a slow economy and regain public trust ahead of a national election later this month.
Shigeru Ishiba was chosen as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party last week, a ticket to the top job as his party’s coalition controls parliament. He replaced Fumio Kishida who stepped down earlier Tuesday to pave the way for a fresh leader after scandals dogged his government.
The new prime minister — who was always viewed as an outsider by his party — immediately formed his Cabinet with a strong emphasis on defense and several security experts onboard. With only a couple of women ministers, the majority, including Ishiba, are unaffiliated with factions led and controlled by party heavyweights, and none are from former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s powerful group linked to damaging misconduct.
Speaking to reporters at the prime minister’s office for the first time following a palace ceremony, Ishiba called for stronger military cooperation with like-minded partners. He has been vocal about his wish to form a NATO-like alliance in the region.
He said that one of his policy’s main goals was “to protect Japan” as “the security environment surrounding us is the toughest since the end of World War II,” adding he will adhere to the Japan-U.S. alliance as “the lynchpin” in bolstering his country’s defense and diplomacy.
Ishiba renewed his proposal of a more equal Japan-U.S. security alliance, including joint management of U.S. bases in Japan and having Japanese Self Defense Force bases in the United States, which would require a revision of the bilateral status of forces agreement, a move seen as a big challenge. He says the current bilateral alliance is “asymmetrical.”
“The measure would contribute to further strengthen the Japan-U.S. alliance,” Ishiba said. “I’ve advocated the idea for more than 20 years and obviously it’s not going to happen suddenly just because I became prime minister.” He also said he hadn’t assigned the matter to his Cabinet as an urgent task. “But I will not give up and will steadily work on it.”
A day before officially coming to office, Ishiba said he would call for a snap election on Oct. 27 and that former Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi would head the party’s election task force. On Tuesday, he said he intended to dissolve the lower house on Oct. 9 in preparation for the balloting, adding his new administration needed to have “the people’s verdict” as soon as possible.
During Tuesday’s parliament session, opposition leaders widely criticized Ishiba for announcing such a plan before even becoming prime minister and allowing only several days for his policies to be examined and discussed before a national election. They delayed the vote required to approve his new post for about half an hour, despite not having the power to affect it, signaling a rocky beginning for Ishiba.
Ishiba appointed several ministers who voted for him in the party leadership poll, including two former defense ministers with whom he had worked closely — Takeshi Iwaya as foreign minister and Gen Nakatani as defense chief. He retained Kishida’s top confidante, Yoshimasa Hayashi, as chief Cabinet secretary, who also previously served as defense minister. He appointed Katsunobu Kato as finance minister.
Only two of the 19 ministers are women: actor-turned-lawmaker Junko Mihara as children’s policy minister and Toshiko Abe as education minister. The government is under pressure to increase the number of women in public office. Women now account for only 10% of the lower house, placing Japan near the bottom of global gender-equality rankings.
Some argue his Cabinet lacks a stable power base that could cause it to collapse, but Ishiba hopes to build party unity while preparing for the upcoming election, according to the liberal-leaning Asahi newspaper. The move is also seen as revenge by Ishiba, who was largely pushed to the side during most of Abe’s reign, the paper said.
Last week, Ishiba drafted his views on security and defense in an article for the Hudson Institute. He proposed combining the existing security and diplomatic groupings, such as the Quad and other bilateral and multilateral frameworks involving the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and the Philippines.
In South Korea, deepfake porn wrecks women’s lives and deepens gender conflict
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Three years after the 30-year-old South Korean woman received a barrage of online fake images that depicted her nude, she is still being treated for trauma. She struggles to talk with men. Using a mobile phone brings back the nightmare.
“It completely trampled me, even though it wasn’t a direct physical attack on my body,” she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. She didn’t want her name revealed because of privacy concerns.
Many other South Korean women recently have come forward to share similar stories as South Korea grapples with a deluge of non-consensual, explicit deepfake videos and images that have become much more accessible and easier to create.
It was not until last week that parliament revised a law to make watching or possessing deepfake porn content illegal.
Most suspected perpetrators in South Korea are teenage boys. Observers say the boys target female friends, relatives and acquaintances — also mostly minors — as a prank, out of curiosity or misogyny. The attacks raise serious questions about school programs but also threaten to worsen an already troubled divide between men and women.
Deepfake porn in South Korea gained attention after unconfirmed lists of schools that had victims spread online in August. Many girls and women have hastily removed photos and videos from their Instagram, Facebook and other social media accounts. Thousands of young women have staged protests demanding stronger steps against deepfake porn. Politicians, academics and activists have held forums.
