Beijing October 2005 near the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing. Taken from a taxi. One of my best photos. The composition turned out well by accident! I'm more of a snapshotist than a photographer.

馬來西亞喜劇演員脫口秀🤣

This aged well…

Authorities in southwestern China launched a large-scale raid against Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC) during its Sunday worship service on June 14, detaining dozens of believers, according to reports received by ChinaAid and a subsequent church statement. The church’s worship service, which included families and children, was being held in a hotel conference room in Jiangyou City, about 100 miles northeast of Chengdu, when it was raided at approximately 11 a.m. local time. According to a statement released by ERCC leaders, 60 to 70 government personnel — including police officers, SWAT personnel, Domestic Security Protection Unit officers, religious affairs officials, and local government representatives — “stormed the venue and forcibly took control of the gathering.” Church leaders said 33 believers were detained during the operation, including two elders, Yan Hong and Wu Wuqing. Breaking Now: chinaaid.org/news/breaking-c… With @BobFu4China Attention: @USCIRF @VOM_USA @OpenDoorsUS @StateIRF @CECCgov #China #ReligiousFreedom #ChristianPersecution #PersecutedChurch #PrayForChina #HouseChurch #ERCC #EarlyRainCovenantChurch #BobFu #ChinaAid #HumanRights #CCP CHENGDU, SICHUAN PROVINCE, CHINA

I got this high-res scan from an archive here in China. Rare 1967 world map titled "The Boundless Radiance of Mao Zedong Thought Illuminates the Entire World Red." It's mapping "countries where revolutionary struggle has been launched" that the PRC was backing.

Your reminder that China is intentionally sustaining a war which is killing innocents, ravaging our continent, and has been given a free pass for it. Extraordinary how Beijing keeps telling us who they are, and we keep pretending not to hear.

中文不是中共發明的！中共就是流氓政權啊，先模糊界限，跟你稱兄道弟，最後只想著把你吃乾抹淨。🤮 台灣人帶來的文化就是要落地生根，多元融合，好好愛這片土地，不是用來讓流氓國家親情勒索用的 逝去的祖先也沒有被共慘黨統治過，而是逃離！ 在台灣，票投賣台賊藍白葬送未來。2026～2028下架賣台賊藍白兩黨

Mark Carney does an impression of Donald Trump

#BREAKING: CO AG Griswold: “We are trying to interpret an executive order and rule making but at the end of the day, DHS would send states a list 60 days ahead of the election. We would then have to send the postal service a list 30 days ahead of the election, and to tell you the truth…it feels like a trap. So what happens if an eligible voter is not on DHS’ list? They are telling us that DOJ is going to come after us if we send that ballot out. It’s attempted interference, it’s attempted voter suppression, it’s no good. I don’t know exactly what they are doing, that is what I believe they are doing, but I do know it’s unlawful, it’s unconstitutional and we’re going to fight like hell to push back. The state of Colorado and other states are already in litigation and we are going to push back on the rule making that the postal service just commenced, published this week also.” 🤦‍♀️

When people in Washington lower their voices and say, “Please don’t use my name. I’m afraid he’ll come after my family’s livelihood,” it means something has broken. People no longer trust the law to protect them.

#BREAKING: Hayes: “It has been clear to anyone paying attention that Donald Trump, the guy who did January 6th, the guy who insists he won the popular vote in 2016 and created a whole commission that took over a year to confirm, no, he still lost by three million votes, the guy who insists that California, yes that California, a state which he lost his closest race by 20 points, actually voted for him in all its elections but then rigged the count, the guy who has pushed this totally unprecedented lawless effort to rig the congressional maps for the midterms, that guy was always going to use every trick he could, legal or not, to retain power in the midterm  elections, we have known that, and now this week, that is coming into very very sharp focus.” 😳

