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While citizens in North Korea are nearly starving in the face of food price hikes and shortages, the country’s elite are feasting on one of the country’s most expensive delicacies: dog meat. Meat of any kind is a rarity in the North Korean diet these days, and dog meat costs twice as much as pork. A single bowl of dog meat stew, called dangogi-jang, can cost the same as two kilograms of rice. ... This summer, while the bellies of average citizens in the country of 25 million people rumble, the most popular dog meat restaurants in Chongjin and elsewhere are still bustling with powerful military and ruling party clientele. (more) https://www.rfa.org/english/news/korea/dangogi-07212022163826.html

TAIPEI, July 25 (Reuters) - Roads emptied and people were ordered to stay indoors in parts of Taiwan, including its capital Taipei, on Monday for an air-raid exercise as the island steps up preparations in the event of a Chinese attack. Sirens sounded at 1:30 p.m. (0530 GMT) for the mandatory street evacuation drills, which effectively shut towns and cities across northern Taiwan for 30 minutes. A "missile alert", asking people to evacuate to safety immediately, was sent via text message. "It is necessary to make preparations in the event of a war," Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je said in a speech after overseeing drills for the exercise named Wan An, which means everlasting peace. (more) https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/missile-alert-taiwan-holds-air-raid-exercise-amid-china-tension-2022-07-25/

After some short-lived optimism that the worst of the COVID pandemic might be over, health experts are warning that the peak of the seventh wave has yet to arrive Just a few short weeks ago, coronavirus infections in Japan were hovering around the 10,000-cases-a-day level, and there was optimism across the nation that the worst of the health crisis was over and that the summer holidays would be more carefree than the last two years. As it has done in the past, however, the virus has mutated and caused a spike in infections. On Saturday, authorities recorded a record 200,975 new cases. Health experts say the seventh wave to wash over Japan is of the highly transmissible BA.5 omicron subvariant of the virus, with 17 of the nation's 47 prefectures reporting record-high case loads. On Monday, officials confirmed that there have been a total of 11.39 million confirmed cases in Japan, a nation of 125.8 million, and 31,902 fatalities. (more) https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-japan-struggles-with-record-setting-seventh-wave/a-62584197

Top Secret Service agents who tried to undermine former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony to the Jan. 6 committee have hired private lawyers and are refusing to cooperate with the investigation, members of the panel said over the weekend. Hutchinson, who worked as a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified last month that she was told by deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato that former President Donald Trump was so irate that his security detail would not take him to the Capitol with his supporters on Jan. 6 that he lunged at Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, the head of his detail. ... Ornato, Engel, and the unidentified driver of Trump's vehicle have since hired private counsel, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., told reporters last week. "Some of the officers said that they would be coming and talking under oath," said Lofgren, a member of the committee. "They have not come in, and they recently retained private counsel, which is unusual but they have a right to do that." (more) https://www.salon.com/2022/07/25/secret-agents-tried-to-torpedo-hutchinson-testimony-lawyer-up-refuse-to-testify-panel/ Also: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/22/trump-aides-at-heart-of-jan-6-secret-service-claims-hired-private-lawyers-lofgren-says.html

A majority of Americans say the U.S. government is corrupt and almost a third say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against it, according to a new poll from the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. Two-thirds of Republicans and independents say the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me,” according to the poll, compared to 51 percent of liberal voters. Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 37 percent of gun owners, agreed “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government,” a view held by around 35 percent of Republicans and around 35 percent of Independents. One in five Democrats concurred. (more) https://thehill.com/homenews/3572278-nearly-one-in-three-americans-say-it-may-soon-be-necessary-to-take-up-arms-against-the-government/

Myanmar’s junta has executed four prisoners including a former politician and a veteran activist, drawing shock and revulsion at the country’s first use of capital punishment in decades. Junta-controlled media reported on Monday that four men, including Phyo Zeya Thaw, a rapper and former lawmaker from Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, and the prominent democracy activist Kyaw Min Yu, known as Jimmy, had been executed. They were accused of conspiring to commit terror acts and were sentenced to death in January in closed trials. The UN special rapporteur Thomas Andrews said he was “outraged and devastated” by the executions. “The widespread and systematic murders of protesters, indiscriminate attacks against entire villages, and now the execution of opposition leaders, demands an immediate and firm response by member states of the United Nations,” he said. (more) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/25/myanmar-junta-executes-democracy-activists-state-media

Several posts above has been removed for reasons including quoting foreign language news reports, being off-topic and misrepresenting a research study. "3. English is the only permitted language anywhere on ASEAN NOW, except within the Thai language forum, where using Thai is allowed." https://aseannow.com/terms/

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This thread is a political type discussion that's out of bounds for this subforum. Topic is CLOSED. "Discuss Night Life, restaurants, bars, music, movies, concerts, expat life, fun, or just a chat about anything not covered by other sub- forums. (No Politics)."

