As telecom fraud has become increasingly rampant along the southwestern border of China, multiple regions in Southwest China's Yunnan Province have launched a new round of intensive anti-fraud campaigns. Officials warned that if individuals are lured to scam dens on the border, they may be sold "like pigs" and subjected to torture, or even face life-threatening situations. 

To combat cross-border crime, the Mekong River joint patrol consisting of law-enforcement authorities from China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand are actively taking action, which experts said are necessary and crucial in cracking down on illegal activities, given the complex security situation in border areas and the high mobility of criminal gangs. 

With the exposure of a series of scams under the guise of high-paying overseas jobs and the surprise hit movie No More Bets revealing the inner workings of online gambling fraud, the topic has drawn widespread attention among the Chinese public and particularly from public security services in Yunnan, which neighbors Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam and has been one the main locations of these crimes. 

According to data released by Yunnan's capital city of Kunming, from January to December 2022, the proportion of fraud cases involving overseas phone numbers accounted for 22 percent of the total in the city. So far in 2023, these cases have reached 14 percent of the total.

Various localities in Yunnan have issued warnings in recent days, noting that once people are smuggled to foreign countries, it is not well-paid jobs that are waiting for them but scam dens, where they will be forced to engage in illegal activities. Personal freedom is certainly restricted, and they will be required to complete large amounts of fraud tasks every day. Failure to complete the tasks may result in torture such as forced fasting, electric shocks and beatings. 

If they want to return to China, they are required to pay exorbitant "compensation" and "ransom" up to millions of yuan; if they fail to complete their tasks, they may be sold "like pigs" and even face life-threatening situations, said the warnings.

A Chinese national who has been living in Myanmar for almost 10 years told media on Wednesday that Chinese students studying abroad have become the new targets for scams, as they may not have timely access to the latest information at home and in turn have lower vigilance against scam calls.

Joint patrols with neighboring countries were launched on Tuesday as a fleet consisting of five law-enforcement vessels - three from China, one from Laos and one from Myanmar - departed from the Jingha Port in Yunnan as part of efforts to combat cross-border crimes arising from gambling scams in the Mekong River basin, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Six suspects of telecom fraud were handed over by Myanmar to the Chinese police at Yangon International Airport and escorted back to China on Wednesday. One of the suspects is a key figure in a gambling fraud syndicate and a prime target in the crackdown, media reports said.

In June, the first batch of six suspects involved in fraud cases in Myanmar were returned to China.

Experts noted that as transnational gambling fraud is even more lucrative than drug trafficking and very difficult to eradicate, it is necessary and crucial for countries in the region to collaborate in targeted operations. 

Wu Fei, an expert on Southeast Asia studies, pointed out that some fraud groups are scattered in remote areas of northern Myanmar and have connections with gangs involved in the "Golden Triangle" drug trade, making it more difficult to combat them. After they establish a foothold in underdeveloped regions, these fraud groups can "stimulate" local economies and thus prompt the protection and even involvement of local officials, Wu told the Global Times on Wednesday. 

As many hideouts are located in border areas with strong mobility and networks in Southeast Asia, it is extremely challenging for a single country to conduct operations such as victim rescue or gathering information about crime hotspots, Wu noted. 

The importance of combating cross-border fraud and related crimes lies not only in maintaining a country's image but also in ensuring the development of tourism and international trade. 

This is particularly concerning as the tourism industry is a vital sector for many Southeast Asian countries, the expert said.

What's more, the worrisome security situation may also hamper the timely restoration of people-to-people exchanges in the post-pandemic period, causing unnecessary misunderstandings and conflicts.

The Chinese, Thai, and Laotian ambassadors to Myanmar held a trilateral meeting to coordinate efforts in combating gambling fraud, according to a notice issued by the Chinese Embassy on Tuesday.

The three parties unanimously agreed that the current prevalence of gambling fraud in the region seriously undermines the safety of people's lives and property. They are fully coordinating with Myanmar authorities to conduct investigations and rescue operations, as well as assisting Myanmar in intensifying efforts to combat fraud syndicates. 

China has dealt with more than 36,000 corruption-related cases impacting the public interest in the first half of 2023, with more than 52,000 individuals receiving criticism, education, assistance, or punishment, China's highest supervisory and anti-corruption authority announced on Monday.

Discipline inspection and supervisory authorities at all levels have consistently strengthened their inspection covering the implementation of policies supporting the public interest while punishing acts of embezzlement, misappropriation, false reporting and extortion, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the National Commission of Supervision.