The Trump administration took the names of nine enslaved people off a memorial at George Washington's home. A judge ordered them back. That memorial sits at the site of George Washington's presidential home in Philadelphia, and the order to restore it came Friday from U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston. Her ruling forces the Interior Department to put back the slavery exhibit there, along with the signs and displays it pulled from parks and monuments nationwide because, in the government's own words, they "do not align with its preferred narrative." The fight comes down to one question: who gets to be in the story of America? This administration decided it could delete the people it found inconvenient. The judge said no. It started with an executive order Trump signed in March 2025, "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History." The order claimed a "revisionist movement" had smeared the country as "inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed," and sent the Interior Department into the parks to scrub anything that fit. It named one target directly: Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, where the nation declared that all men are created equal. That is where you see what the words meant. The Park Service took down the memorial to the nine people Washington enslaved at his presidential home. Those were the same people who cooked and cleaned and were owned by the first president while he ran the new republic. Their names stood on that wall until this administration decided visitors should not have to read them. Another judge had already ordered that one restored. She compared the government's claim that it gets to decide which history is true to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell's "1984." Kelley went wider. Her order swept in exhibits on abolition, immigration, labor, women's suffrage, civil rights, and the climate, quietly pulled from sites including Fort Sumter and the Grand Canyon. She did not soften it. The government, she wrote, had tried to "rewrite the Nation's history with a white-out pen," telling "half-truths" about the country it claims to honor. The Interior Department's entire response was to call her a "liberal activist judge" and threaten an appeal. It had no answer for the white-out pen, because there isn't one. Slavery happened. The people who built this country existed, and their names were carved into a wall in Philadelphia until someone here decided to erase them. America turns two hundred and fifty this year. This administration's idea of honoring that was to pick which Americans were allowed in the story. The white-out pen is going back in the drawer. The names go back on the wall, by the Fourth of July, by court order.

Former Denmark PM and NATO Secretary General, Rasmussen: The most effective and cheapest way to guarantee security of Ukraine is to invite Ukraine to join NATO. Ukraine is a provider of European security, the strongest and most battle-tested military power in Europe right now. There might be arguments about how we can deal with a new member that is at war with Russia. But we have a precedent: when we allowed Germany into NATO back in 1955, the whole of Germany formally joined NATO, yet we decided that only the territory controlled by the government in Western Germany was covered by Article 5. We could do exactly the same with Ukraine and say: “You join NATO and Article 5 only covers that part of Ukraine controlled by the government in Kyiv.”

Poised, present and humorous. Fully on the issues and facts. Prime Minister Mark Carney is one of the most important leaders in Canadian and world history. Well worth a watch.

一直以来中共都在抹黑李登辉是台独教父，十恶不赦，现实真是这样吗？05年4月，中华民国前总统李登辉接受台视《台湾论坛》专访。采访中他再次强调了民主自由对台湾的重要性，并抨击了国民党试图“联共”的荒谬想法。从发言中不难看出李对中共不满及警惕之情，绝非针对大陆同胞。

A Chinese diplomat saved over 4,000 Jews from the Holocaust by issuing visas, and nobody knew until a line in his obituary was investigated decades later. His daughter also wrote an extended obituary: As consul general in Vienna, after Adolf Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, Mr. Ho helped many Jews escape the Nazis by issuing them visas to China. In one particularly close call, Mr. Ho managed to stave off Gestapo agents at the door of a Jewish home where he had gone to deliver a visa.

Last week we celebrated the 82nd Anniversary of D-Day. 🇨🇦 One of the Canadians who landed on Juno beach mentioning what he thought was one of his life’s greatest accomplishments. You may remember him playing the character Scotty on Star Trek. The late James Doohan a true hero

Last night my friend @MaxwellFrostFL showed me Donald Trump’s Truth Social posting urging MAGA to expel me from Congress. Apparently Trump doesn’t appreciate our fight against his $1.776 billion slush fund or his outrageous attack against the Southern Poverty Law Center. Sorry, Mr. President, I’m not going anywhere but back to the front lines of the fight against corruption and authoritarianism.

O'BRIEN: Trump believed Ukraine had no cards, that he could bully Ukrainians into giving Putin very good deal. He didn't understand that Ukraine was developing their own capabilities and their willingness to fight. So, Trump failed for two reasons. First, Ukrainians adapted, and that wasn't expected by him. You can see there have been some changes in his rhetoric lately, where he has to grudgingly admit that Ukraine has actually done better. The United States completely underestimated Ukrainian resilience. Secondly, Trump thought Europeans would bully Ukraine along with him because they would be afraid of United States leaving NATO. He thought he could use NATO to push Europeans to force Ukraine to take a bad deal. Europeans eventually helped Ukraine more than he thought. They seem to understand that it's actually better for them to have Ukraine fight the war the way Ukraine wants. Trump didn't understand what Ukraine was capable of and he misjudged what Europeans would do.