What's in the News

Update on what I posted above. This is starting to sound fishy…I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm starting to wonder about how true some points in the original story were.

Children in Alleged Abuse Case Taken into Protective Custody, American Foster Father Still Missing


Nine of the 10 children at the center of alleged cases of child abuse have been taken into protective custody by Chinese officials, an American expatriate source familiar with the situation and a report in Legal Daily indicated Sunday.

The situation first came to light on Thursday, when reports surfaced that an eight-year-old girl, ethnically Chinese but speaking English and only basic Mandarin, was dropped off by a male foreigner at a Beijing hospital on November 21 for treatment. The foreigner has not returned, however that person may not be the man identified as American Ray Wigdal. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

On Friday, Wigdal arranged to move the children to a location near the Lido with the help of some volunteers, the source told the Beijinger. "The volunteers arranged to have three vans to transport the kids so they were safe. The volunteers picked up the kids and were planning to take them to breakfast somewhere in the Shunyi area, as the kids said they hadn’t eaten breakfast and were very hungry. The volunteers drove in a caravan back from Lido towards Shunyi area on the Airport Expressway and when they exited at the Beigao exit, authorities and child protection officials stopped the cars and instructed the volunteers to follow them with the kids to an approved child protection safe house," the source said.

"When the volunteers arrived at the child protection center and entered with the kids it took a little time to get things organized and worked out as this is a very serious case involving 10 kids and the authorities were very sensitive and wanted to make sure things were done correctly.  The volunteers, child psychologist, social worker, and professional counselor were with the kids the entire time and the kids were safe and treated kindly and with great patience and compassion," the source said.

In a story from Saturday night's Legal Daily, an elderly Chinese lady identified as "Granny Guo," who claims to have been assisting Wigdal in taking care of the children offered a possible alibi. She told reporters that Widgal was in the US when the girl first was injured, and suggests her injuries were more likely the case of an injury from a bike accident worsened by roughhousing amongst the children. She did admit that Wigdal had struck the children before, which could explain why the girl told volunteers that her foster father had hit her.

Wigdal has adopted 10 Chinese children ranging in ages from three months to 17 years old, according to Legal Daily, although group photos of the children show none over the age of 12 or 13. Wigdal and the children once lived at Shunyi residence compound Capital Paradise. He was often spotted by area residents say the man was a frequent customer at the Pinnacle Plaza Starbucks nearby, where he would sip coffee while his children played in and around the store.

The children have said little, but have asked "Where is he," referring apparently to Wigdal, and also allegedly said, "We do not like him, but we don't want to be separated from our brothers and sisters," according to Legal Daily.

It is unclear what legal action Wigdal may face. A key element is that he is not the legal adoptive parent of some or all of the children.

So the police interviewed him but didn't hold him? And the media is running with the story as an opportunity to wave the anti-foreigner flag. People on twitter have talked about seeing him and the kids and not thinking the kids seemed underfed. Hard know know what's true and what isn't.

Girl at Center of Suspected Abuse Case Stops Breathing, on Ventilator: Report

An eight-year-old girl at the center of what authorities suspect might be child abuse stopped breathing Sunday night and had been placed on a ventilator, according to Chinese reports at 163.com.

The girl, who was brought to the hospital on November 24, stopped breathing on her own around 8pm Sunday night. Suffering from an intestinal obstruction and kidney problems that began some time in September, this is her third trip to the hospital since the injury. As of Sunday night's report she has been breathing with a ventilator.

Volunteer caregivers who have assisted Ray Wigdal, identified as the American foster father of the girl and 10 other Chinese children, told reporters that her injuries were the result of a bicycling accident; however authorities suspect the girl's injuries may have been inflicted by Widgal, as Chinese media reports claim that the girl told the hospital staff she had been hit by him.

Wigdal is reported to have been in China for over 30 years, speaks Chinese fluently, and has been raising orphans from infancy since at least 2004, with most of the children abandoned by their natural parents because of birth defects such as cleft palate.

Chinese media reports have gone sensational with headlines that have presumed Widgal's guilt, such as 163.com's use of the headline "Chinese Girl Tortured by Foreigner Stops Breathing (被老外虐待中国养女停止呼吸)".

Wigdal's whereabouts remain unknown and has not been to the hospital to visit the girl since her admittance November 24, although the 163.com report states that he was interviewed by police on Sunday. Beijing Police released no further information on the matter, including whether or not they had detained him.

A woman identified as Ms. Zhang, one of the volunteers, said that Wigdal had "almost collapsed," although it is unclear whether this occurred before or after his meeting with the police. "He said that raising children is a part of his life and he can't believe the situation has developed into this," Zhang told The Mirror Chinese newspaper.