The top anti-graft watchdog vowed to eliminate corruption at the grassroots level in areas such as employment and entrepreneurship, education and healthcare, pensions and social security, ecological and environmental protection, workplace safety, food and drug safety, law enforcement, and judicial fields. 

The top anti-corruption authority emphasized the need to strengthen frontline research and closely monitor prominent issues which impact people's livelihoods to address public concerns, giving the example of solving the corruption problem in handing out subsidies to villagers in the city of Baoshan of Southwest China's Yunnan Province and providing financial relief to low income people in the city of Longyan in East China's Fujian Province.

Anti-corruption authorities in East China's Zhejiang Province and Southwest China's Guizhou Province have made full use of big data to deepen grassroots governance of public interest issues. On an updated online supervision platform, the public can submit requests and understand how cases are processed. 
As China highlighted dealing with corruption as it related to public interest, the National Health Commission launched a one-year campaign to crack down on corruption in the healthcare sector across the country earlier in August, focusing on a "key few" in the pharmaceutical industry to ensure high-quality development of the country's medical and healthcare sector.

China's top cyberspace regulator announced on Monday the launch of a two-month nationwide special campaign to regulate the network environment for the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang Province, addressing problems such as fan conflicts involving insults and comment manipulation.

According to the notice released by the secretary bureau of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the Copyright Management Bureau of the Central Publicity Department and the office of the Organizing Committee of the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, the campaign kicked off on Monday and will run through October 29. The campaign will focus on eight categories of prominent problems.

Issues to be addressed include the incitement of insults among fans and the manipulation of comments.

The cyberspace regulator will also rectify the problem of excessive sensationalism and "fan circle culture" in the sports event coverage.

The campaign will target "human flesh search" activities that deliberately expose personal information of athletes, referees and coaches, leading to online violence, as well as the release of unlawful and harmful information that spreads insults, defamatory, abusive and attacking content, causing harm to individuals' physical and mental health.

The authority will also regulate internet news and information service activities without authorization or permission, as well as activities that create and disseminate fake sports event videos with generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Other behaviors that will be rectified during the campaign include spreading false information about the Hangzhou Asian Games and Asian Para Games, the related regional public policies and social and livelihood issues, fabricating rumors about disasters and accidents, illegal activities, food and product quality issues, and other false information that could cause panic.

Besides, unlawful marketing activities that promote commodities and services or collect personal information, private identification or biometric information in the name of the sports events will also be targeted.

The notoriously intricate strategy game Go has a new champion.

AlphaGo, Google’s Go-playing computer program, has topped Lee Sedol, the world’s reigning player, in a five-game match played over a week in South Korea.

The program, a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, learned to play Go by watching human experts and by playing millions of games against itself. It stepped into the world spotlight in January, when it beat Fan Hui, the European champion, 5 games to 0. Victory wasn’t certain against Sedol, though, a player often described as “legendary.”

But by March 12, Sedol was officially sunk. AlphaGo had defeated the human in three consecutive games. The only question left was whether the program would sweep the match. In game 4, however, Sedol defied expectations and pulled out a win. In game 5, AlphaGo made a big mistake early on, but clawed its way back in a match that Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis tweeted was “nail-biting.”

Google DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company that developed AlphaGo, will give away the $1 million in prize money, splitting it amongst UNICEF, science, technology, engineering and math charities, and Go organizations.

BALTIMORE — For centuries, clashes between science and religion have made waves within society at large and in the academic world. You probably haven’t heard very much, though, about similar clashes between science and history.

Yet scientists and historians have fundamentally different perspectives on history, especially when it’s the history of science. Scientists tend to celebrate the discoveries of the past that built the knowledge of the present. Historians argue that the scientists of the past should be viewed through the lens of their own time, not evaluated on the relevance of their work to today’s textbooks.

One prominent physicist who objects to the historians’ modus operandi is Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas at Austin. His 2015 book To Understand the World unabashedly analyzes the scientific past in the light of the present. “I knew from the beginning that I was being naughty,” Weinberg said March 14 at a meeting in Baltimore of the American Physical Society.

In technical terms, Weinberg was engaging in “Whig” history (an allusion to criticisms of British historical accounts involving a prominent political party). Whig historians write (or rewrite) history as a story validating the chain of events that created present-day circumstances. Most historians argue that such an approach distorts the record of the past. Much of what happened in the past had little to do with how things are now, and historical actors certainly had motives other than creating a future they couldn’t even have imagined. “We don’t want to read history only from the winners’ point of view,” commented historian David Wootton, also speaking at the physical society meeting.

