“China – Communist Slave State”

During his inaugural address, President Donald Trump doubled down on his assertion that China runs the Panama Canal.

“China is operating the Panama Canal and we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama and we’re taking it back,” he said.

The 51-mile (82km) Panama Canal cuts across the Central American nation and is the main link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

The ChiComs do influence operations despite what the Beebs China squish says.

The US is right to be concerned about China’s influence over the Panama Canal

It’s still before dawn when hundreds of Chinese missiles begin to rain down on Taiwan. Much of the self-governing island’s air and naval forces are obliterated in a matter of minutes. Chinese special forces storm the residence and offices of the Taiwanese president, executing the “decapitation strike” they’ve trained for years to carry out. Swarms of aircraft and drones pound Taiwanese defences, as up to 50,000 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) paratroopers descend on the island, attempting a blitz assault to capture landing zones for a helicopter-borne second wave before making a drive for the beaches.

Hundreds of thousands of PLA troops are about to make landfall in the largest amphibious operation since D-Day. The long-anticipated invasion of Taiwan has begun.

The message from President Biden’s national security adviser was startling.

Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies’ help to root out the intruders.

A state-sponsored actor in China hacked the U.S. Treasury Department, gaining access to the workstations of government employees and unclassified documents, the Biden administration said on Monday.

The announcement comes after revelations in recent months that China had penetrated deep into U.S. telecommunications systems, gaining access to the phone conversations and text messages of U.S. officials and others.

In a letter informing lawmakers of the episode, the Treasury Department said that it had been notified on Dec. 8 by a third-party software service company, BeyondTrust, that the hacker had obtained a security key that allowed it to remotely gain access to certain Treasury workstations and documents on them.

Back in October, I wrote about the Chinese cyberattack that penetrated our telecommunications system, arguing that the damage done was unimaginably large.

At the time the government was releasing information in dribs and drabs. The spooks let us know that the breach was serious but made all sorts of noises about how the breaches were relatively limited and only affected individuals who the American government was already tracking for some reason.