The report also says Wigdal called the children via one of the volunteers Sunday night, saying, "No matter where you are, I'm still the boss."

The other 10 children were taken into protective custody by Beijing authorities and children protection staff on Friday, December 5, with reports coming from a trusted American source familiar with the case saying  "the kids were safe and treated kindly and with great patience and compassion."

It remains unclear whether Wigdal has legally adopted any of the children. A Chinese elderly volunteer, identified in reports as "Granny Guo," told reporters that she is not aware of Wigdal processing any proper paperwork for fostering or adopting the children.

However, one report added that since most of the children Widgal has been caring for were abandoned due to birth defects, they lack any formal Chinese paperwork such as birth certificates or IDs that would be necessary for proper registration.

Police said they planned to use DNA testing to attempt to establish the children's identities.

Authorities have stated that in order for Wigdal to claim any of them from protective custody, Wigdal will have to prove that he is their legal adoptive parent.

The girl died. What a sad story.

http://rayschildren.org/

Bit of a weird site. No public story, just ten years worth of selected snaps.


The reported claim about the kid (or kids) having minimal Mandarin is a worry. If true, seems to suggest they've been kept out of society (of their peers and in general).

Also, there may be reasons he's not at the hospital 24/7, but it doesn't look good.

How Wal-Mart Made Its Crumbling China Business Look So Good for So Long

After years of heralding China as one of its best markets, Wal-Mart (WMT) in August said its performance there was among the worst in its major countries. A management shake-up and job cuts have followed.

Although the reversals seem abrupt, cracks in the foundation of Wal-Mart's retail business in China have been developing for years, hidden by questionable accounting and unauthorized sales practices, according to employees and internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg....


And that's why Dove is everywhere in China.

Heee heeee.  Canada isn't the same as China for exams      The University of Waterloo is one of Canada's top universities.  A student I tutored in Dalian is now a student at that university.  Hopefully he will be honest.

CTV Kitchener
Published Wednesday, December 17, 2014 3:11PM EST
Last Updated Wednesday, December 17, 2014 6:33PM EST

A 20-year-old woman and 21-year-old man face charges in connection with an alleged unusual bout of cheating at the University of Waterloo.

The woman, Kaiwen Qian, is a student at the school.

She appeared Wednesday in a Kitchener court on charges of personation and uttering a forged document, and was released on $3,000 bail.

 She is accused of getting the man – Longhua Wang, a student at York University – to write an exam for her.

Nick Manning, a spokesperson for the school, says staff were alerted to the possibility one or more students would be cheating during a specific math exam.

“(We) put measures in place to detect that cheating, and we discovered that a male student from a different university had been paid to come and take an exam for one of our students,” he told CTV News.

Wang, Manning said, somehow came into possession of a fake Waterloo student ID containing his picture and Qian’s name.

It’s alleged that Wang was paid more than $900 to write the exam.

Qian returns to court in January.

School officials say they continue to investigate the fake student ID, and whether any others were issued.

“We know that students are under immense pressure to pass exams … and inevitably some will find ways to cheat, which is a great shame,” Manning said.

“We … expect them to uphold very high standards of integrity, which means not cheating.”

NSA has [VPN]s in Vulcan death grip—no, really, that’s what they call it (nb: link is robo-copped)

[VPN] traffic repositories used to find keys, crack encryption of target traffic.

The National Security Agency’s Office of Target Pursuit (OTP) maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking the encrypted traffic of virtual private networks (VPNs) and has developed tools that could potentially uncloak the traffic in the majority of VPNs used to secure traffic passing over the Internet today, according to documents published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. A slide deck from a presentation by a member of OTP’s VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used at that time to attack VPNs—including tools with names drawn from Star Trek and other bits of popular culture.

OTP’s VPN exploit team had members assigned to branches focused on specific regional teams, as well as a “Cross-Target Support Branch” and a custom development team for building specialized VPN exploits. At the regional level, the VPN team representatives acted as liaisons to analysts, providing information on new VPN attacks and gathering requirements for specific targets to be used in developing new ones.

While some VPN technologies—specifically, those based on the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPTP)—have previously been identified as being vulnerable because of the way they exchange keys at the beginning of a VPN session, others have generally been assumed to be safer from scrutiny. But in 2010, the NSA had already developed tools to attack the most commonly used VPN encryption schemes: Secure Shell (SSH), Internet Protocol Security (IPSec), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.

