BTCRAIL FILMS posted a photo:
Conemaugh & Black Lick 111 changes tracks from the CSX connector onto the WMSR main at the historic Western Maryland Cumberland Station. Meanwhile, Interstate 68 looms large over the right of way hauling road traffic east and west through the western Maryland area.
Taken during the "Conemaugh’s Last Chance" Fireball Photo Experience at the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad
Jeff Carlson Kansas...ish posted a photo:
Looking every bit like a scene along US 10 in western Minnesota, or US 52 in eastern North Dakoka, I went out this morning to photograph the Southwest Chief as it rolled into Topeka.
This scene in reality is along US 75 in Pauline, KS on Topeka's south side, and the two beautiful Northern Pacific dome cars are owned and operated by Webb Rail. The 313 and 549 were both built by Budd in 1954 for the North Coast Limited, and served stints on the BN and Amtrak before being sold into private hands.
A former pro-democracy lawmaker has been struck off Hong Kong’s medical register following his conviction for conspiracy to subvert state power in the landmark “Hong Kong 47” national security case.
The Medical Council of Hong Kong ordered on Thursday that urologist Dr Kwok Ka-ki, 64, be removed from the General Register “indefinitely,” after a disciplinary panel found that his national security conviction had caused “damage” to the profession and that he “showed no remorse.”
The ruling is the first removal order by the council against a doctor convicted under the national security law, imposed by Beijing in 2020 following months of pro-democracy protests and unrest.
Kwok wrote on Facebook on Thursday that he “expected” the outcome, but added that his national security conviction did not result from “professional misconduct.”
Kwok was not present and was not represented by a lawyer during a panel hearing on Thursday, according to a 15-page judgment.
The former lawmaker, who represented the medical sector between 2004 and 2008 and New Territories West between 2012 and 2020, had been included in the General Register since 1987 and in the Specialist Register’s urology section since 2004, according to the judgment.
The panel found Kwok guilty of a disciplinary charge after he was convicted of a national security offence as a registered physician. Kwok had a clear disciplinary record prior to the hearing, the judgment noted.
“We are particularly concerned about the damage that [Kwok’s] flagrant violation of the [national security law] had done [to] public confidence in the medical profession,” the five-member panel wrote.
Kwok’s mitigation plea failed to demonstrate his remorse or show that he had reflected on his conviction, the judgment also said.
Kwok was quoted in the judgment as telling the panel that: “[his] conviction was not related to [his] clinical practice. Basically, the charge arose from [his] political commitment as a member of the Legislative Council in the participation in the primary election in 2020. There was no complaint [about his] integrity, and no dishonesty and negligence to [his] duties as a doctor.”
The panel said Kwok’s plea showed that he was “still putting his political agenda [at] the forefront.”
The judgment added: “In his subsequent correspondence with the Secretary [of the council], [Kwok] went so far as to [say] that ‘It is an uphill battle for me to face all these challenges in preparing for the inquiry. While I am facing an authority with resources and manpower, I am here alone. I am always ‘an egg in front of a high wall.’
“This illustrates to us that the Defendant has showed no remorse and let alone been rehabilitated.”
In his Facebook post, written in Chinese, Kwok said he would keep helping people despite being disqualified from practising medicine and urged supporters not to be frustrated.
“Nowadays, we know that all kinds of absurd things could happen. I don’t take it as a surprise, and people don’t need to be sad or frustrated,” he said. “We must live well and excel at what we can still do.”
Claudia Mo, a co-defendant in the “Hong Kong 47” case, expressed disbelief at the council’s decision in a Facebook post on Friday, saying: “Expected, but still …”
Kwok and Mo were sentenced to four years and two months in prison after they pleaded guilty to the offence.
They were released from prison in April last year, alongside former pro-democracy lawmakers Gary Fan and Jeremy Tam. The four were the first defendants to complete their jail terms in the case.
The “Hong Kong 47” case centred on an unofficial primary election held in July 2020 that aimed to help the pro-democracy camp win a controlling majority in the legislature.
The judges ruled that the defendants had planned to use their constitutional powers to veto the government budget, ultimately forcing the resignation of the chief executive and a government shutdown.
This, the judges ruled, would have resulted in a “constitutional crisis.”
