cmarshall

For which the same legal concepts apply even if the specifics may differ slightly. Maxwell was not herself charged with rape although she might have committed that crime, because rape is not a federal crime. She was charged with sex trafficking of a minor, transportation of a minor with intent to engage in illegal sex acts, enticement of a minor to travel for illegal sexual purposes, and three counts of conspiracy, all of which violate Federal statutes. The federal legal age of consent that applies to these crimes is: Cross-border travel for sex. The PROTECT Act, §105(a)(b), establishes an age of consent of 18 for travel into or out of the country or between states for the purpose of a sexual encounter. http://www.solresearch.org/report/US_Federal_Age_of_Sexual_Consent So, legally the girls under the age of eighteen were children at the time exactly like two-year olds in the eyes of the relevant law.

Really do try to grasp the concept of legal age to give consent. I know it is difficult, but really the behavior of the legal minor has no bearing on the issue of consent since there is no legal consent for a minor which is established by statute not by behavior. Similarly, the statute of limitations for various crimes is established by statute, not by what you personally consider reasonable and may also be extended by statute.

Doesn't apply to the minor children involved who no more have the legal authority to give consent to sexual activity than a two-year old can. So, whatever the children said or did or got paid does not reduce Maxwell's legal liability one whit. This seems to be a concept that the pro-pedophile faction has difficulty in grasping.

Fine, except that I have experience with routine Thai acceptance of my US passport card, while you are just supposing that Thais would be confused. It goes without saying that you are welcome to make your own choices, but advising others against getting it without any data to support your theory that it is useless in Thailand is not a reasonable position. Getting a Thai to accept a photocopy of a passport seems a lot more dubious to me. My passport card is also a lot less valuable to me than my passport book. If I lost the card, I would just be out the price of a replacement with no real inconvenience.

If you read what I have written I never claimed to hand it to Thai officials. There are a lot of occasions when people other than government officials ask for an id. No Thai I ever handed it to seemed in the least nonplussed, probably because they think it must be a national id card. I also used it when signing my most recent lease which was then accepted without question by both the landlord and the building manager. As you know, we are advised/obliged to carry id while in Thailand. The passport card fulfills that function and fits in your wallet while you keep the passport book safe at home. You should give it a try before you decide that it would just confuse Thai people.

Having a passport card in Thailand saves us from ever having to carry the passport book, the loss of which would be a headache. I have used my passport card as my id in sending DHL parcels, in registering at a hospital and then getting healthcare at the hospital, in registering for a language course, getting a Covid vaccine, etc.. The only time I carry my passport book is when going to the TM. Other than that the passport card is indeed an effective substitute for the passport book. The reason is that Thai people expect an ID card, since they all have national id cards. So, they it doesn't strike them as odd to present a passport card as id, although many Americans would find it odd.

If you are renewing a US passport, be sure to get the passport card as well. Very useful in Thailand and elsewhere.

Too bad. Open-billed storks are handsome birds that fly beautifully. And then there are so many planes. The pictures looks like the Airbus A320 that landed in the Hudson River a few years ago, not a fighter jet.

This thread has not been a complete waste of time for me at least. My Thai wife and I are now tentatively planning to move to France in a year or two, provided that the plague is not still raging in Europe then. I am entitled to Irish citizenship and an Irish passport based on ancestry and am waiting on one final vital document from the US before making my application to the Irish Embassy here in Bangkok. I am pretty sure that my application will be successful, because my brother got his Irish passport on the same documents. As an EU citizen I will have the right to enter France without a visa and to settle there. My wife will be entitled to a carte de séjour including the right to work if she wants. After three months we can enroll for full coverage in the French health care system. Turns out I won't even have to pay income tax in France, since the tax treaty excludes French taxes on my Social Security benefits and distributions from IRA accounts which compose the whole of our income. We will have to pay for the health care. I have enjoyed the past ten years here in Bangkok, most of all studying Thai language, which I intend to continue in the future. I do not despise the Thai people and feel very lucky to have been in Thailand for the pandemic. But we think living in France and travelling in Europe by train will be a more interesting life for us. My wife has already enrolled at the Alliance Française. I will sign up there also to rehabilitate my once passable French. And so, thanks for all the fish.

Zeynep Tufecki is a brilliant writer. I read her columns in the NY Times with interest.

Portugese D7 visa a lot less than a million pounds and includes permission to work and even a pat to citizenship. Very friendly.

The example I have in mind is a well-informed young woman who lived in Costa Rica for ten years while she developing a relocation business, apparently successfully. There are some people who are very well-informed. The stupid ones are easy to spot and not worth wasting time on.

Costa Rica and Ecuador have pervasive crime problems. You can find youtube videos about expats leaving Costa Rica. The reason is always the crime. I've been to Ecuador, where houses are routinely fortified against crime.

If they legalize it I hope they promptly release everyone who was incarcerated for violating the laws against it.

But much of the social and crime control benefits from drug policy in Portugal has come from legalizing heroine, hasn't it?

