Important Takeaways:
- After half a year of delays and debates, the US Congress has approved a $60.8bn military aid package for Ukraine, lifting the spirits of Kyiv’s forces this week as special operations destroyed Russian air defenses, a long-range bomber, a unique ship, and oil refineries.
- “It’s a dangerous time. Three of our primary adversaries, Russia and Iran and China are working together … their advance threatens the free world and it demands American leadership,” said US House Speaker Mike Johnson
- US Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Senator Mark Warner told CBS News that the missiles would be on their way to Ukraine “by the end of the week”
- Russian reactions ranged from the cynical to the vitriolic: “I can’t help but wish the USA with all sincerity to dive into a new civil war themselves as quickly as possible,” Medvedev wrote. “Which, I hope, will be very different from the war between North and South in the 19th century and will be waged using aircraft, tanks, artillery, MLRS, all types of missiles and other weapons. And which will finally lead to the inglorious collapse of the vile evil empire of the 21st century – the United States of America.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- China is rapidly becoming more aggressive in its rhetoric and actions across Asia, the out going head of the US Indo-Pacific Command said, as Beijing turned up the heat on Washington just before Secretary of State Tony Blinken heads to the country for high-stakes visit.
- “We all need to understand that it’s moving very fast,” Admiral John Aquilino told reporters
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Thanks to Biden, China Could Start World War III Here
- China is swarming the waters of the Philippines, hoping to intimidate Manila into surrendering territory. US President Joe Biden and the State Department keep on issuing warnings, but Chinese President Xi Jinping continues to ignore them, suggesting deterrence is failing….
- [R]ecently, China took Scarborough Shoal …. Washington then brokered an agreement for both sides to withdraw their craft, but only Manila complied. Beijing has been in firm control of Scarborough ever since.
- When Chinese leaders, generals and admirals saw Washington’s failure to act, they began moving against Second Thomas Shoal and other Philippine reefs and islets in the South China Sea, went after Japan’s islets in the East China Sea, and began reclaiming and militarizing features in the Spratly chain. Biden as vice president legitimized the worst elements in the Chinese political system by showing everyone that aggression works.
- Beijing has been waging proxy wars on three continents: Europe in Ukraine, Africa across its northern rim, and Asia in Israel and surrounding areas.
- Xi apparently now believes he is boss of the world. “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” the Chinese leader told Russian President Vladimir Putin after their 40th in-person chat, in Moscow on March 22 last year. “And we are driving this change together.”
- Biden is now trying to reestablish deterrence. Britain and France desperately attempted to do that in late summer 1939 when they warned Germany that they would declare war if it invaded Poland. Then, German leaders did not believe the British and the French would in fact fight because for three years they had failed to make good on previous warnings.
- The United States, therefore, is left with only risky options to deter China in the South China Sea. “Once a country loses credibility and prestige, it must fall back on military force to achieve its aims,” Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association and editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, told this author. “The U.S. has lost both around the world.”
- Thanks to Biden, America is now the Britain and France of our decade, and the world is again on the brink of global conflict. Some 55 craft in Philippine waters tells us that China thinks it has a free hand.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- China is stealing everything from nuclear weapons secrets to genetically-modified seeds as part of an estimated $600billion-a-year theft of US technology, DailyMail.com can reveal.
- Analysis of Department of Justice cases shows rampant and brazen plundering of US companies by Chinese spies who send trade secrets back home.
- In at least two cases, Beijing has plotted to steal technology related to the production and detection of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
- …also pilfered medical secrets from a children’s hospital in Ohio, as well as stealing seed technology from a farm in Iowa.
- com has found more than a dozen cases in which the US Government has charged Chinese entities or individuals with conspiring to steal American intellectual property on behalf of Beijing since 2018.
- Our audit reveals:
- The People’s Republic of China has orchestrated attempts to steal billions of dollars worth of trade secrets from some of the biggest companies in the US, including Tesla, Google, Apple, and Coca-Cola
- But the shameless thievery filters through all levels of society, from Wall Street to Main Street, with small businesses and start ups also targeted
- No sector of society is safe, with agriculture, tech, manufacturing, medical and military fields all subject to Chinese espionage
- US-based Chinese nationals are often paid large sums by CCP-backed entities or provided grant funding in exchange for passing on company secrets
- These findings are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg, with the FBI revealing last year that it had around 2,000 active investigations related to China’s efforts to ‘steal information’
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Nearly 127million people in China brace for ‘once a century’ floods as biblical downpours trigger landslides and deluge cities – with terrified residents trapped in their homes as emergency crews launch rescue missions
- Landslides in southern China injured at least six people and trapped others, state media reported Sunday, as a region with nearly 127million people braced for severe floods ‘seen around once a century’.
- Torrential downpours across swathes of Guangdong province since Thursday have swollen rivers in the Pearl River Delta and triggered deluges in mountainous areas.