SmallRig has announced a new Universal Cooling System for mirrorless cameras, designed to help manage heat during extended shooting sessions. Available in two versions, Hybrid Cooling and Basic Cooling, the system offers different approaches to temperature control depending on shooting needs and environments.
If we believe media reports alone, the U.S.-Mexico border is nothing but a never-ending territory in crisis. If you, however, call the border region home, as 30 million of people do, you would know spirits around here are much higher than the national media of both countries would like you to believe.
You see, with the pandemic caused by Covid-19 not only did the word “amidst” increase in popularity but so did the attention given to value chains. Further fueling this discussion is the recent passage of the CHIPS and Science Act aimed at strengthening the U.S. industrial base by manufacturing semiconductors domestically. If Covid-19 demonstrated the urgency of securing value-chains, then the CHIPS Act is encouraging economic stakeholders at the border to seriously think how the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) can help usher this new industrial policy and what role will Mexico, in particularly along the border, will play.
Their optimism is not misguided. What is misguided, however, is to think that the potential of USMCA can be achieved while simultaneously disregarding criminal dynamics that target productive economic activities along the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2022, the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies partnered with Mexico-based think-tank México Evalúa, the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) to better understand how protection rackets operate in Tijuana and how state and criminal actors compete or collude to offer “protection” to victims who pay in exchange for safety to the very same actors that threaten their income and their lives.
The full report “Business Extortion and Public Security in Tijuana: Who Is Protecting Whom?” provides robust evidence that should give the business community pause for concern. Two findings stand-out for their relevance to economic activity:
1) The successful economic integration of CaliBaja, the mega region that includes the counties of San Diego and Imperial and all municipalities in Baja California, has obscured the multiple Tijuanas that co-exist. On the one hand there is a Tijuana of economic prosperity with deep ties to California that can boast that nearly all the pacemakers in the world are made in this border city. On the other is the Eastern Zone, a label, as the report explains, that is an umbrella term for “dangerous” areas of the city which residents characterize as the forgotten Tijuana.
These “Two Tijuanas” also create invisible borders that create territories where local criminal dynamics can thrive. While Tijuana is often associated with transnational criminal activities, such as drug trafficking, our findings show that activities that take place within city boundaries can be highly predatory. This includes the collection of “protection payments” ranging from $400 pesos every Friday up to US $3,000 per month after an initial payment of US $5,000. Absurdly, and as a result of the imposition of this criminal tax, it is residents in low-income areas who end up paying more for basic necessities and food staples.
2) Operating a functioning and viable protection racket is not a simple task. Arguably, more so at the U.S.-Mexico border where you do not want to kill the goose that lays golden eggs. After the riot-like violence of August 12, when the major of Tijuana infamously requested criminals “to only target those who have not paid” the business community reported that ninety percent of medical appointments from patients coming from the U.S. had been cancelled as a result of the violence. These cancellations are not minor incidents; every year Baja California welcomes 2.5 million patients coming from the United States.
This matters not only from the point of view of lost revenue but also because it should be a wakeup call to the business community that thinks that violence, and its consequences, only happens in the Eastern part of the city. One of the key features of protection rackets is that they have to issue credible threats of violence to potential victims. These credible threats can sometimes escalate and will result in events like the ones that took place on August 12 but even homicides of victims who refused to comply.
In the time I have lived in the border region I have witnessed how Tijuana’s business community has often diagnosed the lethal forms of violence in the city as the result of drug trafficking and drug users. This falls short of addressing the region’s realities of complex transnational criminal dynamics, like drug trafficking, that co-exist with local criminal dynamics, such as protection rackets. Equally important, in the time that I have lived in the border region, I have also witnessed first-hand what pragmatism and innovation between the U.S. and Mexico can accomplish. If the Baja California business community is seriously thinking about their role in this semiconductor venture, then it is time to take off the blinders and acknowledge and address the protection rackets that are suffocating productive activities in the Tijuana that exists outside the prosperous CaliBaja.
* Cecilia Farfán Méndez is head of Security Research Programs at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Twitter: @farfan_cc
Mexico recently achieved an important triumph in the United Nations that has largely gone unnoticed. With the invasion and war crimes occurring in Ukraine, it is natural that most of the attention centers on how member states attempt to bring Russia into line. Yet, the United Nations is more than the Security Council even if at times it may appear that the only relevant decisions are made there.
