Free Republic

A widening investigation into allegations of high-level corruption on the island of Malta, first levelled by murdered journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, stretches to China and a $400 million investment into Europe by a Chinese state power company, Reuters has found. Caruana Galizia was murdered in October 2017 as she investigated a web of companies that she believed were funneling bribes to Maltese politicians. Now, Reuters and a consortium of journalists have traced two firms involved in that web to relatives of a senior Chinese executive for Accenture, the global consultancy firm. The executive, 43-year-old Chen Cheng from Shanghai, negotiated investments...

Balochistan can be freed if US stops supporting Pakistan, feels Baloch activist Ahmer Musti Khan who earlier heckled Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif speech."I must assure you our Baloch people are so confident of victory that they believe that once US stops supporting Pakistan, we can force them out of Balochistan," Musti Khan said in an exclusive interview with ANI....Musti Khan demanded freedom of Balochistan provinces where Pakistani army has been engaged in torture and killings of Baloch people demanding freedom. The activist also called Sharif a 'friend of al-Qaida founder Osama Bin Laden.'

Lusaka, Zambia (CNN)The trail of blood outside the warehouse door was the only immediate sign that a murder had taken place. But CCTV footage seized by police, and seen by CNN, revealed a brutal afternoon of carnage. At midday on Sunday, May 24, three Zambian attackers with iron bars entered the grounds of a Chinese-owned textile warehouse in Lusaka. Police said they were pretending to be potential customers. But the trio did not want to do business. Over the next 17 minutes, the CCTV footage shows, they beat two men and one woman to death in the courtyard, before dragging...

The Italian government of Giorgia Meloni is reportedly preparing to leave Communist China’s Belt and Road global domination scheme within the coming months. In 2019, under the stewardship of then-technocratic Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Italy became the first, and so far only, G7 nation to sign up to Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, which Beijing uses to ensnare nations throughout the world under its boot through debt trap diplomacy tactics. Now the populist-minded government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni faces a decision on Italy’s continued participation in the Chinese scheme, with the country’s membership set to automatically renew itself...

The “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft, has laid out his bribery allegations against the president’s family in an extraordinary video filmed in an undisclosed location while on the run. In the 14-minute recording, obtained exclusively by The Post, the fugitive former Israeli army officer claims he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their benefactors from the China-controlled energy...

As headlines about the frosty relationship between China and the United States are dominated by spy balloons, Taiwan and botched attempts at diplomacy, commanders in the Pentagon are increasingly worried by a more insidious threat: Beijing's growing stronghold on Latin America. From tens of billions of dollars in funding for key infrastructure projects across the region to its own secretive, military-run space station in Argentina that could target American satellites, China's presence has grown. Some 21 countries in Latin America are signed up to Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative - a defining policy introduced by President Xi Jinping in 2013...

JOHANNESBURG, March 28 (Reuters) - China spent $240 billion bailing out 22 developing countries between 2008 and 2021, with the amount soaring in recent years as more have struggled to repay loans spent building "Belt & Road" infrastructure, according to a study published Tuesday. Almost 80% of the rescue lending was made between 2016 and 2021, mainly to middle-income countries including Argentina, Mongolia and Pakistan, according to the report by researchers from the World Bank, Harvard Kennedy School, AidData and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. China has lent hundreds of billions of dollars to build infrastructure in developing...

Nearly a decade after its inception, momentum behind China’s sweeping Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) appears to be slowing as lending slumps and projects stall—forcing Chinese President Xi Jinping to again rethink a floundering initiative that he once hailed as his “project of the century.” After doling out hundreds of billions of dollars, experts say China’s lending for BRI projects has plummeted, largely a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic and the country’s own economic slowdown. Support has also waned as partner countries drown in debt and fractures emerge—literally—in projects, fueling uncertainty about the future of the sprawling initiative. In 2022,...

Lethal suicide bomb attack on Chinese nationals claimed by Balochistan Liberation Army with threat of more to come.PESHAWAR – China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Pakistan is being targeted by an intensifying Balochistan insurgency that has so far claimed dozens of lives including three Chinese teachers last week in a daring suicide attack carried out by a female operative of the insurgent Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA).Shari Baloch, a 31-year-old teacher, mother of two and a post-graduate philosophy student, blew herself up in front of a van carrying Chinese teachers near the Confucius Institute in the southern seaport city of...

Over the past ten years, China’s Communist Party (CCP) has strategically relied on its $4 trillion Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to boost its image and influence with at least 149 countries to date. But success has eluded its efforts, and the BRI strategy may be doomed as a result. Consider for example the CCP’s stalled attempts at pushing the BRI strategy across countries in Europe. Not anticipated were the barriers and delays created by sanctions imposed on Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. Before the sanctions, China used Russia as a convenient transit point for the shipment of BRI...

Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of IMF odious debt taken on by corrupt right-wing regimes. Seeking alternatives to US hegemony, President Alberto Fernández traveled to Russia and China, forming an alliance with the Eurasian powers, joining the Belt and Road Initiative.Argentina's President Alberto Fernández meets with Russia's President Vladimir Putin and China's President Xi Jinping in February 2022The United States constantly intervenes in the internal affairs of Latin America, organizing coups d’etat, destabilizing independent governments, trapping nations in debt, and imposing sanctions. Washington sees the region as its own property, with President Joe Biden referring to it this January...

Cambodia continued construction work at its Ream naval base in August and September, advancing projects that the US suspects could support a Chinese military presence in a strategically valuable corner of Southeast Asia. Satellite photos taken by Maxar and Planet Labs and published by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative show that two new buildings were built on the north end of the base... ... work took place near the former site of the Tactical Headquarters of the National Committee for Maritime Security, a US-funded building that was officially opened in 2012 and unexpectedly demolished in September 2020...

CommentaryMuch of the world is having an enlightening moment with China.Recall that China began the last decade by positioning itself as a global benefactor. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was supposed to be a beneficial foreign aid and development program. Other economic and cultural outreach efforts supplied nations with financing and cultural exchanges that have served Beijing well.The Shine Is OffBut foreign aid debt traps and spyware scandals certainly took some of the shine off China’s global reputation. The world started to open its eyes.Then the launch and spread of the CCP virus pandemic, along with the hoarding of...

An Indian diplomat’s microphone conspicuously cut out during a United Nations (U.N.) transport conference in Beijing last week just as the envoy began to criticize China’s infrastructure-building Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Press Trust of India (PTI) reported Wednesday. Priyanka Sohoni, the second secretary of the Indian Embassy in Beijing, had just begun speaking at the U.N. Global Sustainable Transport Conference on October 16 when her microphone suffered a mysterious malfunction that temporarily muted her speech. Sohoni had been voicing New Delhi’s opposition to Beijing’s BRI projects in foreign countries when her microphone stopped working. Moments later, an introductory...

On the face of it, America has little to fear from China's new deal to upgrade Cuba's power grid. The countries are already firm allies via their Communist leaders, Havana is under a diplomatic and economic embargo from Washington, and all efforts to mend ties between the two ended when Obama left office. But scratch the surface and what emerges is a picture of Chinese economic dominance in America's backyard that would be enough give any president sleepless nights. In fact, the deal with Cuba - signed this week as part of China's trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative - is...

A few years ago, I found myself on the platform of a train station in Tanzania. There under the ubiquitous photograph of the country's then president were two fading portraits of two statesmen from an earlier time, Chairman Mao Zedong and Julius Nyerere, first president of independent Tanzania. These two political giants were the main architects of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA), which was completed in 1976. The Chinese-built railway allowed Zambia to circumvent apartheid South Africa and white minority ruled Rhodesia and export its copper out of the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam. The 1,860-kilometer-long railway remains an enduring...

Nigeria’s Consul General to Shanghai has urged China to embrace honesty and sincerity in relating with Africa. The Consul General, Amb. Chimezie Ogu in a remark at the Jiangsu-Africa Cooperation Conference and China Africa Local Government Cooperation Forum Jiangsu Sub-forum disclosed that the continent is a reliable friend and partner of China. Explaining that “honesty and sincerity are an essential ingredient in the growth and progress of friendly countries with shared values, visions and expectations,” the Nigerian Envoy called for the closing of gaps in bilateral relations between both parties. This is as he invited the Government of Jiangsu Province...

California's state pension invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese state-owned enterprises linked to the People's Liberation Army, according to records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) had more than $3 billion invested in Chinese companies, including 14 state-controlled enterprises blacklisted by the Trump administration, as of June 2020. Many of these companies are funding the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure project Beijing is using to expand its geopolitical and military influence. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.), who recently praised a Chinese-owned media company for its "journalistic integrity," has not...

A Taliban spokesperson has praised Beijing as a “main partner” and financer as the group moves to build a national governance and develop Afghanistan’s economy.“China is our main partner and represents for us a fundamental and extraordinary opportunity because it is willing to invest and rebuild our country,” Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid told the Italian newspaper la Repubblica on Sept. 1.Mujahid made the remarks as the militant group, which took over Afghanistan in dramatic fashion last month, celebrated the final withdrawal of American troops from the country, putting an end to a 20-year-long conflict.But money has become a pressing concern...

China has withdrawn its BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) funding for railway projects in Bangladesh, after the recipient country proposed significant cuts in costs. This happened amidst increasing tension between the two countries.According to media reports, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina found that Chinese companies were charging three times the normal price for construction, and slashed $5.72 billion from the China-funded Akhaura-Sylhet and Joydebpur-Ishwardi railway projects that are part of the BRI agreement signed between the two countries.The main conditions of the contract with China required that the contractors of the railway construction be selected by the Chinese...