Tag: china

US Military Boards 3rd Sanctioned Oil Tanker on the Indian Ocean, Pentagon Announces

U.S. military forces boarded a third sanctioned oil tanker on the Indian Ocean after it was tracked from the Caribbean Sea, officials announced Tuesday.

The Pentagon stated that U.S. military forces boarded the Bertha vessel overnight without incident, according to a post on X. Video footage included in the post shows military helicopters flying around the vessel.

“Three boats ran and now all three have been captured,” the Department of War stated. “The vessel was operating in defiance of President [Donald] Trump’s established quarantine of sanctioned vessels in the Caribbean and attempted to evade. From the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, we tracked it and stopped it. No other nation has the global reach, endurance, or will to enforce sanctions at this distance.”

The post added that the military would continue to “deny illicit actors and their proxies freedom of maneuver in the maritime domain.”

The Bertha, which flies under a Cook Islands flag, is linked to Shanghai Legendary Ship Management Company Limited and falls under sanctions imposed in January 2020, according to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Following the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in Caracas by U.S. forces in January, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration would move to enforce a quarantine of sanctioned oil tankers operating to and from Venezuela.

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China’s ‘Magic Weapon’ Reaches Deep Into America and the West

In 2023, the FBI arrested two Chinese-Americans, Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping, for operating a Chinese police station in Manhattan. Chen pleaded guilty and faces up to five years in prison for acting as a Chinese agent, while Lu, who has connections to Chinese authorities, pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. He faces 20 years for obstruction of justice.

According to the Department of Justice (DoJ), the police station was established to monitor and intimidate Chinese dissidents in the U.S. What is concerning, however, is that this is not an isolated case of serious infiltration. Nor is such activity limited to the U.S. alone. Safeguard Defenders, a Madrid-based NGO, has identified 102 Chinese police stations in 53 countries.

The audacity of operating police stations in other countries highlights how far China is willing to go to silence critics as it seeks global dominance in economic, military, and cultural fields. This ability was not built overnight. Its foundation was laid by Mao Zedong himself with the creation of the United Front Work Department (United Front), one of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “three magic weapons,” alongside armed struggle and party building. The front reports directly to the CCP’s central committee.

According to Cheryl Yu, a China expert and fellow of the Jamestown Foundation, Mao described the United Front’s work as “unifying our real friends to attack our real enemies.” Deng Xiaoping expanded that to a more aggressive approach: “unifying those who can be unified, neutralizing those who can be neutralized, and dividing those in the enemy camp who can be divided.” Current CCP supreme leader Xi Jinping has used it for the “Great Rejuvenation” of China.

Yu’s detailed report states that the first mention of the United Front working abroad appears in a 1985 document. Another document lists five overseas tasks: increasing people’s love for the motherland and the party; promoting Chinese culture; encouraging Chinese abroad to support their country’s development; promoting unification with Taiwan; and creating a positive international environment for the CCP.

Over decades of “assiduously cultivating” overseas Chinese groups, the CCP has turned those seemingly harmless goals into a global network of influence—groups and individuals it can mobilize to promote its interests. Yu’s report states there are over 2,000 such groups in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany; the worldwide number could reach “tens of thousands.”

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Texas Sues Drone Maker Anzu Over Alleged Ties to CCP

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing drone-maker Anzu Robotics, alleging that the U.S.-based company misled consumers and concealed its ties with the Chinese communist regime.

Paxton announced the lawsuit on Feb. 19, accusing the Texas-based startup of rebranding products sourced from Chinese drone giant Da Jiang Innovations, commonly known as DJI.

Founded in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen in 2006, DJI has been flagged by U.S. regulators as a security risk because of its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The U.S. Commerce Department added DJI to its export control list in 2020 for aiding the CCP’s human rights abuses. The Treasury banned U.S.-based individuals from trading DJI shares the following year because of similar concerns. The Pentagon blacklisted DJI as a Chinese military company in 2022, noting that the Chinese regime requires all Chinese companies to allow it to use them as part of its military-civil fusion strategy.

In the lawsuit, Paxton accused Anzu of making false and misleading representations to Texans about its business relationship with DJI, data-sharing practices, and software development.