In March, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) held its 65th session in Vienna, Austria. To recall, the CND “reviews and analyzes the global drug situation”. During this session, Mexico presented the resolution “Strengthening international cooperation to address the links between illicit drug trafficking and illicit firearms trafficking”. Mexico’s resolution was one of four adopted at the CND’s session this year.
Why it matters?
1. As obvious as it may seem for scholars and citizens, especially those living in Latin America, that there is a link between drug trafficking and firearms trafficking, the resolution advances the conversation for governments around the world so that both issues are addressed in an “integrated manner”. If this seems like a minor achievement, recall the ongoing legal action of Mexico against US gun manufacturing companies. This is to say, that Mexico is spearheading a conversation at the international level about the relationship between the two and places the lawsuit in the larger context of an international instrument. Therefore, this is not exclusively a US-Mexico challenge but one that is reproduced in different regions across the globe and where Mexico is assuming a key role in bringing positive change even if this happens incrementally.
2. The resolution also “recognizes the need to further address the negative impacts of the links between illicit drug trafficking and illicit trafficking in firearms on the lives of women, men, girls, and boys and calls on Member states […] to mainstream a gender perspective in preventing, combatting, and eradicating those crimes”. Of course, this does not happen with the stroke of a pen, but it is a step in the right direction in recognizing the differential impacts on distinct populations. As civil society has documented in Mexico, for example, the increased availability of firearms as a result of the “war on drugs” has also changed the way women are victimized. On average, of the 10 women who are killed daily in Mexico, six are murdered with a firearm.
3. I can understand that for those who already see the UN as an arena for feel good exercises these are considered pyrrhic victories at best. Yet, the CND takes places in Vienna, a city where the distinguished delegates of member states can enjoy a wonderful schnitzel but also have to conduct negotiations bearing in mind the “Spirit of Vienna”. Meaning that resolutions are adopted by consensus rather than voted on, which is to say that Mexico had to get the US to agree to its resolution and have countries like Iran accept language discussing gender mainstreaming.
A year ago, in the context of the 64th session of the CND, I wrote about the dissonance that existed between “United Nations Mexico” and “Domestic Mexico”. To be sure, I still think some of the challenges I outlined then persist to this day. Yet, I also think it is important to recognize, for the robustness of our analyses and as intellectual honesty, when the gap between how Mexico acts at the international level and domestically is closing in benefit of its citizens. Is there more than Mexico can do domestically on firearms trafficking? Absolutely. Is this resolution a step on the right direction? Without a doubt.
P.S. A year ago I also wrote that “if you cannot be aspirational at UN meetings where else can you live your best life?”. During the 65th session of the CND, member states also adopted the resolution Promoting alternative development as a development-oriented drug control strategy, taking into account measures to protect the environment. In light of President López Obrador’s program Sembrando Vida, it will be important to evaluate how Mexico incorporates into its domestic policy the text contained in this resolution. Will it be another case of UN Mexico living its best life or will it be a useful tool for the success of the program in drug producing regions?
By Cecilia Farfán Méndez *
•International Women’s Day on March 8 celebrates “the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women”. In recent years, women in Mexico have demonstrated on this day demanding the basic right to a life free of fear. Of the official 36,773 homicides that occurred in Mexico in 2020, 10.76% were committed against women. Unlike homicides for men that slightly decreased compared to 2019, those of women have continued to rise every year.
•Like the rest of the country, women in the US border city of Tijuana wore purple clothing and green bandanas to protest gender-based violence and support safe abortions. While different generations joined the march, young women represented the majority of those in attendance. In Mexico, homicide is the top cause of death for women between the ages of 15 to 24.
•The march in Tijuana featured demands that are more specific to border regions including “We are all migrants. Stronger together” and “Not motherhood out of duty, nor incarcerated for planting [weed], nor dead for having an abortion”.
•In the state of Baja California, where 72.3% of women feel unsafe on the streets, the Tijuana demonstration of March 8 reshaped, even if only for an afternoon, the relationship women have with public spaces in Mexico.
*Cecilia Farfán Méndez is head of Security Research Programs at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Twitter: @farfan_cc
Login