The NSA has a specific repository for capturing VPN metadata called TOYGRIPPE. The repository stores information on VPN sessions between systems of interest, including their “fingerprints” for specific machines and which VPN services they’ve connected to, their key exchanges, and other connection data. VPN “fingerprints” can also be extracted from XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s distributed “big data” store of all recently captured Internet traffic, to be used in identifying targets and developing an attack. Because XKEYSCORE includes data from “untasked” sources—people and systems not designated as under surveillance—the OTP VPN Exploitation Team’s presentation requested, “Try to avoid relying on (XKEYSCORE) workflows due to legal and logistical issues.” But XKEYSCORE, it was noted, is best for attacks on SSH traffic.

Analysis of TOYGRIPPE and XKEYSCORE data, as well as from “daily VPN exploits,” is fed into BLEAKINQUIRY—a metadata database of “potentially exploitable” VPNs. This database can be searched by NSA analysts for addresses matching targeted individuals or systems and to generate requests for the VPN Exploit crew to convert the "potentially" into an actuality.

When an IPSec VPN is identified and “tasked” by NSA analysts, according to the presentation, a “full take” of its traffic is stored in VULCANDEATHGRIP, a VPN data repository. There are similar, separate repositories for PPTP and SSL VPN traffic dubbed FOURSCORE and VULCANMINDMELD, respectively.

The data is then replayed from the repositories through a set of attack scripts, which use sets of preshared keys (PSKs) harvested from sources such as exploited routers and stored in a key database called CORALREEF. Other attack methods are used to attempt to recover the PSK for each VPN session. If the traffic is of interest, successfully cracked VPNs are then processed by a system called TURTLEPOWER and sorted into the NSA’s XKEYSCORE full-traffic database, and extracted content is pushed to the PINWALE “digital network intelligence” content database.

But for those that aren’t successfully cracked, the VPN Exploit Team’s presentation noted, the team works to “turn that frown upside down” by doing more data collection—trying to capture IPSec Internet Key Exchange (IKE) and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) traffic during VPN handshakes to help build better attacks. In cases where the keys just can’t be recovered, the VPN Exploit Team will “contact our friends for help”— gathering more information on the systems of interest from other data collection sites or doing an end-run by calling on Tailored Access Operations to “create access points” through exploits of one of the endpoints of the VPN connection.


Thanks, NSA.

Dalian is in the news.  Very interesting video.  Hope you can get it in China.  It is about the newly rich in China.   

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/video/playlist/world-economy/bling-dynasty-china-wealthiest-1-110000881.html

Wanted by Police: Trojan Horse in Hack-Averse China

When the subject of cyberspying pops up, China’s line has remained consistent: Beijing opposes hacking and China is a victim.

Perhaps the message wasn’t heard in the eastern Chinese city Wenzhou.

The police department in an economic-development zone there in December said on an official website that it planned to award a 149,000 yuan ($24,000) contract to a domestic state-run company to supply it software services for what it described as a “Trojan Horse.” A Trojan Horse is a program that helps others pilfer information from an unsuspecting user.

The notice from the Wenzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone’s public security bureau explained the purpose of the Trojan Horse program and a related delivery system: “targeting mobile phones using the Android system or iPhone after jailbreak for real-time surveillance on information like phone calls, text messages and photos on mobile phones.” “Jailbreak” refers to the steps phone owners sometimes take to modify their gadget’s software to get around restrictions placed by manufacturers and carriers so that users can tap multiple app stores and other services....


And it's not just Wenzhou either.

Dalian is in the news.  Very interesting video.  Hope you can get it in China.  It is about the newly rich in China.   

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/video/playlist/world-economy/bling-dynasty-china-wealthiest-1-110000881.html

The newly VERY rich. Only the French could have such a casual sense of entitlement to wealth though. The pronunciation on the clip reminds me of Mme. de Gaul when asked what she looked forward to in her husband's retirement. She answered "A penis". "No, no, no" said Charles. "You mean 'happiness'".
Apocryphal maybe, but it should be true!

That hard hitting, investigative Chinese journalism:
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2015-01/15/content_34569527.htm

Man falls asleep on subway, ashamed that he didn't offer seat to pregnant lady.

Man runs over son while fleeing Chengguan
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2015-01/16/content_34581618.htm

I've been here too long, I didn't go 'aww', i went 'hmph' when i read it.

'Western values' forbidden in Chinese universities

China's education minister has vowed that "western values" will never be allowed into the country's classrooms as the Communist party steps up efforts to consolidate autocratic rule and stave off demands for democracy and universal human rights.

"Never let textbooks promoting western values enter into our classes," Yuan Guiren said, according to an official account of his remarks. "Any views that attack or defame the leadership of the party or smear socialism must never be allowed to appear in our universities."

China has tightened controls over all aspects of public life and clamped down hard on freedom of expression since President Xi Jinping took over as leader in 2012....


There goes my plan to teach queuing.