Free Republic

Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Shanghai, China, on Wednesday afternoon for meetings with senior officials, receiving no significant honors upon his landing and preceded by loud warnings from the Foreign Ministry to avoid challenging the Communist Party on its belligerent policies. Blinken is expected to stay in China for three days, beginning his journey in the economic heart of China, Shanghai, and then traveling north to Beijing to meet top officials. According to the State Department, Blinken is expected to address a wide variety of international issues, many of them not directly relevant to China such as “the...

A trove of leaked documents from a Chinese state-linked hacking group shows that Beijing’s intelligence and military groups are attempting large-scale, systematic cyber intrusions against foreign governments, companies and infrastructure — with hackers of one company claiming to be able to target users of Microsoft, Apple and Google. The cache — containing more than 570 files, images and chat logs — offers an unprecedented look inside the operations of one of the firms that Chinese government agencies hire for on-demand, mass data-collecting operations. The files — posted to GitHub last week and deemed credible by cybersecurity experts, although the source...

If you were thinking that those large pro-Palestine protests popping up everywhere seem awfully organized, you’re not wrong. Today the Free Press points out that at least four rallies, including one in New York which was later denounced as too extreme by AOC, were co-organized by a group called The People’s Forum.Based in Midtown Manhattan, The People’s Forum calls itself a “movement incubator for working class and marginalized communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad.” But a review of public disclosure forms show that multimillionaire [Neville Roy] Singham and his wife [Jodie] Evans have...

A recent YouTube video featured drone footage of a large number of electric vehicles sitting in a field in China. It alleged that Chinese automakers are manufacturing cars, falsifying sales records, and abandoning them in order to receive government subsidies. However, a Shanghai-based automotive industry veteran has looked into those claims and was able to debunk them as false. Shanghai-based Mark Rainford, who runs his own YouTube channel called Inside China Auto, visited the “EV graveyard” in person. He captured his own footage of the cars that YouTuber Winston Sterzel claimed, based on old images captured by drone, were 10,000...

A criminal IRS investigation into Hunter Biden — President Biden’s son — appears to have convened a grand jury as far back as May 2019, a confidential subpoena served to JPMorgan Chase bank reveals. The subpoena also seeks bank records of James Biden, the president’s brother, which appears to be the first time another Biden family member has surfaced in connection with the investigation. The document, obtained by Breitbart News, specifically demands information on related transactions between JPMorgan Chase Bank, which the document calls “correspondent bank,” and the Bank of China, which the document calls the “originating or beneficiary bank.”...

Shanghai Academy acts as a front for Chinese spy recruitment, according to FBI The Brookings Institution, a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, partnered with a Shanghai policy center that the FBI has described as a front for China’s intelligence and spy recruitment operations, according to public records and federal court documents. The Brookings Doha Center, the think tank’s hub in Qatar, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in January 2018, the institution said. The academy is a policy center funded by the Shanghai municipal government that has raised flags within the FBI. The partnership...

According to the World Health Organization, there have been 6,947,192 confirmed COVID-19 deaths globally as of June 28. Of those, 1,127,152 occurred in the United States, making the number of Americans killed by the virus more than 19 times the number of American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.And yet, over three years since the beginning of the pandemic, we still don’t know where the virus originated. The fear is that the next time around, the number of deaths could be much higher; because we didn’t learn from this pandemic, we wouldn’t be as prepared as we should for the...

As the global economic intelligentsia debates how to “decouple” or “de-risk” from China, Elon Musk clearly didn’t get the memo. The Tesla founder was feted like a returning king in Beijing this week. From the moment his private jet arrived on Tuesday, Musk is reportedly being called “Brother Ma,” putting him in rarified league with Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma. There are many takeaways from Musk’s first China visit in three years. One is that not everyone is decoupling from China, least of all the globe’s most influential electric-vehicle (EV) evangelist and owner of Twitter. Another: the future of EV production...

A Chinese state-run newspaper issued a warning to Tesla CEO Elon Musk after he shared reporting on the U.S. Department of Energy’s “low confidence” assessment that the global Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan laboratory. CNBC’s Eunice Yoon reported Tuesday morning on the warning from the social media pages of the Global Times, the English-language subsidiary of the CCP-controlled People’s Daily. The Global Times warned Musk that he could be “breaking the pot of China” after the Tesla and Twitter CEO responded to tweets that asserted that the Covid pandemic originated in a Wuhan research laboratory. The saying is akin...

Former President Donald Trump slammed President Joe Biden following the revelation that he was stashing classified documents at the University of Pennsylvania, which is reported to have accepted millions of dollars in mysterious donations from China.Trump speculated that China could have had access to the classified information because the Penn Biden Center reportedly received $54 million in anonymous Chinese donations between 2014 and 2019.“Biden’s documents are HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL, many pertain to UKRAINE, where Hunter was ‘raking in the dough,’ and FUNDED BY CHINA, which gave $55 Million to Biden, through Penn, and probably had easy access,” Trump wrote on Truth...

