Bangkok, July 25, 2017–A Vietnamese court these days sentenced blogger Tran Thi Nga to nine years in prison and 5 years’ probation on charges of “spreading propaganda against the country,” according to news reports. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the verdict and referred to it as the Vietnamese government to give up jailing journalists.
After a one-day trial, the People’s Court in Ha Nam province, kind of 60 kilometers (37 miles) south of Hanoi, observed Nga responsible under article 88 of the Penal Code, which includes a most sentence of two decades in prison for the vague offense of “propagandizing” against the country. The verdict stated that Nga produced and posted online motion pictures that accused “the communist country of violating human rights and referred to as for pluralism and the removal of Article 4 of the Constitution,” which enshrines a one-party state, information reports said.
Prosecutors supplied as evidence 13 films they stated Nga produced. They claimed they had violated the regulation, including movies on a toxic maritime spill, territorial disputes with China, and corruption reviews of the kingdom. Nga’s attorney, Ha Huy Son, told the media that the verdict was unfair and that Nga turned into no longer guilty, information reports stated. “Vietnam’s repression of courageous bloggers like Tran Thi Nga ought to forestall,” Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s Southeast Asia consultant, said. “We call on Vietnamese authorities to repeal this outrageous verdict and release all of the reporters now being held on trumped-up anti-national charges.”
Nga, an activist who blogs under the pen name “Thuy Nga,” campaigned against country abuses, including trafficking, the confiscation of land, and police brutality, in line with reports. When the government arrived to arrest the blogger from her home in Vietnam’s northern Ha Nam province on January 21, she published videos online that showed the dozens of law enforcement officials who had surrounded her house, reports said.
Nga was held for over six months in pre-trial detention. Before her arrest, she had complained about years of legitimate harassment. In 2014, assailants attacked her with metallic bars while she rode a bicycle together with her kids, breaking her left arm and right leg, consistent with information reviews.
Nga’s conviction comes nearly a month after a courtroom sentenced Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, referred to as “Me Nam” or “Mother Mushroom,” to ten years in jail for “propagandizing” towards the state. She was held incommunicado for more than eight months earlier than her one-day trial, in keeping with information reviews and CPJ studies.
Eric Banh and His Passion Behind Ba Bar
Ba Bar is Eric Banh’s contemporary growth of the Vietnamese empire. The 50-seat high ceiling area feels similar to a gastropub that occurs to seservesreat Vietnamese street meals. The noodle bar hopes to fill in the gaping hole of Seattle’s restaurant panorama by presenting overdue night food till 2 am and four am on the weekends. The menu includes various vermicelli noodle dishes, clay pot rice and chook, duck leg confit, and route bowls, rich and steamy Pho. Nightly specials are also available.
A few days after having dinner at Ba Bar, I simply took the place to be their first-ever lunch customer. After taking a seat, I soon realized that Eric Banh changed into running around his new eating place, and I jumped at the opportunity to talk with him. Eric Banh has three very successful eating places, one of which I can without problems call one of my favorites. Monsoon serves current Vietnamese cuisine with a Northwest flair, and it is where I had my thirtieth birthday dinner. Monsoon East is an equal eating place in Bellevue, while Baguette Box is a Vietnamese-inspired gourmet and sandwich shop.
I watched his paintings as he directed his workforce around the eating place. It has become obvious that he is a man thll papaysnterest to detail, all the way down to how a server should seat and treat clients t,o how a table needs to be properly set up. “It may look simple, but you have to take it very seseriously he lectured a workforce member over the foam on an espresso drink.
I turned inbit frightened at the beginning, no longer understanding what to say or ask. I took a deep breath, fixed my helmet, head, nd scooter-blown hair, and walked up to him. I instructed him on how big a fan I am of his restaurants, and I presented myself as a food blogger. He asked me not to be too critical as he changed into glaringly self-conscious of the growing pains of a present-day eating place. I became fifteen in Edmonton and slightly knew English once I was given my first eating place job. That’s why I hired young youngsters to work here, to present human beings a threat at their first restaurant job.”
We pointed out the exceptional and the non-exceptional for late-night food in Seattle. He was a bit disenchanted that the teens of the Vietnamese community provided him the most grief over the charge of a bowl of his Pho. “Our broth is revamped fourteen hours; at Monsoon, over twenty-four hours. And the bone-to-water ratio is so high, and the broth so wealthy. All this, and I’m only charging two bucks more than everybody else,” explained Banh.
