The National Institutes of Health (NIH) deleted COVID-19 gene sequences that may have proven valuable to detecting earlier the probability the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated at the Wuhan lab, as was discovered in June 2021.
Now, U.S. district court judge Leonie Brinkema is ordering the NIH to turn over the missing data related to a probe by the group Empower Oversight. The NIH had earlier submitted a motion for summary judgment, which was denied.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) recently warned that China’s interest in the agriculture of the United States poses both a serious economic challenge and a security risk to the United States.
China sits on 7-9% percent of the world’s arable land, 294 million acres, but is home to nearly 20% (1.4 billion in 2020) of the global population (nearly 8 billion in 2022). By comparison, the US has more than 375 million acres of arable land and a population of 329.5 million.
While many are rightfully concerned about the growing influence of video-based social media platform TikTok and the Chinese government’s ability to harvest incredible amounts of user data from it, China’s largest social media and video game studio, Tencent, has quietly been acquiring a commanding stake in the most popular video game companies around the world, and no one has seemed to notice. From Riot Games’ flagship title Valorant to the popular Epic Games-produced Fortnite, Tencent and the Chinese Communist Party are inserting propaganda and influencing a generation of children around the world while their parents aren’t looking.
How “woke” experiments endanger our Armed Forces.
The FBI raid on Donald Trump’s estate has temporarily pushed the China threat out of the headlines. But, of course, the threat is still there and so is the question of how to respond to it.
Teddy Roosevelt said that when dealing with hostile foreign powers one should “speak softly and carry a big stick.” In other words, don’t provoke your enemies, but let them know that you possess sufficient fire power and personnel to handle any situation that may arise.
China has closed the gap with the U.S. “in most economic races, even overtaking it in some,” according to a recent report from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The report, “The Great Economic Rivalry: China Vs. the US,” predicts that at the current rate, China will overtake the US economically within a decade.
Measured by purchasing power parity (PPP) — which compares national economies in terms of how much each nation can buy with its own currency at the prices items sell for in its market — China has already surpassed the US to become the world’s largest economy.
Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns formerly headed an influential D.C. think tank while it employed undisclosed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members as well as individuals with Chinese government ties, the Daily Caller News Foundation has found.
The German economy is even more dependent on China than it is on Russia.
BERLIN — Germany’s Wagnerian foreign policy spectacle is moving east.
Spoiler alert: It’s even worse than the original.
For months, Berlin has frustrated (read enraged) many allies with its one step forward, two steps back approach to confronting Russia over Ukraine. Yet that tortured episode is looking like little more than an overture to what’s brewing in Asia, as tensions over Taiwan force Berlin to weigh how it would respond if Beijing tries to seize the island nation, which China considers a breakaway region.
SFU professor Darren Byler has been frequently attacked by China’s state media, which accuses him of being an agent of the U.S. government. Something he denies.
During four groundbreaking expeditions into China, the latest in 2018, Byler has witnessed many colleagues and research subjects disappear into the mass “re-education” camps and forced labour factories endured by more than 1.5 million Uyghur Muslims.
In his meeting in Tehran with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Islamic Republic’s “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised what he called “Your Excellency’s pre-emptive initiative” in launching “Special Operations ” against Ukraine.
He claimed that if Putin had not invaded Ukraine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would have started a war against Russia to regain control of the Crimean Peninsula.
Although later removed from the official media in Iran, the remarks started a debate in Tehran’s decision-making circles about the Islamic Republic adopting a similar strategy by going on the offensive against its “enemies”.
For the past two decades, China has built up a powerful position in Canada’s critical minerals and mining sector, with little oversight from Ottawa
Three years ago, Sinomine Resource Group Co., a Chinese company, quietly bought the Tanco mine in Manitoba. At the time, Tanco was one of the world’s few sources of the critical mineral cesium, a key input in atomic clocks and radiation detectors. The mine had previously produced lithium, a battery metal used in electric cars.
Even though Tanco was owned by an American chemicals company, Cabot Corp., Canada’s federal government had the authority to block the acquisition on national security grounds. But far from blocking the deal, Ottawa appears not to have given it a second glance.
Earlier this year, under its new Chinese ownership, the Tanco mine started producing lithium and shipping it back to China, where it is fed into the country’s massive domestic electric car industry. Tanco is now the only operating lithium mine in Canada, and Sinomine has plans to expand production over the next few years.
An American scientist recently testified at a U.S. Senate hearing that his research provides evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has conducted synthetic biology research of the deadly Nipah virus.
“The Nipah virus is a smaller virus than SARS2 [virus causing COVID-19] and is much less transmissible. But it is one of the deadliest viruses, with a greater-than-60 percent lethality. This is 60-times deadlier than SARS2,” Dr. Steven Quay, a Seattle-based physician-scientist, told a Senate subcommittee at a hearing on Aug. 3
A former espionage officer claims that some Canadian politicians are on the payroll of foreign agents.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former chief of the Asia-Pacific desk at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told the Commons ethics committee, “There are elected officials at all levels whether it’s municipal, provincial or federal who are being paid by foreign governments and who are not necessarily acting in the interests of Canada.”
“Construction stops, mortgage stops. Deliver homes and get repaid!”
That was one of the chants disgruntled apartment buyers in China used at a protest in June. But their ire over unfinished homes didn’t stop at signs and chants.
Hundreds of them stopped paying their mortgages – a radical step for China, where dissent is not tolerated.
A young couple who moved to Zhengzhou in central China told the BBC that after receiving the down payment last year, the developer withdrew from the project and construction stalled.
“The issue of creating an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of our countries is being worked out,” said Vladimir Putin in June, at a meeting of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—grouping.
Russia and China have launched another attempt to develop a “new global reserve currency.” In other words, they are again attacking the dollar.
A “coordinated global challenge taking place to the U.S. dollar… would be the biggest news story in decades,” writes “Tyler Durden,” the pseudonym for in-house staffers at the ZeroHedge site. Durden is “stunned that nobody seems to care that arguably the largest shift on the global macroeconomic playing field over the last half century may be taking place.”
China announced suspension of dialogue with the United States in a number of areas on Friday, countering the recent visit to Taiwan by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Not only has dialogue been cut on climate change and between theatre-level military commanders, cross-border crime and drug trafficking exchanges have also been ceased.