- State broadcaster CCTV said Sunday that rains had sparked landslides affecting six villages in the northern Guangdong town of Jiangwan, ‘causing people to become trapped’
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- Chinese government-linked hackers have burrowed into U.S. critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Thursday.
- An ongoing Chinese hacking campaign known as Volt Typhoon has successfully gained access to numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water and other critical sectors, with 23 pipeline operators targeted, Wray said in a speech at Vanderbilt University.
- “Its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”
- Earlier this week, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said Volt Typhoon was in fact unrelated to China’s government, but is part of a criminal ransomware group.
- Wray said China’s hackers operated a series of botnets – constellations of compromised personal computers and servers around the globe – to conceal their malicious cyber activities.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- FBI says China is ‘defining threat of our generation’ with hackers ready to ‘wreak havoc’ in US
- FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the national security threats in the US are ‘more complex and sophisticated than ever’ as he claimed China is ‘becoming more aggressive’
- He said: “Today’s national security threats are more complex and sophisticated than ever. We’re seeing hostile nation-states becoming more aggressive in their efforts to steal our secrets and our innovation, target our critical infrastructure, and export their repression to our shores.
- “Front and center is China—the defining threat of our generation. To put it simply, the CCP [Communist Party of China] is throwing its whole government at undermining the security and economy of the rule-of-law world.”
- Wray warned officials that “China’s hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation combined.”
- “If each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intelligence analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, China’s hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1”, he added.
- In the alarming speech, the FBI claimed China is engaging in “traditional espionage and economic espionage, foreign malign influence, election interference, and transnational repression—often working in tandem.”
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- From Taiwan to South Korea to Silicon Valley, some of the most important nodes in the global tech economy are in disaster-prone places
- Considering that Wednesday’s quake was the strongest in Taiwan in 25 years — and that earthquakes of similar strength have killed tens of thousands of people or more in other countries — this could have been much worse.
- There was one other way in which Taiwan — and the world — avoided a worse outcome from the earthquake: the island’s all-important semiconductor manufacturing industry seemed to emerge largely intact.
- To say that Taiwan is important to the global tech industry is like saying oxygen is important to breathing. Taiwan as a whole is responsible for making 80 to 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips — ones for which there is no current substitute.
- While earthquakes and volcanoes are just one threat to Taiwan’s semiconductor foundries, the better-known one is the People’s Republic of China.
- Should Taiwan’s chip foundries be destroyed in such a conflict, the damage to the global economy could be on par with the Great Depression.
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- China Warns Citizens Inside USA: Prepare for “Various unexpected situations”
- A strange warning has been issued by China to any of its citizens located in the United States: “take safety precautions and be prepared for ‘various unexpected situations.’
- According to the China Ministry of Foreign Affairs, several Chinese students and company employees have recently been subjected to “unwarranted interrogations and harassment” by US airport law enforcement officers, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on its WeChat account on Friday.
- Their phones, computers and other luggage items were searched piece by piece, and several people were banned from entering the country, it said.
- To most casual observers, this “warning” from China makes no sense. At worst, perhaps twenty people from China have had unusual incidents trying to enter the United States; hardly a reason for such a large warning. Unless . . .
- So-called “Conspiracy theorists” are wondering if this “warning” is actually a “signal” to Chinese forces already inside the US; sort of a notice to “prepare for action?”
- [Even the South China morning Post reported on this] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257317/china-issues-travel-advisory-citizens-visiting-us-warning-unwarranted-interrogations-and-harassment
Read the original article by clicking here.
Important Takeaways:
- China’s Largest Base Has Replicas Of Taiwan’s Presidential Building, Eiffel Tower
- Through satellite images, we explore China’s premier large-scale training site that has some ominous and bizarre features.
- China has made massive investments in modernizing its military over the better part of the past three decades and has established new and improved research and development and training bases to support those efforts. The People’s Liberation Army has fully embraced the idea of utilizing highly realistic facilities to prepare its forces for the sorts of environments they’d be likely to fight in during future conflicts, drawing significant lessons from the experiences of the U.S. military and those of its allies.
- The Zhurihe Training Base in remote Inner Mongolia is the largest of these sites and notably features a huge full-size mockup a portion of downtown Taipei, the capital of the island of Taiwan, including highly elaborate recreations of its Presidential Office Building and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There’s also a cloverleaf highway interchange, a mock airfield and, bizarrely, a replica of France’s Eiffel Tower.
- Interestingly, this isn’t the only Eiffel Tower replica in China, either. There is another one in Tianducheng, China, a suburb of Hangzhou in the country’s Zhejiang Province, which has an overall aesthetic meant to evoke the architecture in the French capital Paris. There is another recreation of the Eiffel Tower at the Window of the World theme park in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, situated on the mainland just outside Hong Kong.
Read the original article by clicking here.