Anzu markets itself as an American-owned, made-in-Malaysia alternative, but much of its drone technology is licensed from DJI, which receives payments for every drone that Anzu orders, the complaint alleges.

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‘Absolute surprise’: Homo erectus skulls found in China are almost 1.8 million years old — the oldest evidence of the ancient human relatives in East Asia

Three Homo erectus skulls previously unearthed in China are almost 1.8 million years old, around 600,000 years older than originally thought, a new study finds.

This revelation has made the Yunxian skulls from Hubei province the oldest evidence of our early human relatives, known as hominins, in East Asia, according to research published Wednesday (Feb. 18) in the journal Science Advances.

Study co-author Christopher Bae, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Live Science in an email that he felt “absolute surprise” when he first saw the results of the analysis. This more ancient age may force experts to rethink the date that H. erectus first emerged, which is believed to have occurred around 2 million years ago in Africa.

“What this means is that we need to consider pushing the origin of Homo erectus back” to around 2.6 million years ago, Bae said in an email.

H. erectus has long been considered the first human relative to leave Africa, with 1.78 million to 1.85 million-year-old fossils found at the Dmanisi site in Georgia being the earliest evidence of humans in Asia. But stone tools discovered at two sites in China dated to 2.1 million and 2.43 million years ago have complicated that picture, since they predate experts’ theory of when H. erectus originated.

The exact date of the three Yunxian skulls, which were found between 1989 and 2022, has long been debated, but they were previously considered to be around 1 million years old based on the age of animal teeth found close by, although one study dated them to around 1.1 million years ago using electron spin resonance and uranium-series dating. So when the opportunity arose to try a new dating technique at the site, Bae and his colleagues thought it was a good chance to revisit the debate.

Their team used a technique called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating to determine the age of the quartz found in the sediment layers where the skulls were found. This dating technique measures the half-life of two chemical variants — Aluminum-26 and Beryllium-10 — to determine how much time has passed since the quartz was exposed to cosmic rays.

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Disney Sends Cease-and-Desist Letter to Chinese ByteDance To Stop Use of Copyrighted Characters in New Seedance 2.0 AI Video Generator

ByteDance reportedly is vowing to comply.

The release of the revolutionary Seedance 2.0 AI video generator has sent Hollywood into a frenzy, with the Motion Picture Association and several class organizations firing on all cylinders against the Chinese company ByteDance.

Now, Disney has gone one step further and sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, accusing it of ‘using Disney characters to train and power the AI generator without permission’.

Reuters reported:

“Disney said ByteDance had pre‑packaged Seedance with a pirated library of copyrighted characters from franchises including Star Wars and Marvel, portraying them as if they were public-domain clip art, the person said.

The letter alleges Seedance is reproducing, distributing and creating derivative works featuring Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and other characters, the person added.”

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Jury Convicts Chinese National in $2M Scheme Targeting Elderly Bank Customers

A federal jury has convicted a Chinese national of using his role as a bank employee to access confidential client information to target elderly customers and create a scheme to steal their money and then use it for his personal benefit.

After a five-day trial in front of U.S. District Judge J. Philip Calabrese, Yue Cao, 36, was found guilty on 10 counts of bank fraud, four counts of aggravated identity theft, and one count of money laundering.

Court documents and evidence presented before the jury showed that Cao was a quant analytics manager at an Ohio-based bank who was hired to help protect customers from fraud. 

Instead, from about 2022 to 2023, he used his access to steal the identities and money of elderly customers who had not enrolled in the bank’s online services. 

He did this by first using an offshore service to create email addresses in the names of more than 100 victims. 

Then, he used these emails to enroll the victims in online banking—all without their knowledge or authorization. Additionally, Cao directed the victims’ bank statements and other notifications to the email addresses he created. Because he controlled their online banking, he transferred the victims’ money directly to his personal bank and credit card accounts.

He also used the victims’ identities to open accounts in their names without their knowledge and transferred their money into them. Some of these were brokerage accounts, where he then engaged in options trading using their money. He even arranged trades between the unauthorized accounts he set up and his own brokerage account.

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Feds charge 11 in Florida for marriage fraud scheme targeting US service members

Federal authorities have unsealed a sweeping indictment charging 11 people in connection with a marriage fraud conspiracy that allegedly recruited U.S. military service members, particularly Navy personnel, to enter sham marriages with Chinese nationals to evade immigration laws and provide illicit benefits, including unauthorized access to military installations. 

