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GO AWAY SCAMMERS.
Ok don't read the headlines. What I wanted to focus was the later part of the article that writes about a 23-year-old student who lost RM12, 810 after applying for a job as a social media influencer through Facebook.
He said the victim was lured by the highly-paid job in an advertisement on Facebook last month.
Moral of the story? If it's too good to be true, don't believe in it.
DO NOT FALL INTO A SCAM WITH PROMISES OF FAST AND EASY MONEY.
Ok. Itu sahaja.
When Americans are determined (Lee Yee)
There are many things in the world that ordinary people find impossible to accomplish, yet if some put their heart into it, things may not turn out to be all that impossible.
I saw an essay on a mainland site two months ago that was titled “The World’s Most Powerful Parents, Two Against a Country”. It was quickly deleted, but relevant information could be found on overseas sites.
The parents here were the parents of Otto Frederick Warmbier, a college student who was imprisoned and tortured to death by North Korea more than four years ago. Otto went to North Korea on a short trip in December 2015. As he was leaving, he was accused of attempting to steal a political propaganda poster from a hotel in Pyongyang, and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. On June 13, 2017, North Korea suddenly released him on “humanitarian grounds”, he turned to the US in a vegetative coma. A week later, he died.
Otto’s father, Fred Warmbier, described the state of his son on his return to the US, and was determined that Otto was severely injured from being tortured in North Korea. His mother, Cindy, said that North Korea only released him because “they did not want him to die on their land”.
Otto’s parents filed a lawsuit in the US courts and demanded compensation from North Korea. The family ran a large-scale metal processing company that was on Forbes’ list in 2015. They were not short of money, and only wanted a revenge with the ask for compensation. In the US legal system, suing a country will be blocked by sovereign immunity, except when the country is classified as a terrorist country by the US. At that time, North Korea was not on the list. So the couple went onto media platforms, again and again, to speak about their son’s death, and the huge blow it was to their family. In the US where family values are cherished, they received great sympathy from the civilians, to the Congress, and to the White House. In November 2017, Trump added North Korea to the list of terrorist countries. In April 2018, the court accepted the lawsuit. On December 24 of the same year, the US Federal Court ruled that North Korea owed Otto Warmbier’s parents US$510.13 million.
This was great, but did it do anything? Would a rogue nation like North Korea acknowledge it? Many felt that this is an unenforceable ruling that was no different from a sheet of scratch paper.
However, the Warmbiers launched an operation to trace North Korea’s global assets. The media called it “the crusade of the Warmbiers”. The first installment of the compensation arrived soon enough. In April 2018, a cargo ship that belonged to North Korea was detained in Indonesia for violating the UN sanctions on the transportation of coal. In the year after, M/V Wise Honest, the second-largest single-hull bulk carrier registered in North Korea, was forfeited in the US, sold in September 2019 on orders of a US federal judge to compensate the Warmbiers.
On May 11, 2020, the US Federal Court ordered all relevant US banks to provide the parents with detailed information, including North Korea’s account number and holder’s address. While it is unclear the total amount of North Korea’s hidden overseas assets, what was discovered was that within the US alone was US$74.36 million.
The couple started a bank investigation into the deposits of senior North Korean officials in the US, and actually found three North Korean funds totaling US$23.89 million from three banks. The money will no doubt go to the Warmbiers.
Though a closed country, the Kim regime still has large deposits overseas. After all, North Korea still needs certain necessities imported from overseas.
It is highly doubtful that North Korea’s overseas assets would exceed US$510.13 million, but the couple persists and would not give up. Three years in, their determination for revenge has not diminished. They even make use of the global Jewish network to search for secret North Korean funds hidden around the world. “Our goal is to make North Korea pay for our son’s death,” the couple said.
One couple to bring this much headache to the whole country of North Korea. This is bigger than money, this is the dissemination of bad reputation.
The moral of this story is that if Americans are determined to pursue their trace for accountability, they would give it all and never surrender. If a country is listed as a terrorist country or criminal group, there will be no sovereign immunity for the country to be prosecuted; if any person is added to the US sanction list, tough luck to you. Some things that may seem unlikely, as long as one is determined, success may not be out of the question. Although justice is often no match for absolute powers, justice must be upheld, just like the Warmbiers.
泰晤士報人物專訪【Joshua Wong interview: Xi won’t win this battle, says Hong Kong activist】
Beijing believes punitive prison sentences will put an end to pro-democracy protests. It couldn’t be more wrong, the 23-year-old says.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/joshua-wong-interview-xi-wont-win-this-battle-says-hong-kong-activist-p52wlmd0t
For Joshua Wong, activism began early and in his Hong Kong school canteen. The 13-year-old was so appalled by the bland, oily meals served for lunch at the United Christian College that he organised a petition to lobby for better fare. His precocious behaviour earned him and his parents a summons to the headmaster’s office. His mother played peacemaker, but the episode delivered a valuable message to the teenage rebel.
“It was an important lesson in political activism,” Wong concluded. “You can try as hard as you want, but until you force them to pay attention, those in power won’t listen to you.”
It was also the first stage in a remarkable journey that has transformed the bespectacled, geeky child into the globally recognised face of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy. Wong is the most prominent international advocate for the protests that have convulsed the former British colony since last summer.
At 23, few people would have the material for a memoir. But that is certainly not a problem for Wong, whose book, #UnfreeSpeech, will be published in Britain this week.
