While the United States has been hypnotized by our domestic battle of Biden versus Trump, China has made a major move in the Middle East.
It has negotiated an alliance of convenience between those thousand-year enemies, the Saudis and Iranians, whose theological feud goes back to the generation after Mohammed.
China has thereby effectively countered the Abraham Accords negotiated by the US, the Arab states (with Saudis in the background) and Israel.
Dan Hao was once a wealthy entrepreneur in China. Now, he’s in self-imposed exile in Vancouver working as a contractor — with an international warrant out for his arrest.
Hao fled to Vancouver in 2019 after, he says, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) forcibly took over the securities brokerage firm he was running. In the years since, Hao has become a vocal protester of the CCP and is now the leader of the Vancouver branch of the Democratic Party of China — activities, he says, that have made him and his group the target of harassment campaigns.
Canadian government doesn’t scale back on Chinese steel in new navy patrol ships
Canada has yet to determine how much Chinese steel and equipment will go into its new naval warships, but it didn’t scale back on such products for its Arctic and offshore patrol vessels even though concerns were raised in 2018.
You have to admit that China and its assets have got very good value for their donations to Trudeau’s foundation and election campaigns.
h/t Mauser
The U.S. military has been prodding Ottawa to buy a privately owned hangar adjacent to a NORAD airbase in the Arctic community of Inuvik, after a Chinese buyer expressed interest in taking over the facility.
For nearly a year, Ottawa resisted American pressure over the property, located near a strategic piece of the continent’s air-defence infrastructure that would make a prime target for foreign surveillance. The Canadian government had previously leased the hangar to shelter military aircraft, but argued it no longer had need of it.
Canadians are split on whether the federal government’s recently-announced probes into allegations of foreign election interference are a sincere effort to get to the truth or an attempt to cover up what is alleged to have happened, a new poll suggests.
The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News and released Tuesday found 52 per cent of those surveyed think the probes, and the appointment of a special rapporteur to oversee them, are genuine. Forty-eight per cent, meanwhile, think “the investigation is a cover-up.”
An on-line poll with an oversized sample of Beijing Fifth Columnists conducted by a Liberal friendly pollster. That’s my story and I’m stickin to it.
A new report provides some answers to the nagging questions that linger from early February, but it raises others.
According to the “two current senior U.S. officials and one former senior administration official” with whom NBC News reporters Courtney Kube and Carol Lee spoke, the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the continental United States in February was, in fact, “able to gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites”:
The interim commissioner of the RCMP says he would support additional laws that allow police to further crack down on foreign interference in Canada, as well as ways to further collaborate with intelligence officials on the issue.
But Mike Duheme adds multiple investigations remain underway that he’s confident will lead to criminal charges, though he did not give specifics.
Adi Robertson, The Verge’s senior tech and policy editor, makes an impassioned plea to not ban TikTok, China’s popular video-sharing app, on free speech grounds. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), speaking on the floor of the Senate on March 29, also raised First Amendment objections to a proposed TikTok prohibition.
Nonetheless, it is time to either ban TikTok or force the sale of all its shares to American parties. The American owners must also control all the app’s algorithms, in particular, the algorithms curating content. If Beijing does not permit such a sale, the federal government should expropriate TikTok.
Reports out of China continue to confirm that scientists there are still seeking to push through barriers with Frankenstein-like experimentation on genes with an eye toward the manipulation of human DNA – any and all ethical considerations be damned. What could go wrong?
The Hong-based South China Morning Post has a doozy of a headline out this week based on a breakthrough announcement by a team of scientists linked to the Chinese military, working in Beijing: “Chinese team behind extreme animal gene experiment says it may lead to super soldiers who survive nuclear fallout.”
As questions continue to swirl around the issue of other countries’ meddling in Canadian affairs, interim RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme says he’s “very, very concerned” about foreign interference, and would like to see the national force be able to use intelligence as evidence in its investigations.
In an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos airing on Sunday, Duheme was asked if, given all that has recently been alleged regarding China interfering in federal elections and the years of warnings from various national security agencies, he thinks a public inquiry is warranted.
A lawyer for Han Dong has served Global News and its parent company Corus Entertainment with a libel notice after the media outlet published an allegation the Toronto MP spoke to a Chinese diplomat about delaying the release of two Canadians.
Lawyer Mark Polley says he is demanding that Global News make a “full apology and retraction” for publishing what he describes as “false, malicious, irresponsible and defamatory statements” about Dong, now an Independent MP for Don Valley North.
Former CSIS officials say the intelligence agency has been warning successive governments about foreign election interference for decades but all failed to act — and measures outlined in this week’s budget are not enough to address the problem.
“Thirty-two years in national security work, every time we’ve had a crisis, every time we’ve had an incident, that’s what the government’s done. We’ll throw money at the RCMP, we’ll say you folks have got to sort that out. And I don’t think that’s really an appropriate response,” Dan Stanton, former executive manager at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told a committee of MPs on Friday.
Liberal MP Parm Bains said he won his B.C. riding in the last election “fair and square” after his former opponent told a parliamentary committee foreign interference by Beijing played a role in his victory.
Bains sits on the Commons ethics committee and was sitting across the table when former Conservative MP Kenny Chiu told MPs on the committee Friday he believed Bains was the “beneficiary” of a disinformation campaign he suspects was tied to the Chinese Communist Party during the 2021 election campaign.
The threat from foreign interference, with Beijing as the main culprit, has evolved to become more dangerous to the state than traditional espionage, a former executive with Canada’s spy agency told MPs.
“What we’ve seen, in the last 30 years, is that foreign interference has eclipsed classic espionage as a national security threat, both in terms of its scope and its speed,” said Dan Stanton, a 32-year veteran of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
Among the various types of outlandish and sinister responses to the recent revelations about Beijing’s emissaries interfering in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the purpose of re-electing a Liberal government, the conjuring of bogeymen has been especially destructive to any clear public consensus about what’s at stake here, and what’s really going on.