The three-count indictment, announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida, alleges the conspiracy operated from March 2024 through February 2025 and spanned multiple states, with fraudulent weddings staged in Florida, New York, Connecticut and Nevada.  

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Red Defection: CIA deploys new video seeking to lure Chinese soldiers to U.S. amidst PLA turmoil

he CIA deployed a new recruitment video in the Mandarin language, hoping to lure Chinese soldiers to defect amidst significant turmoil inside the People’s Liberation Army where two generals have been removed by President Xi Jinping.

The new video, entitled “The Reason for Stepping Forward: To Save the Future,” follows a series of videos dating to late 2024 that the Agency said have been successful in encouraging some Chinese to defect or cooperate with the United States.

The prior videos had some “success” in getting around Chinese Internet censorship, prompting CIA Director John Ratcliffe to make the new one, a senior U.S.official told Just the News, “If the videos didn’t work we wouldn’t be making more of them.”

The new video “illustrates the real gulf between the Chinese elites who want what is best for their banks and the Chinese citizens who want what’s best for their country,” the official said,

The new video which debuted on YouTube, portrays a Chinese military officer who contacts the CIA after becoming disillusioned with his country’s leadership and thinking of his young daughter’s future. 

“This is the world I know, defending the homeland and protecting the people. But day after day, the truth becomes increasingly obvious. What leaders are really protecting is their own self interest,” the narrator states.

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AOC Falls Apart on the World Stage When Asked a Simple Foreign Policy Question at Munich Security Conference

This was painful to watch.

Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez completely fell apart on the world stage when asked a simple question about foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference on Friday.

Many speculated that AOC’s decision to speak on foreign policy at the Munich Security Conference was her way to signal a possible 2028 run.

AOC spoke on two different panels on Friday: “Vox Populi? Responding to the Rise of Populism” and “Breaking (With) the Past: Seismic Shifts in US Foreign Policy.”

The moderator asked AOC if the US should commit troops to defend against China and she turned into a stuttering mess.

Of course, AOC would hang Taiwan out to dry, but she could not string together a sentence.

“Would and should the US actually commit US troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?” the moderator asked AOC.

“Um, you know, I think that, uh, this is such a, uh, you know, I — I think that this is a, umm, this is of course a, uh, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States – uh and I think what we are hoping for is we want to make sure that we never get to that point,” AOC said.

“And we want to make sure that we are moving all of our economic research and global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise,” she said.

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State Department Says Far Left Group ‘Code Pink’ is Linked to the Chinese Communist Party

The State Department has just reported to Congress that the far left group ‘Code Pink’ is linked to the Chinese Communist Party. This should come as a surprise to no one.

Code Pink began making a nuisance of themselves during the presidency of George W. Bush. They portrayed themselves as an anti-war group. Of course, once Obama became president and continued most of Bush’s foreign policy and the wars, they became curiously silent. Some of them were even guests at Obama’s inauguration.

Now that Trump, a Republican, is president again, they are back to their old tactics of showing up in places where they were not invited and being generally annoying.

This move by the State Department has the potential to change the game.

The New York Post reports:

State Department identifies Code Pink and other far-left groups as vectors of Chinese influence operations

The State Department transmitted a report to Congress Tuesday linking lefty nonprofits Code Pink and the People’s Forum to Chinese influence operations.

“Partisan hacks spent years peddling the phony Russia collusion hoax while turning a blind eye to the sprawling web of far-left activist organizations who push the agendas of the Chinese Communist Party,” Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers said in a statement provided to The Post.

“Organizations like Code Pink and the People’s Forum denigrate the United States, whitewash the violence of Marxist regimes, and run cover for China while enjoying an influx of cash from a donor network with connections to the Chinese Communist Party,” Rogers added.

“The State Department will pursue complete transparency for the donor and NGO networks that lobby for our adversaries and seek to weaken the resolve of the United States.”

The report on “Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference” alleges that China “spreads propaganda through influence campaigns run by nonprofit organizations like Code Pink, the People’s Forum and groups linked with the notorious Singham network.”

This has been a long time coming.

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