“Teenage (girls) must be feeling uneasy about whether their male classmates are okay. Their mutual trust has been completely shattered,” said Shin Kyung-ah, a sociology professor at South Korea’s Hallym University.
The school lists have not been formally verified, but officials including President Yoon Suk Yeol have confirmed a surge of explicit deepfake content on social media. Police have launched a seven-month crackdown.
Recent attention to the problem has coincided with France’s arrest in August of Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging app Telegram, over allegations that his platform was used for illicit activities including the distribution of child sexual abuse. South Korea’s telecommunications and broadcast watchdog said Monday that Telegram has pledged to enforce a zero-tolerance policy on illegal deepfake content.
Police say they’ve detained 387 people over alleged deepfake crimes this year, more than 80% of them teenagers. Separately, the Education Ministry says about 800 students have informed authorities about intimate deepfake content involving them this year.
Experts say the true scale of deepfake porn in the country is far bigger.
The U.S. cybersecurity firm Security Hero called South Korea “the country most targeted by deepfake pornography” last year. In a report, it said South Korean singers and actresses constitute more than half of the people featured in deepfake pornography worldwide.
The prevalence of deepfake porn in South Korea reflects various factors including heavy use of smart phones; an absence of comprehensive sex and human rights education in schools and inadequate social media regulations for minors as well as a “misogynic culture” and social norms that “sexually objectify women,” according to Hong Nam-hee, a research professor at the Institute for Urban Humanities at the University of Seoul.
Victims speak of intense suffering.
In parliament, lawmaker Kim Nam Hee read a letter by an unidentified victim who she said tried to kill herself because she didn’t want to suffer any longer from the explicit deepfake videos someone had made of her. Addressing a forum, former opposition party leader Park Ji-hyun read a letter from another victim who said she fainted and was taken to an emergency room after receiving sexually abusive deepfake images and being told by her perpetrators that they were stalking her.
The 30-year-old woman interviewed by The AP said that her doctoral studies in the United States were disrupted for a year. She is receiving treatment after being diagnosed with panic disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder in 2022.
Police said they’ve detained five men for allegedly producing and spreading fake explicit contents of about 20 women, including her. The victims are all graduates from Seoul National University, the country’s top school. Two of the men, including one who allegedly sent her fake nude images in 2021, attended the same university, but she said has no meaningful memory of them.
The woman said the images she received on Telegram used photos she had posted on the local messaging app Kakao Talk, combined with nude photos of strangers. There were also videos showing men masturbating and messages describing her as a promiscuous woman or prostitute. One photo shows a screen shot of a Telegram chatroom with 42 people where her fake images were posted.
The fake images were very crudely made but the woman felt deeply humiliated and shocked because dozens of people — some of whom she likely knows — were sexually harassing her with those photos.
Building trust with men is stressful, she said, because she worries that “normal-looking people could do such things behind my back.”
Using a smart phone sometimes revives memories of the fake images.
“These days, people spend more time on their mobile phones than talking face to face with others. So we can’t really easily escape the traumatic experience of digital crimes if those happen on our phones,” she said. “I was very sociable and really liked to meet new people, but my personality has totally changed since that incident. That made my life really difficult and I’m sad.”
Critics say authorities haven’t done enough to counter deepfake porn despite an epidemic of online sex crimes in recent years, such as spy cam videos of women in public toilets and other places. In 2020, members of a criminal ring were arrested and convicted of blackmailing dozens of women into filming sexually explicit videos for them to sell.
“The number of male juveniles consuming deepfake porn for fun has increased because authorities have overlooked the voices of women” demanding stronger punishment for digital sex crimes, the monitoring group ReSET said in comments sent to AP.
South Korea has no official records on the extent of deepfake online porn. But ReSET said a recent random search of an online chatroom found more than 4,000 sexually exploitive images, videos and other items.
Reviews of district court rulings showed less than a third of the 87 people indicted by prosecutors for deepfake crimes since 2021 were sent to prison. Nearly 60% avoided jail by receiving suspended terms, fines or not-guilty verdicts, according to lawmaker Kim’s office. Judges tended to lighten sentences when those convicted repented for their crimes or were first time offenders.
The deepfake problem has gained urgency given South Korea’s serious rifts over gender roles, workplace discrimination facing women, mandatory military service for men and social burdens on men and women.
Kim Chae-won, a 25-year-old office worker, said some of her male friends shunned her after she asked them what they thought about digital sex violence targeting women.
“I feel scared of living as a woman in South Korea,” said Kim Haeun, a 17-year-old high school student who recently removed all her photos on Instagram. She said she feels awkward when talking with male friends and tries to distance herself from boys she doesn’t know well.
“Most sex crimes target women. And when they happen, I think we are often helpless,” she said.
Pages