“You have the 3 buck chuck, and you’ve got a sixty-dollar Washington Cabernet; each will get you inebriated,” Banh metaphorically preached approximately the fine of his meals, “but it’s all approximately the adventure.” I then sat down as my combo vermicelli was served. I cheated and picked off a chunk of the imperial role as Banh walked using. It “Mix it all up, pour some sauce, nd eat it like a salad!” Banh Dewas was fined as he ran around his restaurant. “People like me and you, we live to consume, no longer eat to stay,” stated Banh as he took some other pass with the aid of my table.
“You need to attempt a few dumplings.” Five minutes later, I had dumplings full of mung bean, caramelized shallot, and a spicy soy vinaigrette at my table. “These two ladies led them to the band. Very real, I plan on having a dumpling station here,” he pointed to an empty area close to the entrance of the restaurant. The dumplings were fine. However, it became the sauce that blew me away. Even after I finished the dumplings, I kept spooning up the sauce into my mouth or vermicelli bowl.
My enjoyment with the two instances I’ve been to Ba Bar has been wonderful. The food is passionately prepared inside the imaginative and prescient of Eric Banh and is on par with the excellence of Monsoon. I’ve had no hassle with the provider despite different humans having awful stories that different people, like Kate Opatz, from Pat My Butter wrote about. I’m assured that veteran restaurateurs and the passion of Eric Banh and his group of workers will pull af it all together. I hope the overdue night-time Seattle community will come to Ba Bar for something that each one of Seattle has wanted for a long time bowl of late-night happiness.
James B. Stockdale became one of the highly reputable Vice admirals in the history of the United States Navy. He set a terrific example and received many awards for his high-ranking spirit, bravbraveryd endurance. He changed into also Vice Presidential candidate in 1992. James Stockdale was a prisoner of war from September 9, 1965, to February 12, 1973, in the Vietnam War. Stockdale credited that his stoic nature helped him live to tell the tale as a Prisoner of War. Jim Collins included Stockdale’s philosophy as the Stockdale Paradox in his renowned book Good to Great as “confronting the brutal fact of the scenario, but at the same time, in no way giving up hope.”
When interviewed by way of Jim Collins approximately Vietnamese Prisoner of War (POW) camp, Stockdale said, “I in no way lost religion ultimately of the story, I in no way doubted no longer simplest that I would get out, but additionally that I would succeed in the end and turn the revel in into the defining event of my existence, which, on reflection, I would now not trade.”
And whilst requested approximately who failed to make it out, Stockdale responded, “Oh, it truly is clean, the optimists. Oh, they had been the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by way of Christmas.’ And Christmas could come, and Christmas would pass. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter might come, and Easter could go. And then Thanksgiving, after which it’d be Christmas again. And they died of a broken coronary heart.”
Stockdale was born in Abingdon, Illinois, in 1923. He graduated from Naval Academy in 1947 and joined Naval air station Pensacola, Florida, for flight schooling. He acquired a master’s in International family members and Marxist concepts from Stanford University and later desired to be a fighter pilot. He rose through ranks fast and reached maximum function as a fighter squadron commander.
Stockdale became as prisoner of War in 1965 in North Vietnam while working on an assignment in Vduringtnam War. He was dispatched to one of the maximum notorious Hao Lo prisons, where he was tortured physically and mentally. In the seven years he was ed into a saved captive as a prisoner of war despite being severely overwhelmed, malnourished, asphyxiated, and spending years in a general state of darkness, he in no way succumbed to the North Vietnamese.
During his seven years as a POW, he resisted cooperating with the captors, even if turned over into placed in solitary confinement. He becomes locked with leg irons in a tub stall, crushed, and whipped. He resisted the efforts of him as propaganda with the aid by hurting himself relentlessly. When Stockdale got here to realize that he was to be paraded in public before overseas newshounds by using captors, he slashed his scalp with a razor to disfigure himself so that the captors would not take him and use him for propaganda. When they placed a hat, he had overwhelmed his face with a stool to be swollen beyond recognition. When captors informed him that other POWs are death below torture, he slit his wrists to expose that he preferred loss of life alternatively to capitulate.