But they don't trust them so much lately, do they? As the full effects of Brexit continue to increase, such as the trade consequences of finally checking incoming goods for which the Tories made no preparation in the past five years, their regret of their misplaced trust is only likely to increase as well.

Tell it to the Israelis: https://www.timesofisrael.com/satellite-images-of-chinese-hospital-parking-suggests-outbreak-began-in-august/ The innumerate often fail to grasp how to reason from statistics that are known to be incomplete. Congratulations on your connections to Chinese society from which you still have no relevant observations to report. So, none of your Chinese circle observed coffin shortages, people dying on the street, or hospitals with patients on gurneys filling waiting rooms? How many Chinese in you circle of contacts got Covid? No one I know in Thailand got Covid. I periodically asked my Thai family and acquaintances if they knew anyone infected with Covid. They always answered in the negative until in September one person did have a friend whose mother died of Covid. By comparison in my circle of contacts back in the States there are many people reporting Covid cases firsthand including one of my own family members. So, while not dispositive that is the kind of limited, but concrete observation on the ground that can tend to confirm or disconfirm theories like yours in the absence of any data to support them.

And that would be the same Tory government that decided that have trade agreements with their largest trading partner were not strictly necessary?

To say the numbers are not accurate is not the same as saying that there is no information in them at all. They are roughly approximate and useful especially when they can be compared with qualitative observations. The Covid epidemic was essentially controlled by summer of 2020, when they permitted mass gathering in places like Wuhan water parks without a subsequent spike in infections. Of course, they have had local outbreaks to which they have responded vigorously and effectively. The comparison of Covid deaths per hundred between the US (242) and China (< 1) is essentially correct. If the disease burden in China had ever exploded they would not have been able to hide it from the foreigners in the country or from the satellites passing overhead tallying how many cars were observed day by day in the hospital parking lots. Citing the government control of the media as a broad generalization to justify your otherwise unsubstantiated assertion is indicative of a hatred of China. Just like many of the posters here whose false denigration of the Thai response indicates their hatred of Thailand. I take as evidence of the falsity of your belief that despite your having spent time in China you don't report any on-the-ground observation of high infection or death rates.

Choosing a school to teach you Thai is not like other consumer purchases. If you go to Central Chidlom to buy a toaster the odds are strong that the toaster will indeed toast your bread. The situation is just the opposite for Thai language schools. Most Western students of Thai fail, that is, they never become fluent in the language. It's like picking out a toaster knowing that there is a 95% chance it won't work. So, the question that should be on your mind in choosing a school should be, "What evidence is there that any Westerners who have studied here have succeeded?" That will narrow the search down considerably.

1. None of the numbers cited is accurate, except maybe S. Korea since none of them did adequate testing at the outbreak or had the means to. Certainly there was never widespread testing of dead people. Only S. Korea ramped up early for extensive testing and then carried it out successfully, due to the excellent leadership of the Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency. 2. If you think China experienced the devastation of, say, Northern Italy in Spring of 2020 and managed to keep it a secret, you are deeply lost in fantasy.

The original Global Health Security project, which completed in Oct. 2019, had the goal of evaluating preparedness for a possible pandemic. So, that was prospective. Now however, we have actual data from the actual, ongoing pandemic which can answer the question, "So, how did the countries actually perform?" The answer to that question in a single number is the Covid deaths per hundred thousand. The US, which was positioned to perform the best among nations actually performed among the worst. Thailand, which ranked fifth in the 2019 study performed pretty much as predicted, which is to say, extremely well. But the stars of the epidemic have been China, Taiwan, S. Korea, Viet Nam, and a few others. Among those highly successful countries only S. Korea has a first-world level of GDP per capita. We were very lucky to be in Thailand for the pandemic.

You folks don't like to pay attention to data? Rather just go by "feelings?" Covid deaths per hundred thousand US 242.09 UK 219.34 Germany 126.30 Sweden 147.64 Thailand 30.32 S. Korea 7.99 Taiwan 3.57 China 0.35 The joke in the Johns Hopkins study is the US, not Thailand.

A foreign national would have a hard time staying for years in the US without a green card.

But you are missing the point. The Covid pandemic posed a lethal threat to anyone in the highly developed countries. So, it doesn't matter how high or low the final mortality rate is. It is news and a focus, because a lot of people whose lives were never threatened by malaria, TB, or even flu at least to the same extent, have been facing a novel and lethal threat. During the Viet Nam war the US Selective Service put all young men aged eighteen or above in the pool from which the actual draftees would be randomly selected. So, except for those with deferments of one kind or another, all men eighteen and over were at risk of being drafted and sent to a war zone. So, they protested against the war in large numbers. By 1970, however, the Selective Service realized that most of the young men in the pool would never be drafted because the manpower needs were much smaller than the entire cohort of eligible young men. So, they realized that they their own system was stimulating more protest than it had to. They then started holding an annual lottery the result of which would be that three quarters of the young men would realize they were at no risk of being drafted and would be much less inclined to do any protesting. The scale of the risk depends on the size of the pool of people, especially relatively rich ones, who feel themselves at risk. With Covid that was everyone or at least all the smart ones.