Exclusive: What happened before former Chinese President Hu Jintao was e...

 

character of Tetsuya Yamagam

 Yamagami was described as a "totally normal" and seemingly "earnest" person by at least two people who had interacted with him, Kyodo News also reported.

He was hired through a dispatch agency in October 2020 to work at the freight department of a factory in Kyoto prefecture, the agency reported, citing an unnamed "former senior colleague".

The former colleague characterized Yamagami as someone who kept to himself.

"If it was work talk, he would respond, but he didn't go into his private life. He seemed mild-mannered," the former colleague said, according to Kyodo News. The former colleague added that Yamagami would "eat lunch alone in his car" and that "conversations with him never strayed beyond the topic at hand."

The former colleague said there had been no issues with Yamagami for the first six months of his employment, until he started to exhibit "gradual neglect" of work practices, according to Kyodo News Agency.

For the first six months, there were no issues with his attitude toward the job. However, cracks began to emerge, and his gradual neglect of work practices saw him increasingly being cautioned by coworkers. Earlier this year, a transportation firm urged him to observe their standard procedure of using cushioning material to protect the goods being carried, but Yamagami reportedly argued that his way of doing it was “also fine.” The company subsequently submitted a request for his removal from the role.

Long-time staff also criticized his methods, to which Yamagami would sometimes respond confrontationally.

In March, Yamagami started taking "unauthorized time off" and spoke of "heart issues" and other physical problems, despite having no previous issues with punctuality or attendance. His employment ended on May 15, the agency reported.

An unnamed employee at the dispatch agency who interviewed Yamagami for the job described him as "totally normal," but added that he "didn't say much" and "had a slightly gloomy sense to him," according to the Kyodo News Agency.

Less than two months later, Yamagami, who previously served for about three years in the Maritime Self-Defense Force, was arrested over the murder of Japan’s longest-serving prime minister.

Speaking to the media, his former colleague could barely conceal his shock and condemned his actions as being against freedom of expression. “There were problems at work over what he did, but never once did it turn into violence. He didn’t seem the type to do something huge like this,” he said.

The dispatch company employee who originally interviewed Yamagami later delivered the news that his job was terminated. The employee described the suspect as someone who “didn’t say much and had a slightly gloomy sense to him but was totally normal,” asking, “why would he do something like this?”

jury didn't believe

 

• During an interview on "Today," Depp's lawyer said why he felt the jury didn't believe Amber Heard.
• "My sense is that it has a lot to do with accountability," Benjamin Chew said.
• "Johnny owned his issues," he added.

• On Wednesday, Johnny Depp's lawyers Camille Vasquez and Benjamin Chew went on the "Today" show to talk about their client winning his defamation claim over his ex wife Amber Heard last week.

  When Savannah Guthrie asked the lawyers why the jury didn't believe Heard, they said it came down to one thing: "accountability."

  "My sense is that it has a lot to do with accountability," Chew told Guthrie. "Johnny owned his issues. He was very candid about his drug and alcohol issues. He was candid about some unfortunate texts that he wrote. And I think it was a sharp contrast to Ms. Heard, who didn't seem, or at least the jury may have perceived, that she didn't take accountability for anything."

• One of the major moments in the trial when Heard's accountability was questioned was when the actress took the stand and recounted a claim that Depp once pushed then-girlfriend Kate Moss down a flight of stairs in the 1990s.

  Recounting a fight she had with Depp in 2015, in which Heard said she hit Depp in the face, Heard said: "I don't hesitate. I don't wait. I instantly think of Kate Moss and the stairs and I swung at him."

  Later in the trial, Moss testified via video stream and denied that Depp ever pushed her down the stairs, rather that he came to assist her after she slipped.

 

When Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine, war seemed far away from Russian territory. Yet within days the conflict came home — not with cruise missiles and mortars but in the form of unprecedented and unexpectedly extensive volleys of sanctions by Western governments and economic punishment by corporations.