But limiting historical accounts to evaluating the past “on its own terms,” without admitting current knowledge into evidence, misses much of the story, Weinberg asserts.

And as Weinberg points out, it’s often hard to understand the past on its own terms anyway. Especially when studying early Greek philosophers, it’s impossible to know very much about the conditions under which they worked and the influences that shaped their thought. Even many of their own writings are missing or fragmentary.

“Our knowledge of present science provides a contrast to the attitudes and methods of the past, attitudes and methods that often obstructed progress,” Weinberg said.
Of course, the notion of progress itself is one of those concepts that some historians deny; it implies a value judgment that things now are somehow better than they used to be. But in science, progress of some sort is very hard to deny. Wootton, the historian, agrees with Weinberg on that point. Wootton believes many historians go too far in denying the notion of progress in many fields, with science being the most prominent example.

“The progress has been real and needs to be studied and explained,” Wootton said. “Understanding the past in its own terms is not enough” — a point he also makes in his recent book The Invention of Science.

Other historians view their task more narrowly, insisting that scientists of the past should be studied in light of their efforts to solve the problems posed in their own day within their own worldview. But that is not the story of science’s past that interests Weinberg.

He agrees that early scientists dealt with different problems. “Scientists of the past were not just like scientists of today who didn’t know as much we know. They had completely different ideas of what there was to know, or how you go about learning it,” he said. “But the point of scientific work is not to solve the problems that happen to be fashionable in your own day — it is to learn about the world.”

So that makes the stories that historians like to tell irrelevant (to him).

“It is the history of the change in the attitudes of what was there to know, and how do you find it out, that seems to me the most interesting … story.” That’s the story, Weinberg believes, that helps in understanding how science has succeeded and perhaps even helps identify present-day mistakes.

“The real story is the progress of science from an earlier day when the most intelligent and well-informed people in the world did not know how to address the mysteries of nature,” he said. “We’re certainly not finished, and we’re undoubtedly still making mistakes. But we have amassed a large amount of reliable knowledge, and more important we have developed techniques for deciding when knowledge really is knowledge or just a mistake. It is a great story. It’s not at an end. But we have learned some things, and if we don’t use the things that we have learned, then the story we tell has no point.”

As Superstorm Sandy threatened the East Coast of the United States in fall of 2012, people stocked up on bread and batteries. They boarded their windows. And they tweeted. During the height of the storm and its impact, between October 26 and November 10, people sent more than 20 million hurricane-related tweets.

Now, scientists have taken almost 10 million of those tweets and used them to show where Sandy hit. They also found that tweets about the storm’s damage were associated with how much financial support ended up getting handed around. The results show that social media can be used to track the damage from natural disasters. And they suggest that eventually, these social networks might be able to contribute to disaster response.

These days, if an earthquake happens miles away, you may read about it on Twitter before you even feel the tremor. In some cases, earthquake information actually travels faster via tweet than from scientific instruments. In 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency held the DARPA Network Challenge — a contest designed to see how social media and the Internet could be used to solve time-sensitive problems. Manuel Cebrian, a computational social scientist now based at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Clayton, Australia, won that challenge with his colleagues by using social media to hunt down 10 red weather balloons released across the United States.

Since then, Cebrian and his colleagues have been applying social networks to other, more disastrous events.

First, they tried to see if they could predict outbreaks of contagious disease. But soon, they turned their minds to large-scale disasters. Hurricane Sandy was the perfect target. It was a disaster big enough that everyone cared about it. The storm, which made landfall in New Jersey on October 29, 2012, killed at least 147 people. It also caused $50 billion in damages and left 8.5 million people without power.

The disaster was large — and came at a time when Twitter had become “a pervasive technology that everyone was using,” Cebrian explains. This made Sandy a good storm to test the powers of Twitter.

A storm of social media
The scientists analyzed 9.7 million tweets from 2.2 million users posted between October 15 and November 12, 2012. They restricted their search to tweets where they could determine the location of the user. Cebrian and his group compared “hurricane-related” messages using keywords such as “Frankenstorm,” “Sandy,” and “hurricane” to tweets that contained vague, non-Sandy-related terms such as “weather.”

By comparing Twitter use in 50 cities in the United States, the researchers found that the closer the city was to the hurricane’s path, the more storm-related tweets were sent in the period immediately before, during and after Sandy’s big day, the researchers report March 11 in Science Advances.

