It’s been a “Twilight Zone” of a political week, from James Taylor singing “Fire and Rain” to cheer the Inflation Reduction Act to our Beto O’Rourke in New York looking for money to the Democrats in full “Daydream Believer” mode to pursue their climate change agenda.
A senior Chinese health official has advised people to avoid physical contact with foreigners to prevent possible monkeypox infection after the first known case of the virus on mainland China was reported on Friday.
“To prevent possible monkeypox infection and as part of our healthy lifestyle, it is recommended that 1) you do not have direct skin-to-skin contact with foreigners,” Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted on his official Weibo page on Saturday.
As China and Russia meet to consider wider issues, reports indicate that exports of Russian gas are finding their way into Europe – via China.
“The global liquefied natural gas (LNG) market is increasingly well-integrated, and regional demand shifts can help balance otherwise tight markets. This redirection of flows serves the interests of all parties involved,” Nicholas Kumleben, director of energy research at macroeconomic advisory firm Greenmantle, told DW.
China, not the US, is now the world’s biggest emitter
Hailed as America’s first comprehensive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro. The UNFCCC’s objective was to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” a threshold that the convention left undefined.
The European Union’s top intelligence official canceled a trip to Taiwan after his top-secret preparations were seemingly leaked to Beijing in advance, according to two diplomats with knowledge of the situation.
José Casimiro Morgado, director of the European Union Intelligence and Situation Centre, was supposed to make the below-the-radar visit to meet Taiwanese officials in October, according to the diplomats.
China’s economy is in trouble. The juggernaut that once looked bound for global domination is slowing down — and not only in the short run.
The Chinese economy’s projected growth this year has slowed to about 3%, missing the government’s target of 5.5% by an embarrassingly wide margin.
After decades of galloping expansion, that would be the second-worst performance in more than 40 years. Only 2020, with its COVID-induced recession, was worse.
h/t CV
An increasing number of Americans believe that China’s communist regime considers itself to be at war with the United States, according to the results of a new national survey.
Some 40 percent of likely U.S. voters said they think the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, considers itself to be at war with the United States. Less than 26 percent said the CCP doesn’t consider itself at war with the United States, while more than 34 percent were unsure.
Chinese intelligence gathering in the US takes many forms and has different purposes. Most Americans are familiar with some of their means and tactics, but not with how widespread and persistent they are.
Americans may know about the malware contained in that infernal TikTok app that their children use. They may know the Chinese military’s cyber-intelligence service was likely behind many of the largest hacks of Americans’ personal data that have ever occurred. They may know from the news how US defense and intelligence policy have sanctioned Chinese telecom giant Huawei, and counseled America’s allies to reject Chinese-architected implementations of 5G networking, due to evidence that China has planted backdoors in commercial networking equipment designed to allow the Communist regime in Beijing to conduct surveillance and cyber-espionage anywhere in the world.
Do they know it extends to consumer-level drones?
The Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation was once a small, obscure list of autocrats that posed no real threat. Not any more, writes Matthew Campbell
Authoritarian world leaders including President Putin of Russia and President Xi of China will gather this week in Central Asia for the annual summit of an obscure organisation which has attracted little global attention since its founding in 1996.
That is about to change, for the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation (SCO) is poised to take a bold step. In a development certain to irritate Washington, it is granting membership to Iran, a country regarded in America as a state sponsor of terrorism.
China aims to project power through new economic and military projects in the Arctic, according to experts.
By securing new trade routes and military access in the Arctic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeks to expand its capacity for “global power projection,” according to Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
A new report shows the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to expand sway over international media — and what a democracy’s response must be.
The Chinese Communist Party does not take kindly to criticism, either at home or abroad.
But while its extremely low Press Freedom Index ranking reveals the extreme measures it takes to control information in China, influencing media narratives around the world is more difficult.
But that hasn’t stopped it from trying. A new report, released on Thursday by US-based free speech think tank Freedom House, reveals that from 2019 to 2021 China made a concerted effort expand its media footprint and silence critical reporting.
A majority of Canadians and Americans say they find China to be the greatest health threat to their countries, while agreeing that Chinese goods should be a top priority for inspection, a Nanos Research poll shows.
This synchronized view of the threats posed by China was published in the latest release of an 18-year tracking survey, co-conducted by the Canada-based Nanos and the University at Buffalo in New York. This latest survey is the seventh wave conducted since Justin Trudeau became the prime minister of Canada and the second wave with Joe Biden as president of the United States.
The US Pentagon has stopped accepting new F-35 jets after it discovered a magnet used in the stealthy fighter’s engine was made with unauthorized material from China, a US official said on Wednesday.
An investigation that gathered steam in mid-August found that an alloy in the engine’s lubricant pump did not comply with US procurement laws that bar unauthorized Chinese content, said Pentagon spokesperson Russell Goemaere.
Few cases better show how U.S.-China relations have deteriorated in the age of Big Data than the response Wang Jiang got when he offered, at the height of the pandemic, to set up labs for COVID-19 testing in the U.S.
Wang is a known quantity in the world of U.S. biotech. He cut his teeth as a genetics researcher at the major public research universities of Texas, Iowa and Washington. He’s now the snowy-haired, charismatic chairman of Shenzen-based BGI, the world’s largest biotech company, which for decades has been collaborating with some of America’s leading geneticists. BGI participated in the global effort to sequence the first human genome, formed a partnership with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to identify genes associated with pediatric diseases, and named an institute in China after Harvard’s George Church, a gene-editing pioneer, who continues to work with the company.
A court in Hong Kong has convicted five speech therapists of producing “seditious publications” in the form of a series of illustrated children’s books that depicted sheep trying to defend their village from wolves.
The convictions are the latest using a colonial-era sedition offence that authorities have deployed alongside a new national security law to stamp out dissent.