Three months after the Feb. 24 invasion, many ordinary Russians are reeling from those blows to their livelihoods and emotions. Moscow’s vast shopping malls have turned into eerie expanses of shuttered storefronts once occupied by Western retailers.

McDonald’s — whose opening in Russia in 1990 was a cultural phenomenon, a shiny modern convenience coming to a dreary country ground down by limited choices — pulled out of Russia entirely in response to its invasion of Ukraine. IKEA, the epitome of affordable modern comforts, suspended operations. Tens of thousands of once-secure jobs are now suddenly in question in a very short time.

Major industrial players including oil giants BP and Shell and automaker Renault walked away, despite their huge investments in Russia. Shell has estimated it will lose about $5 billion by trying to unload its Russian assets.

While the multinationals were leaving, thousands of Russians who had the economic means to do so were also fleeing, frightened by harsh new government moves connected to the war that they saw as a plunge into full totalitarianism. Some young men may have also fled in fear that the Kremlin would impose a mandatory draft to feed its war machine.

But fleeing had become much harder than it once was — the European Union's 27 nations, along with the United States and Canada had banned flights to and from Russia. The Estonian capital of Tallinn, once an easy long-weekend destination 90 minutes by air from Moscow, suddenly took at least 12 hours to reach on a route through Istanbul.

Even vicarious travel via the Internet and social media has narrowed for Russians. Russia in March banned Facebook and Instagram — although that can be circumvented by using VPNs — and shut access to foreign media websites, including the BBC, the U.S. government-funded Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

After Russian authorities passed a law calling for up to 15 years’ imprisonment for stories that include “fake news” about the war, many significant independent news media shut down or suspended operations. Those included the Ekho Moskvy radio station and Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper whose editor Dmitry Muratov shared the most recent Nobel Peace Prize.

The psychological cost of the repressions, restrictions and shrinking opportunities could be high on ordinary Russians, although difficult to measure. Although some public opinion polls in Russia suggest support for the Ukraine war is strong, the results are likely skewed by respondents who stay silent, wary of expressing their genuine views.

Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center wrote in a commentary that Russian society right now is gripped by an “aggressive submission” and that the degradation of social ties could accelerate.

“The discussion gets broader and broader. You can call your compatriot — a fellow citizen, but one who happens to have a different opinion — a “traitor” and consider them an inferior kind of person. You can, like the most senior state officials, speculate freely and quite calmly on the prospects of nuclear war. (That's) something that was certainly never permitted in Soviet times during Pax Atomica, when the two sides understood that the ensuing damage was completely unthinkable,” he wrote.

“Now that understanding is waning, and that is yet another sign of the anthropological disaster Russia is facing,” he said.

The economic consequences have yet to fully play out.

In the early days of the war, the Russian ruble lost half its value. But government efforts to shore it up have actually raised its value to higher than its level before the invasion.

But in terms of economic activity, “that’s a completely different story,” said Chris Weafer, a veteran Russia economy analyst at Macro-Advisory.

“We see deterioration in the economy now across a broad range of sectors. Companies are warning that they’re running out of inventories of spare parts. A lot of companies put their workers on part time work and others are warning to them they have to shut down entirely. So there’s a real fear that unemployment will rise during the summer months, that there will be a big drop in consumption and retail sales and investment,” he told The Associated Press.

The comparatively strong ruble, however heartening it may seem, also poses problems for the national budget, Weafer said.

“They receive their revenue effectively in its foreign currency from the exporters and their payments are in rubles. So the stronger the ruble, then it means the less money that they actually have to spend," he said. “(That) also makes Russian exporters less competitive, because they’re more expensive on the world stage.”

If the war drags on, more companies could exit Russia. Weafer suggested that those companies who have only suspended operations might resume them if a cease-fire and peace deal for Ukraine are reached, but he said the window for this could be closing.