We meet in a cafe in the Admiralty district, amid the skyscrapers of Hong Kong’s waterfront, close to the site of the most famous scenes in his decade of protest. Wong explains that he remains optimistic about his home city’s prospects in its showdown with the might of communist China under President Xi Jinping.
“It’s not enough just to be dissidents or youth activists. We really need to enter politics and make some change inside the institution,” says Wong, hinting at his own ambitions to pursue elected office.
He has been jailed twice for his activism. He could face a third stint as a result of a case now going through the courts, a possibility he treats with equanimity. “Others have been given much longer sentences,” he says. Indeed, 7,000 people have been arrested since the protests broke out some seven months ago; 1,000 of them have been charged, with many facing a sentence of as much as 10 years.
There is a widespread belief that Beijing hopes such sentences will dampen support for future protests. Wong brushes off that argument. “It’s gone too far. Who would imagine that Generation Z and the millennials would be confronting rubber bullets and teargas, and be fully engaged in politics, instead of Instagram or Snapchat? The Hong Kong government may claim the worst is over, but Hong Kong will never be peaceful as long as police violence persists.”
In Unfree Speech, Wong argues that China is not only Hong Kong’s problem (the book’s subtitle is: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, Now). “It is an urgent message that people need to defend their rights, against China and other authoritarians, wherever they live,” he says.
At the heart of the book are Wong’s prison writings from a summer spent behind bars in 2017. Each evening in his cell, “I sat on my hard bed and put pen to paper under dim light” to tell his story.
Wong was born in October 1996, nine months before Britain ceded control of Hong Kong to Beijing. That makes him a fire rat, the same sign of the Chinese zodiac that was celebrated on the first day of the lunar new year yesterday. Fire rats are held to be adventurous, rebellious and garrulous. Wong is a Christian and does not believe in astrology, but those personality traits seem close to the mark.
His parents are Christians — his father quit his job in IT to become a pastor, while his mother works at a community centre that provides counselling — and named their son after the prophet who led the Israelites to the promised land.
Like many young people in Hong Kong, whose housing market has been ranked as the world’s most unaffordable, he still lives at home, in South Horizons, a commuter community on the south side of the main island.
Wong was a dyslexic but talkative child, telling jokes in church groups and bombarding his elders with questions about their faith. “By speaking confidently, I was able to make up for my weaknesses,” he writes. “The microphone loved me and I loved it even more.”
In 2011, he and a group of friends, some of whom are his fellow activists today, launched Scholarism, a student activist group, to oppose the introduction of “moral and national education” to their school curriculum — code for communist brainwashing, critics believed. “I lived the life of Peter Parker,” he says. “Like Spider-Man’s alter-ego, I went to class during the day and rushed out to fight evil after school.”
The next year, the authorities issued a teaching manual that hailed the Chinese Communist Party as an “advanced and selfless regime”. For Wong, “it confirmed all our suspicions and fears about communist propaganda”.
In August 2012, members of Scholarism launched an occupation protest outside the Hong Kong government’s headquarters. Wong told a crowd of 120,000 students and parents: “Tonight we have one message and one message only: withdraw the brainwashing curriculum. We’ve had enough of this government. Hong Kongers will prevail.”
Remarkably, the kids won. Leung Chun-ying, the territory’s chief executive at the time, backed down. Buoyed by their success, the youngsters of Scholarism joined forces with other civil rights groups to protest about the lack of progress towards electing the next chief executive by universal suffrage — laid out as a goal in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution. Their protests culminated in the “umbrella movement” occupation of central Hong Kong for 79 days in 2014.
Two years later, Wong and other leaders set up a political group, Demosisto. He has always been at pains to emphasise he is not calling for independence — a complete red line for Beijing. Demosisto has even dropped the words “self-determination” from its stated goals — perhaps to ease prospects for its candidates in elections to Legco, the territory’s legislative council, in September.
Wong won’t say whether he will stand himself, but he is emphatically political, making a plea for change from within — not simply for anger on the streets — and for stepping up international pressure: “I am one of the facilitators to let the voices of Hong Kong people be heard in the international community, especially since 2016.”
There are tensions between moderates and radicals. Some of the hardliners on the streets last year considered Wong already to be part of the Establishment, a backer of the failed protests of the past.
So why bother? What’s the point of a city of seven million taking on one of the world’s nastiest authoritarian states, with a population of about 1.4 billion? And in any case, won’t it all be over in 2047, the end of the “one country, two systems” deal agreed between China and Britain, which was supposed to guarantee a high degree of autonomy for another 50 years? Does he fear tanks and a repetition of the Tiananmen Square killings?
Wong acknowledges there are gloomy scenarios but remains a robust optimist. “Freedom and democracy can prevail in the same way that they did in eastern Europe, even though before the Berlin Wall fell, few people believed it would happen.”
He is tired of the predictions of think-tank pundits, journalists and the like. Three decades ago, with the implosion of communism in the Soviet bloc, many were confidently saying that the demise of the people’s republic was only a matter of time. Jump forward 20 years, amid the enthusiasm after the Beijing Olympics, and they were predicting market reforms and a growing middle class would presage liberalisation.
Neither scenario has unfolded, Wong notes. “They are pretending to hold the crystal ball to predict the future, but look at their record and it is clear no one knows what will happen by 2047. Will the Communist Party even still exist?”
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1119445/unfree-speech
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