OTTAWA — In late June Taiwan authorities arrested three tech executives over the alleged diversion of roughly $22 million in Nvidia AI servers bound for China. Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te put forward new national security laws and created a new website where citizens can safely report PRC spies to authorities. Recently a Taiwan court sentenced a former spy named Lu Chi-hsien to more than 12 years in prison for leaking top-secret information to China.
The German car industry has warned of a potential collapse of employment in the sector in Europe unless society and workers accept that “bold decisions” are needed to address competition from the Chinese and other rivals.
Volkswagen is preparing to formally propose up to 100,000 job losses, a move that has triggered a wave of protests.
The statement from the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), which appears timed to coincide with this meeting, went as far as to say that handing some of the country’s car plants over to foreign ownership could be a way to save jobs.
I’m sure Carney will do just fine.
Liberal-appointed Sen. Yuen Pau Woo says he is embarrassed by Canada’s response to the war in Gaza, accusing the federal government and Parliament of failing to do enough to stop what he described as a genocide.
Speaking during a videoconference with pro-Palestinian activists marking what organizers called “1,000 days of genocide” since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Woo said Canada has failed to meet its obligations under international law.
The United States’ top trade official is pointing to Canada’s deepening economic ties with China as one of the reasons Washington is refusing to renew the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement on free trade (CUSMA) in its current form.
Speaking to Global News on Thursday, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the White House is concerned Beijing could use Canada as a back door into the American market.
My suspicion is the Americans are not much concerned with economic matters but worry more at the ChiCom compromised security risk Canada is becoming.
VANCOUVER — A Burnaby RCMP investigation that began with a routine traffic stop last summer has ended in one of the largest drug-chemical seizures in British Columbia’s history — 6,765 kilograms of finished narcotics and fentanyl-production chemicals pulled from three homes and two shipping containers in Richmond, alongside tactical shotguns, cash, contraband cigarettes — and a multi-antenna device consistent with the signal jammers used to defeat electronic surveillance.
h/t Auntie Polly
American intelligence agencies are working on a report to Congress that will disclose new details about the wealth of Chinese Communist Party leaders, including Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, who is also president, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The public report is due before the end of the year and is required under the fiscal 2026 Intelligence Authorization Act signed into law in December as part of the Defense Authorization Act.
“I can confirm ODNI is actively working on the report, as required by the FY26 IAA,” an ODNI spokeswoman told Inside the Ring.
OTTAWA — China keeps finding inventive ways to burrow into the West, and Canada’s new appetite for Chinese electric vehicles may be the most consequential opening yet.
That is the warning at the center of a report published this week by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and written by Brenda Shaffer, an energy and national-security specialist who teaches at the United States Naval Postgraduate School.
As socialist candidates surge in New York and New York City, it’s worth noting that one leader of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter is the niece of Neville Roy Singham — a propagandist for the Chinese Communist Party and ardent supporter of Maoism and socialism.
The NYC-DSA made headlines this week after candidates it endorsed won their congressional primaries. Winners included Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who are both DSA members, as well as Brad Lander (who was backed by Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, though he failed to receive a formal DSA endorsement).
It’s a war that’s underway everywhere, all the time. It’s being waged by Beijing and Moscow. It’s a hybrid war that confounds western intelligence agencies and transcends borders. Like conventional warfare, it involves mobilizations and sophisticated operations and devastating weaponry that lays waste to entire industries.
China on May 20 towed a “floating structure” to Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. The Chinese termed it a temporary facility and claimed it was carrying out activities “including scientific research.”
The South China Sea Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said it was using the platform for environmental monitoring and sampling and that it was supporting “ecological civilization development.”
New in-house federal research shows that Canadians see China as a bigger threat than Iran, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
The poll by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said that 70% saw Russia and 66% saw China as “significant threats” compared to only 34% who felt that way about Iran.
OTTAWA — Canadian auto industry leaders panned Industry Minister Melanie Joly’s claim Monday that Chinese carmakers are interested in forming joint ventures to make electric vehicles with Canadian labour, parts and standards, and said Ottawa’s China push threatens Canada’s chances at getting a deal at the trade table with the United States.
As the July 1 deadline for renewal of the deal looms, and Ottawa is in the midst of a delicate dance with the Trump administration over how closely it is aligning with China, a trip in the past week by Joly to China accompanied by several mining, investment and business executives, but no Canadian carmakers, was seen as cause for concern.
Carney has to know what Joly is up to.
Prime Minister Mark Carney was caught on a hot mic speaking with U.S. President Donald Trump on June 16 justifying Chinese EV imports. “Less than 3 per cent of our market, 49,000 cars,” Mr. Carney said on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in France. “It’s a cap, we capped, a hard line … I thought you’d actually like that.”
Mr. Trump does like it, Mr. Carney told reporters later.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand refused to say whether Chinese-made electric vehicles could be banned under new federal legislation targeting products linked to forced labour, despite evidence that some Chinese auto supply chains rely on materials connected to Uyghur labour camps.
(Incognito)
The US has raised concerns that Dutch semiconductor giant ASML may have shipped an ultra-high-tech chip-making machine to China.
Howard Lutnick, the US commerce secretary, reportedly held several meetings with ASML executives in which he voiced fears that an extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machine may have ended up in Chinese hands.
This would be a major violation of the US’s export control regime, which bans the transfer of ASML’s EUVs to restricted markets such as China.