A senior doctor at one of Shanghai’s top hospitals is sounding the alarm on surging COVID-19 cases in China — as he estimates that up to 70% of the city’s population has been infected. Chen Erzhen, the vice president of Ruijin Hospital and a member of Shanghai’s COVID expert advisory panel, estimates at least 70% of the megacity’s 25 million residents have been infected following the easing of the country’s “zero-COVID” policies. As a result, he warned, hospitals in China are being stretched to their limits. Erzhen said his hospital has seen a stunning 1,600 emergency admissions each day —...

The huge protests engulfing China right now against lockdowns have left a lot of people wondering if these are just protests. The size, and scope, and vehemence, and fearlessness of the Chinese public against their very oppressive communist masters has made them appear to be a mass movement. In Shanghai, they are calling for the ouster of the entire Communist Party of China. When a billion-strong nation rises up on a cause that has unified them such as this, there's clearly the scent of revolution in the air. The New York Times did a huge spread on the matter this...

Tehran (AsiaNews) – Iran will become a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the signing of the memorandum of obligation at a summit in Samarkand, on 15-16 September. “This year, within Uzbekistan's chairmanship, Iran, as an observer state will ... become a full-fledged member of the SCO,” RIA Novosti quoted Uzbek Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov as saying yesterday during a meeting in Moscow. Iran took one step closer to full membership on 17 September last year when its application was accepted 15 years after it was made. On that date, SCO began the country's accession, which usually...

Worker unrest is on the rise at the Shanghai factory of a major supplier for Apple gadgets, with protests at times turning violent in response to draconian “COVID zero” lockdowns. Workers at the Quanta Computer plant — which makes Apple’s MacBook laptops — have been under strict lockdown for nearly two months with limited supplies as the Chinese government takes drastic measures to keep production online despite a recent COVID-19 case surge. But the fed-up employees – most of whom are low-wage earners – have reportedly started to revolt against the measures. The unrest has included violent confrontations involving hundreds...

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/26/why-general-john-allen-is-being-promoted-in-commercials-for-hillary-clinton/

Retired four-star Marine Gen. John Allen, is on administrative leave from his role as president of the Brookings Institute D.C. think tank after the FBI seized his electronic data on suspicion of lying to investigators and withholding evidence about his role in secretly lobbying for the government of Qatar. As a general, he commanded all U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan in the Obama administration. The court records, which were unsealed Tuesday, are the latest public evidence showing the FBI and Justice Department are conducting a large-scale investigation into the stateside influence of wealthy Arab nations including Qatar, Saudi Arabia...

Cai Qi, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Beijing, told state media Monday that the city would adhere to its “zero-Covid” policy of lockdowns and quarantines for the next five years.State media rapidly deleted his comment — and Chinese censors relentlessly scrubbed it from websites — after a burst of shock and outrage on social media.The original quote from Cai, as published by the state-run Beijing Daily, read as follows: “In the next five years, Beijing will unremittingly grasp the normalization of epidemic prevention and control.”The rest of the article made it clear that Cai was talking about the harsh...

Shanghai and Beijing went back on fresh COVID-19 alert on Thursday after parts of China's largest economic hub imposed new lockdown restriction and the city announced a round of mass testing for millions of residents. The most populous district in the Chinese capital, meanwhile, announced the shutdown of entertainment venues, while news of the lockdown of Shanghai's Minhang district, home to more than 2 million people, pulled down Chinese stocks. Several local-level authorities in Shanghai, which is home to 25 million people, have also issued notices saying residents will be subject to two days of confinement and another 12 days...

Residents stuck inside a compound nearly a week after Shanghai's much vaunted reopening following a virus outbreak shouted at hazmat-clad officials on Monday (Jun 6), as fears grew that some city neighbourhoods were being locked down again. Authorities in the financial hub eased many harsh restrictions last Wednesday, after confining most of the city's 25 million inhabitants to their homes since late March, as China battled its worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. But hundreds of thousands have not yet been allowed out of their homes, while others have immediately been placed back under local lockdowns after a brief liberation...

Pandemic-hit Shanghai, China's financial hub, unveiled more post-lockdown plans on Thursday as it moves towards a return to normalcy, but a country-wide economic recovery is still a distance away, heightening a sense of urgency for more support. The city of 25 million people, which is set to officially emerge from its lockdown on June 1, has been cautiously easing Covid-19 curbs, allowing more of its population to venture out and putting more vehicles back onto its once busy streets. Officials in the city said on Thursday (May 25) that students in junior and senior high school can return to offline...