“If you walk around shopping malls in Moscow, you can see that many of the fashion stores, Western business groups, have simply pulled down the shutters. Their shelves are still full, the lights are still on. They’re simply just not open. So they haven’t pulled out yet. They’re waiting to see what happens next," he explained.

Those companies will soon be pressed to resolve the limbo that their Russian businesses are in, Weafer said.

"We are now getting to the stage where companies are starting to run out of time, or maybe run out of patience,” he said.

man with “eternal love

 BANGKOK (The Nation/Asia NewsNetwork): A 72-year-old man who lived with the body of his late wife for 21 long years is keeping her cremated remains at his house and turning himself into a foundation volunteer to spend the rest of his life doing good for her.

After the story of Sub-Lieutenant Charn Janwatchakal, 72 (pic), living alone with the body of his late wife for more than two decades was unveiled on Saturday (Aril 30), several social networkers called him the “endless love man” or man with “eternal love”.

In the latest development, prominent lawyer Nitithorn Kaewto visited Charn on May 2 and interviewed him.

The lawyer recounted that the old man is well-educated with several degrees to his name. But he lived less than a modest life without even electricity after the loss of his wife.

The endearing man lives alone in a small ramshackle one-floor concrete house that looks like a tiny storage room but on a 195-square-wah plot in Soi Raminthra 3 in Tha Reng subdistrict, Bangkok’s Bang Khen district. The house, with windows and doors fallen out, had no electricity or water: the old man lived on water shared by a neighbour.

On April 29, Charn visited the Phet Kasem Bangkok Foundation to seek help in cremating his wife’s body. A female executive of the foundation was puzzled as she thought the old man lived alone.

She had visited him every day during the past two months to give him food and drink after the foundation rescued him following a motorcycle accident.

It later came to light that the man kept the body of his wife in a coffin in the small room where he slept. He said he talked to the body as if his wife were still alive. He finally decided to cremate her for fear that nobody would give her a proper ceremony after his death.

It was a heartbreaking scene when the old man was seen at the foundation on Facebook Live, sobbing and bidding his wife’s coffin a final goodbye.

“Mum,” he cried, “you are just going for a brief business and you’ll be back home again. It won’t be long, I promise.”

Charn kept his word as he put the cremated remains in a white cloth the following day and took them home to place them in the same room.

Staff from the foundation visited the dilapidated house to clean it up. They removed a lot of weeds and dry leaves from the compound, fixed the roof and wired electricity for him the day following the cremation.

Charn told lawyer Nitithorn he used to live with his wife and two sons but after his wife died and he decided to keep her body, the two sons moved out as they could not accept his decision.

When Nitithorn visited the old man on May 2, foundation workers had not yet finished cutting the tree branches or fixing and cleaning the house.

The foundation has now given him a new mattress, blanket and pillow.

The old man told Nitithorn that he had graduated from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Chulalongkorn University before becoming a medic in the Royal Thai Army.

He also graduated from a traditional medicine course and went on to grow several herbs in his compound. His knowledge of herbs helped him survive a snake bite twice in his house.

And that’s not all. Charn also received a law degree from Ramkhamhaeng Open University and got a licence to represent plaintiffs or defendants in court in 1984.

A picture taken by Nitithorn showed a pile of concrete pillars and some old construction materials in the house compound.

According to the lawyer, when the man’s wife was alive, they had planned to build a bigger house but the contractor fled as soon as he got the first payment. After his wife died, Charn wasn’t interested anymore in pursuing the construction.

During the day he rested with his cats and dogs in a small space beside the house. At night he slept beside his wife’s coffin in a room which used to be storage quarters.

Charn told Nitithorn he would from now on work as a volunteer for the foundation to do merit for his late wife. He has also allowed the foundation to keep its rescue boats, which are used for flood operations, in the house compound. In return, foundation staff promised to visit and take care of him daily.

The lawyer also bought Charn a bed and gypsum boards for building a new house.