Tag: china

California Political Adviser Pleads Guilty to Being Foreign Agent of China

The former campaign adviser of a Southern California city council member pleaded guilty on Oct. 27 to acting as an illegal Chinese agent.

Sun Yaoning, also known as Mike Sun, worked as a campaign adviser in the 2022 city council race in Arcadia, a Los Angeles suburb.

He also operated a news website targeting the local Chinese American community, posting content supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

If the judge accepts the sentencing recommendation, Sun, 64, could face up to 10 years in prison.

In the plea agreement, Sun agreed that he was a foreign agent for China from 2022 to 2024, promoting pro-CCP propaganda in the United States without alerting the U.S. Attorney General.

Campaign filings from the November 2022 election show that Sun worked as treasurer for the campaign of Eileen Wang, an Arcadia city council member.

At the time of the arrest in December 2024, Arcadia City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a letter to the community that Sun had no affiliation with the City of Arcadia and that Wang had spoken with the FBI and was cooperating with investigators.

According to the plea agreement, Sun admitted to writing a report about his activities in support of the CCP.

“Overseas anti-China forces have been ceaseless, Taiwan independence, Tibet independence, Xinjiang independence, and Falungong have been active for a long time,” he wrote.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. As with the other areas mentioned above, the faith group has been a major target of the Chinese regime.

Sun proposed organizing counteractivities and requested $80,000 to fund a demonstration at a Fourth of July parade in Washington, according to the criminal complaint filed on Dec. 17, 2024, by the Justice Department in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Sun also admitted to providing information to a Chinese official at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles about activities in the area related to Taiwan. In April 2023, during a visit by then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, Sun took photos of protesters and sent them to the Chinese official.

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Chinese Communist Party Making Millions in UK Gov’t Contracts for Migrant Hotels: Report

A report from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) has found that the Chinese Communist Party is directly profiting from Britain’s migrant hotel scheme to house supposed asylum seekers, many of whom break into the country illegally via the English Channel from the beaches of France.

According to the IPAC audit of the Sino-British economic relationship, the CCP, or entities and people under its control, currently hold £190 billion in UK assets, including schools, national infrastructure such as Heathrow airport, wind farms, power networks, billions of shares in FTSE-listed companies, and properties, including migrant hotels.

Among the Chinese-owned assets listed in the report include three migrant hotels in Britain that have collectively been awarded millions in Home Office contracts, The Sunday Times reported.

One of the firms, Kew Green Hotels, a £300 million business which owns and operates over 60 hotels, is entirely owned by the Communist Party through Beijing’s China Tourism Group Corporation.

It currently owns Holiday Inns in Kent and Cheshire, both of which faced anti-migrant hotel protests in August following nationwide outrage over the government scheme and concern for the safety of communities following the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by an Ethiopian hotel migrant in Epping.

The report estimated that the two migrant hotels, both of which are block booked by the state to house alleged asylum seekers, have earned the Chinese firm around £15 million through Home Office contracts.

Another Chinese cutout, Campanile, an asset of the Shanghai city government, also owns a hotel in Cardiff, which has been housing supposed asylum seekers for the British government since 2022.

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China, Russia use ‘asymmetric advantage,’ unleash sex warfare to seduce US tech execs, steal secrets: report

China and Russia have deployed attractive women to the United States to seduce unwitting Silicon Valley tech executives as part of a “sex warfare” operation aimed at stealing American technology secrets, according to a report.

Industry insiders told The Times of London that they have been approached by would-be honeypots — some of whom have even managed to ensnare their targets by marrying them and having children.

Chinese and Russian agents are also using social media, startup competitions and venture capital investments to infiltrate the heart of America’s tech industry, the report said.

“I’m getting an enormous number of very sophisticated LinkedIn requests from the same type of attractive young Chinese woman,” James Mulvenon, chief intelligence officer at risk-assessment firm Pamir Consulting, told The Times.

“It really seems to have ramped up recently.”

A former US counterintelligence official who now works for Silicon Valley startups told The Times that he recently investigated one case of a “beautiful” Russian woman who worked at a US-based aerospace company, where she met an American colleague whom she eventually married.

According to the former counterintelligence official, the woman in question attended a modelling academy when she was in her twenties. Afterward, she was enrolled in a “Russian soft-power school” before she fell off the radar for a decade — only to re-emerge in the US as an expert in cryptocurrency.

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Chinese Nationals Arrested In Georgia For Attempting To Buy Black Market Uranium 

In an entirely bizarre and alarming story emerging out of the Republic of Georgia, the country’s State Security Service announced Saturday that three Chinese nationals had been arrested in Tbilisi for allegedly attempting to illegally purchase two kilograms of uranium.

They are accused of attempting to illegally obtain “nuclear material,” Interpress news agency reported as cited in Reuters. It’s unclear whether the suspects have any official links with the Chinese government or its military or intelligence services, however. The suspects intended to buy the uranium for $400,000 and smuggle it to China through Russia, Georgian security and intelligence officials detailed further.