Showing that tweets could track a storm’s path was “the main goal,” Cebrian explains, but then the team moved on to a more difficult question: Whether tweets were also associated with material storm damage. “It was kind of a long shot for us,” Cebrian admits. But Superstorm Sandy again had good data to offer. Using the publicly available data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and private insurance companies on how much money was spent on storm recovery, the scientists were able to show the volume of tweets about Sandy in New Jersey and New York was associated with how much money people in the area received for damages. Cebrian and his group were even able to apply their methods to 12 other natural disasters, including the South Napa earthquake and the Oso mudslide, and see similar results.

“We were surprised there was any correlation at all” between tweet volume and damage, Cebrian notes. “These are two very different processes.” On one hand, you have Twitter, something many people do when distracted, “you are looking at a million things and talking to your mom and then you tweet,” Cebrian says. “On the other hand, to know how much money goes into your house…they have to take pictures and assessment and get the numbers approved. You are looking at a well calibrated process.”

The study is much larger than many previous studies of social media and disaster, says Julia Skinner, who studies social media, political unrest and natural disasters at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. “It combines a lot of different ways that researchers have considered social media and disasters into one approach,” she explains.

The study also showed that people retweet less in the path of the hurricane, which suggests there is “more new information coming from areas close to the hurricane,” says James Bagrow, who studies social media and disaster response at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “This isn’t ‘cowboy science,’” he says. “They did a good job of supporting the decisions they made along the way.”

To tweet or not to tweet
Though Cebrian has done several analyses of Twitter, he himself doesn’t tweet. “I’ve never used Twitter,” he admits. “I’m not very good with this technology.”

But it has still proven to be a rich resource to mine. “Twitter is this weird mix of a social network where people check on their friends, but also an information network where agencies try to reach out to people,” Cebrian says.

Twitter is also useful because it’s public, Skinner explains. “Even if you don’t have an account, you can see what people are saying about a disasters, while on a platform like Facebook or Snapchat, people’s privacy settings might prevent you from seeing what they have to say.”

But not everyone tweets, and that means the results will end up skewed. “Twitter has great penetration in America,” Cebrian notes. But other countries might not be so well represented. “We can’t claim universality,” he says. It also depends on the natural disaster. People may be very excited about issues that are not yet local. “Twitter can be very good if you want to raise awareness, but it might not be a good tool today to see where Zika is traveling,” Cebrian notes.

So far, the associations between tweet and destruction was still only moderate. “This is the beginning,” Cebrian notes. He hopes that down the line, companies such as Twitter and Google might want to help do further research. But he also says, in the end, the emergency aid groups have many methods, and “this is only another tool.”

For Wisconsin’s snowshoe hares, climate change now ranks as an even bigger menace than the bulldozing, paving and other destructive things people have done to northern forests.

Habitat loss as humans reshape landscapes has loomed for decades as the main conservation problem for a lot of wildlife. It’s still important, says climate change ecologist Benjamin Zuckerberg of the University of Wisconsin‒Madison. But along the southern boundary of the snowshoe hares’ range, climate change bringing skimpy snow covers has surpassed direct habitat loss as a threat, Zuckerberg and his colleagues say March 30 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
North America’s Lepus americanus hares may be especially sensitive to climate change. “Almost everything about them screams adaptation to seasons of extensive snow cover,” says study coauthor Jonathan Pauli, also at Wisconsin‒Madison. The hares have outsized snowshoe feet, thick fur and an annual molt from brown to snow-white. Getting out of sync with the snow turns camouflage into a come-on for predators (SN Online: 1/26/16). In bad years, “there’s a lot of white hares on brown backgrounds,” Pauli says.

To see how the hares have fared, the researchers looked for signs of the animals at 199 sites during the winters of 2012‒2013 and 2013‒2014. Many of these locations were mentioned in a rather anecdotal 1945 study and in a more systematic one in 1979 to 1980. Satellite images showed not much change in the overall amount of hare-suitable forest since the 1980s, but snow cover averages have declined. When researchers put all their information into a computer simulation, the climate-related changes — particularly the length of the snow-cover season — did a better job of explaining the ups and downs of hare populations than just the forest changes did.
Snow cover has powerful effects on hares. For each 7.41 days that snow blankets the landscape, snowshoe hare populations become four times as likely to survive, the researchers found.