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French politicians have blamed the chaos at Dover ferry port which has led to long delays for families travelling to Europe on the introduction of passport checks under Brexit rules. Motorists were facing a two-hour wait to travel the last mile of the route on Saturday before further delays of a few hours at French passport control, with a major incident having been declared by local authorities due to the volume of traffic. The long queues came despite all 10 French passport control booths being fully manned at the port, in contrast to Friday, when only four appeared to be operational. ... Because of the Covid pandemic’s travel restrictions this is the first summer since Britain left the EU in which tourist passengers are experiencing full passport checks. ... The port was expecting to handle 10,000 cars boarding 65 sailings from Dover to France on Saturday, with thousands of cars and goods lorries snaking down the A2 and along Jubilee flyover over the white cliffs of Dover from early morning, rather than along the A20 and the town’s seafront. (more) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/07/23/long-long-delays-expected-port-dover/

Ukraine: Russia hits Ukrainian port despite grain deal Russian missiles hit Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa hours after Moscow and Kyiv signed deals to allow grain exports to resume from there, one of the latest attacks in the ongoing war in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry denounced Saturday’s strike as a “spit in the face” to Turkey and the United Nations, which brokered the agreements. “It took less than 24 hours for Russia to launch a missile attack on Odesa’s port, breaking its promises and undermining its commitments before the U.N. and Turkey under the Istanbul agreement,” Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said. “In case of non-fulfillment, Russia will bear full responsibility for a global food crisis.” ... The port's infrastructure was hit by two Russian Kalibr cruise missiles and Ukrainian air defenses brought down two others, the Ukrainian military's South Command said. (more) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-russia-hits-ukrainian-port-despite-grain-deal-2-americans-die-in-donbas-report-says/ar-AAZT63p

... Having expended the last of its prewar combat power capturing the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Russian army has hit pause on major offensive operations. The Kremlin is busy raising volunteer battalions to make good the tens of thousands of soldiers the army has buried or sent to hospitals since late February. Ukrainian commanders have taken advantage of the Russian pause—and the simultaneous arrival of U.S.-made rockets—to ratchet up strikes on Russian radars, command posts and supply lines. The rocket attacks are helping to destabilize Russian defenses. And in the south around Kherson, that’s helped Ukrainian forces to inch toward the occupied port city with a pre-war population of 300,000, extending a tentative counteroffensive that began back in May. (more) https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/yard-by-yard-the-ukrainians-appear-to-be-pushing-toward-kherson/ar-AAZSDUA

Vermonter Harry Anzbock once supported Obama. He eventually came to embrace Trump’s false rigged-voting claim – and threatened to kill election officials over it. Reuters traces one man’s journey from counterculture youth to rightwing extremism and a dark family tragedy Before Harry Anzbock started threatening to kill election workers, he did his own research. The Vermont barn restorer went online after the 2020 presidential vote and watched a stream of videos. He saw plenty of evidence of voter fraud, he later recalled, including footage of people “obviously doing shady things” at polling places. He said he learned that balloting machines switched votes from Republican Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden – and that Biden took money from China to manipulate the U.S. election. All of these claims were bogus conspiracy theories, promoted by Trump’s political allies and attorneys as they sought to overturn Biden’s victory. Anzbock embraced them as fact. The videos enraged him. He believed Trump’s voters had been robbed. Democracy was on the line. Someone needed to save America. So, a few weeks after the election, Anzbock picked up a hard-to-trace prepaid mobile phone and started making anonymous calls. (more) https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-threats-vermont/

As home prices hover near historical highs and mortgage rates keep soaring, housing affordability in the U.S. is about to reach its lowest point since the 2007 Great Financial Crisis, according to a report by S&P Global Ratings released on July 20. ... Assuming a down payment of 10%, first-time homebuyers will have to pay 28% of their income to cover mortgage payments by the end of 2022 – the highest level since Q1 2007, S&P Global noted, adding that mortgage payments as a percentage of a household’s income shouldn’t surpass 25%, noting the National Association of Realtors’ (“NAR”) guidelines. ... As a testament to how much mortgage rates have risen since the onset of the pandemic, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 2.66% in the week ended December 24, 2020 vs. an average of 5.54% in the week ended July 21, 2022. (more) https://seekingalpha.com/news/3859754-us-housing-affordability-poised-to-fall-to-lowest-since-gfc-on-soaring-prices-rates

Largest international monkeypox study to date highlights new symptoms Many of the people infected in an international monkeypox outbreak experienced a single lesion or sore in their mouth or on their genitals, a departure from typical symptoms of the virus that could lead to clinicians to misdiagnose monkeypox as another sexually transmitted infection (STI). That's one of the main takeaways from the New England Journal of Medicine's (NEJM's) new international study of the current outbreak, which is the largest case-study on the virus. ... The study included clinical observations from 528 confirmed infections at 43 sites from Apr 27 to Jun 24 of this year. The median incubation period is 7 days in this outbreak, and the median age of a case-patient was 38. No deaths occurred, but 70 patients (13%) required hospitalization. In the study, authors share many patients are presenting to clinics and hospitals for pain management or difficulty swallowing. Single anal sores have been recorded in several cases. One in 10 people had only a single skin lesion in the genital area, and 15% had anal and/or rectal pain, a symptom not typically seen in other monkeypox outbreaks. (more) https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2022/07/largest-monkeypox-study-date-highlights-new-symptoms