Statements from Georgian security services describe a case where the traffickers were caught red-handed. “According to the authorities, a Chinese citizen already in Georgia, who was in breach of Georgian visa regulations, brought experts to Georgia to search for uranium throughout the country,” CBS writes.

“Other members of the criminal group coordinated the operation from China, the statement said.” Further:

The perpetrators were identified and detained while “negotiating the details of the illegal transaction,” the security service said.

The suspects are facing charges which could bring up to ten years in prison. The scenario of foreigners on risky missions to procure nuclear material in Georgia is not far-fetched, given reports of similar illicit trafficking instances over past years.

For example, one US think tank which monitors the Caucasus region reviews of the abundance of Soviet-era nuclear material there:

The Georgian government has attempted to enhance the safety and security of the nuclear materials under its control, but, prior to the August 2008 war, the anarchic conditions, weak law enforcement, and porous borders in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia have permitted widespread smuggling with neighboring Russian regions, as well as into Georgia. This condition has facilitated trafficking in nuclear materials as well as more conventional forms of contraband such as; narcotics, counterfeit currency, and young women. Georgia’s pivotal location at the crossroads between Europe, Russia, Asia, and the Middle East has raised concerns that transnational trafficking networks could move nuclear materials from Russia through Georgia to international terrorist groups.

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China Is Smuggling Fentanyl to US Through Venezuela, Trump Says

U.S. President Donald Trump confirmed on Oct. 23 that China is smuggling fentanyl into the United States through Venezuela to bypass U.S. and Mexican controls.

“They are doing that, yes, but they are paying right now 20 percent tariff because of fentanyl,” Trump told reporters.

Trump said it is one of the issues he will bring up with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping at their bilateral meeting next week.

“The first question I’m going to be asking them about is fentanyl,” he said.

Trump said that with the tariffs on China, which will rise by an additional 100 percent on Nov. 1 if no deal is made, the fentanyl operation will no longer be sustainable for China.

“They make $100 million sell[ing] fentanyl into our country … they lose $100 billion with the 20 percent tariff. So it’s not a good business proposition,” Trump said. “They pay a very big penalty for doing that, and I don’t think they want to be doing it.”

Trump’s meeting with Xi will come at the tail end of his Asia tour, for which he is departing on Oct. 24.

Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel told lawmakers he had spoken to counternarcotics authorities in China and urged them to restrict exports of more fentanyl precursor chemicals.

The Chinese Ministry of Public Security in August added seven chemicals to an export control list, three of them central to producing fentanyl. The restrictions went into effect Sept. 1.

The United States has determined that China is the main supplier of the deadly illicit drug in the United States, and Trump in an executive order on Feb. 1 imposed initial tariffs on China for its “central role” in the fentanyl crisis.

In the order, Trump noted that despite a long history of discussions over the years, Chinese regime officials “have failed to follow through with the decisive actions needed to stem the flow of precursor chemicals.”

According to the order, in addition to subsidizing and incentivizing chemical companies to create and export fentanyl precursors, the regime has also provided “support and safe haven” for transnational criminal organizations that launder the related profits.

“The CCP does not lack the capacity to severely blunt the global illicit opioid epidemic; it simply is unwilling to do so,” the order reads.

In recent weeks, Trump has authorized nine strikes on vessels suspected of trafficking drugs.

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Is Your Medication Made in a Contaminated Factory? The FDA Won’t Tell You.

They were the sort of disturbing discoveries that anyone taking generic medication would want to know.

At one Indian factory manufacturing drugs for the United States, pigeons infested a storage room and defecated on boxes of sterilized equipment. At another, pathogens contaminated purified water used to produce drugs. At a third, stagnant urine pooled on a bathroom floor not far from where injectable medication was made.

But when the Food and Drug Administration released the grim inspection reports and hundreds of others like them, the agency made a decision that undermined its mission to protect Americans from dangerous drugs.

Instead of sharing the names of the medications coming from the errant foreign factories, the FDA routinely blacked them out, keeping the information secret from the public. That decision prevented doctors, pharmacists and patients from knowing whether the drugs they counted on were tainted by manufacturing failures — and potentially ineffective or unsafe.

“Is there some quality issue? Is there a greater difference in potency than expected? Is there a contaminant? I don’t know,” said Dr. Donna Kirchoff, a pediatrician in Oregon who has spent hours trying to find out where certain drugs were made for patients reporting unexplained reactions.

There’s no specific requirement that the FDA block out drug names on inspection reports about foreign facilities. Still, the agency preemptively kept that information hidden, invoking a cautious interpretation of a law that requires the government to protect trade secrets.

It’s part of a decades-long pattern of discounting the interests of consumers who want to make informed choices about the drugs they take — even as 9 out of 10 prescriptions in the United States are filled with generics, many from India and China.

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State Department Employee Arrested For Stealing Thousands of Pages of “Top Secret” Classified Documents Released to Home Confinement

As previously reported, State Department contractor stole thousands of pages of “TOP SECRET” classified documents and met with Beijing officials.