If the hares dwindle from a place, the loss may ripple through the ecosystem. “Snowshoe hares are central, really central, to prey species,” Pauli says. Lynx, great horned owls, coyotes and many more species dine on them. And regardless of any ecosystem role, hares are remarkable creatures in their own right. “It’s hard for me, a person living in Wisconsin, to imagine these northern conifer forests without snowshoe hares,” Pauli says.
To prevent such a loss, reducing greenhouse gases is important, but so is creating “climate-resilient landscapes,” Zuckerberg says. For snowshoe hares, that landscape might bristle and tangle with abundant, thick young growth, full of hiding places for too conspicuous, out-of-season-sync hares, he suggests.

White furry animals may not be the only ones that will have to cope with a shift in the balance of threats. “In a number of cold-associated butterflies, and also birds, it is becoming clear that climate change is beginning to surpass land use as the primary driver of extinction at the trailing edges of the species’ range,” says ecologist Tom Oliver of the University of Reading in England. And the threats of climate change and land-use upsets can intensify each other. “We appear to be entering a worrying time,” Oliver says.

NEW YORK — Sometimes forgetting can be harder than remembering. When people forced themselves to forget a recently seen image, select brain activity was higher than when they tried to remember that image.

Forgetting is often a passive process, one in which the memory slips out of the brain, Tracy Wang of the University of Texas at Austin said April 2 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. But in some cases, forgetting can be deliberate.
Twenty adults saw images of faces, scenes and objects while an fMRI scanner recorded their brains’ reactions to the images. If instructed to forget the preceding image, people were less likely to remember that image later. Researchers used the scan data to build a computer model that could infer how strongly the brain responds to each particular kind of image. In the ventral temporal cortex, a part of the brain above the ear, brain patterns elicited by a particular image were stronger when a participant was told to forget the sight than when instructed to remember it.

Of course, everyone knows that it’s easy to forget something without even trying. But these results show that intentional forgetting isn’t a passive process — the brain has to actively work to wipe out a memory on purpose.

Tadpoles don’t cry to get their way. But some of them sure can beg.

Each bout of hungry-baby drama among mimic poison frogs (Ranitomeya imitator) occupies both parents for hours. The tadpoles get so crazy-frantic that researchers wanted to know whether the begging is an honest call for help or a histrionic scam.

Frogs can lay globs of eggs by the thousands and leave them to fend for themselves. But the two-to three-egg clutches of mimic poison frogs (the only known monogamous frogs) get coddled, says Kyle Summers of East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. Dad repeatedly checks in, sitting on the eggs and shedding some paternal pee if they’re drying out.
When the eggs hatch, dad gives each tadpole a piggyback ride to its own private pool. To find a little rainfall cupped between a leaf and stem, he’ll haul youngsters four meters or so. “A bit of a hike,” Summers says, since dad is only about a centimeter or two long himself.

These baby pools are pretty empty: home to only some algae, maybe some small insects. “The good news is that your offspring are not likely to get eaten; the bad side is that they don’t have anything to eat,” Summers says.
This is where the begging comes in. Frogs can’t make milk like mammals or regurgitate bugs like birds. But this species is one of the rare frogs whose moms, after considerable persuading, will lay an unfertilized egg for the tadpoles’ breakfast.
When parents show up on their weekly visit, a youngster stops regular swimming, noses up to a parent and goes into a frenzy of vibrating its tail. “The parent cannot miss a hungry tadpole,” Summers says.

Bouts of persuasion go on for several hours as the tadpole begs, stops, begs more and then more. Mom often makes several false starts, entering the pool but leaving it without any egg action. During all this, “dad will be the cheerleader,” calling in trills and stroking her, Summers says.

Analyzing tadpole frenzies in the lab, Summers’ then-student Miho Yoshioka found that tadpoles on short rations begged more as hungry weeks dragged on. Parents fed these hungrier tadpoles more reliably than the babies that researchers slipped treats to, Yoshioka, Summers and Casey Meeks report in the March Animal Behaviour. Overall, the researchers conclude, the relentless frenzy shows honest need, not tadpole greed.

A mushroom whose genes have been edited with molecular scissors known as CRISPR/Cas9 doesn’t need to be regulated like other genetically modified crops, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said April 13 in a letter to the mushroom’s creator. The edible fungus is the first CRISPR-edited crop to clear USDA regulation.

Yinong Yang, a plant pathologist at Penn State University, used CRISPR/Cas9 to snip out a tiny bit of one gene from the mushroom Agaricus bisporus. The edit reduces browning when the mushroom is sliced.

Because the gene editing left no foreign DNA behind, the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service determined that the mushroom poses no risk to other plants and is not likely to become a weed.

Yang says he plans to submit data about the mushroom to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. FDA clearance isn’t required but, says Yang, “we’re not just going to start marketing these mushrooms without FDA approval.”