Ashley Tellis, an expert on India and South Asian affairs, removed the top secret documents from secure locations and met with Chinese officials.

The classified documents were located in Tellis’s Virginia home during a raid.

“On Sept. 25, he allegedly printed U.S. Air Force documents concerning military aircraft capabilities. Federal prosecutors allege that he met with Chinese government officials multiple times over the past several years,” Fox News reported.

Prosecutors said in September 2022 that Tellis brought a manila envelope with him when he met with Chinese officials in a Virginia restaurant.

Tellis has been in jail since October 11.

He was charged with one count of retaining national defense information.

Tellis’ attorneys insist their client did not disclose any classified information to a foreign government and claimed government investigators are interpreting his “routine professional duties” as something sinister.

“Regrettably, investigators appeared to interpret his routine professional duties, such as liaison work and international travel, as clandestine activity, reading something sinister into what were standard think-tank and scholarly foreign policy engagements,” Tellis’ attorneys wrote in a court filing, according to The Washington Post.

Newly sworn in US Attorney Lindsey Halligan charged Tellis.

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Japan rejects US call to halt Russian energy imports

Japan’s Trade Minister Yoji Muto announced on 21 October that Tokyo will base its energy import decisions on national interests, resisting pressure from the US to stop purchasing Russian oil and gas.

While Muto stressed Japan’s autonomy, he also noted that “since the invasion of Ukraine, Japan has been steadily reducing its dependence on Russian energy,” according to Reuters.

His remarks followed a meeting between US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Japanese Finance Minister Katsunobu Kato, during which Bessent urged Japan to end all Russian oil and gas imports.

Muto stressed that Tokyo’s approach would balance energy security and diplomatic considerations. 

“We recognise that LNG from Sakhalin-2 plays an extremely important role in Japan’s energy security,” he said, noting that the Russian project supplies roughly three percent of Japan’s electricity generation.

Despite formally joining the G7’s price-cap scheme – which limits how much countries can pay for Russian oil – Japan has kept exemptions in place due to its reliance on Sakhalin-2 for energy security.

In September, Tokyo lowered its price ceiling on Russian crude from $60 to $47.60 a barrel – a symbolic step to match Europe’s tighter cap, despite Japan’s exemption.

The US has intensified its campaign to cut Russian energy revenues by pressing top buyers, namely Japan, India, and China, to scale back purchases. 

Washington argues that such steps would weaken Moscow’s ability to sustain its military operation in Ukraine.

Earlier this month, India also pushed back against US President Donald Trump’s claims that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had agreed to halt Russian oil imports. 

Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said India’s “import policies are guided entirely by the need to safeguard the interests of the Indian consumer,” emphasizing that diversification and stable pricing remain central to New Delhi’s strategy.

Beijing similarly dismissed the US demands, calling them “a typical example of unilateral bullying and economic coercion.” 

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International Student from China Accused of Drugging and Raping Multiple Women on Campus

A Chinese national faces felony charges after he reportedly drugged and raped three women while enrolled at the University of Southern California.

Sizhe “Steven” Weng, 30, allegedly committed the crimes between 2021 and 2024 while pursuing his doctoral degree, according to a Wednesday news release published by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.

He was arraigned Sept. 2 and pleaded not guilty to all felony charges: one count of forcible rape; two counts of sodomy by controlled substance or anesthesia; one count of rape by controlled substance; and four counts of sexual penetration by controlled substance or anesthesia, according to the release.

“No one should ever have to endure the trauma of being drugged, sexually assaulted and stripped of their ability to consent,” Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman said.

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Over 1,000 South Koreans Brutally Tortured, Drugged, Enslaved by Chinese-Linked Crime Syndicates in Southeast Asia

Over 1,000 South Koreans were scammed, brutally tortured, drugged and enslaved by Chinese-linked crime syndicates in southeast Asia.

Via Yonhap News.

Horrific video was released showing the South Koreans being electricuted and beaten by their handlers.

A massive human trafficking and torture network has been uncovered in Cambodia, involving more than one thousand South Koreans who were deceived, confined, and forced into criminal labor under Chinese-run compounds.

Many of these victims were subjected to forced drug injections to keep them awake or submissive while carrying out online fraud and money-laundering operations for their captors.

According to Yonhap News (Oct 20, 2025) and multiple verified Korean sources, the body of a 22-year-old South Korean university student was found in Kampot Province after he had been abducted, tortured, and killed. His death represents only one case within a much larger system that continues to operate across Southeast Asia.

Thousands of Koreans—mostly young men and women—were lured by fake employment ads and trafficked into Chinese-controlled criminal compounds in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar.
Once inside, they were stripped of their passports, confined behind guarded fences, and beaten, electrocuted, drugged, and forced to work up to 20 hours a day.
Those who resisted were brutally punished or killed.

Leaked footage and survivor accounts show victims being forced to scam their own citizens online, turning them into both perpetrators and victims under extreme duress.
Several survivors reported that captors used narcotics and psychotropic drugs to suppress resistance and maintain total control.

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