Tag: china

China and the US Are Racing to Go Nuclear in Space

China has disclosed new details of its space exploration plan in the next decade, including the use of nuclear energy to power its moon base, intensifying its space race with the U.S. 

“We are now developing a new system that uses nuclear energy to address the moon station’s long-term, high-power energy demands,” said Wu Weiren, chief designer of the country’s Lunar Exploration Program, in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV on Monday. 

The outpost is developed in conjunction with Russia and is expected to be built by 2028 on the lunar south pole, which has patches of sunny spots as well as permanently shadowed craters. The U.S. has identified potential landing sites in the same area for its Artemis 3 mission, which is scheduled to launch in late 2025 to put Americans back on the moon using a SpaceX lander.

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Democrat Intel Senator: “Trump Was Right” About TikTok

The top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee warned Sunday that TikTok is a national security threat and that President Trump was right to want to ban it in 2020.

Committee Chairman Senator Mark Warner told Fox News Sunday “I think Donald Trump was right, I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat, it’s a threat on two levels.”

“One, it is a massive collector of information, oftentimes of our children. They can visualize even down to your keystrokes. So If you’re a parent and you’ve got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned,” Warner explained.

He added, “All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”

“The idea that we can somehow separate out TikTok from the fact the actual engineers writing the code in Beijing I think is a — The Justice Department’s trying to come up with a solution. I’m going to take a look at that solution, but they’ve got a huge mountain to climb,” the Senator further noted.

“The second problem is that TikTok in a sense is a broadcasting network.” Warner continued, adding “And if the Chinese Communist Party and TikTok at the end of the day has to be reliant on the Communist Party, the Chinese law states that.”

“If they suddenly want to dial up the fact that we’re going to decrease the content that criticizes Chinese leadership but increase the content that your kids may be seeing saying, hey, you know, Taiwan really is part of China, that is a distribution model that would make RT or Sputnik or some of the Russian propaganda models pale in comparison,” he further stated.

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Biden agrees to pay climate REPARATIONS: US will pay up to $1BN to compensate developing countries for global warming – but gas-guzzling China WON’T have to pay into global fund

Joe Biden says the US will sign-up to a UN-backed fund to pay reparations to developing countries worst-affected by climate change.  

The creation of the fund was announced Saturday. It was negotiated at the United Nations‘ COP27 Summit in Egypt, was originally known as a ‘loss and damage’ fund and had been blocked by previous American administrations. 

The nations who’ll benefit from the funds are largely from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific. They say they’re set to be worst-affected by rising sea levels and other weather extremes blamed on carbon emissions created by wealthier countries. 

Last year, Biden was granted $1 billion to help developing countries tackle climate change, although it’s unclear if that cash will go into this fund. 

The president also faces having his plans stymied by the GOP-majority house, which would have to approve any funding mooted by the White House.

There will be wrangles with fellow UN members over who pays what – which could well mean nothing gets done until after the next presidential election in 2024. 

And if a Republican like GOP golden boy Ron DeSantis ends up winning the presidency, the fund could face being scrapped again. 

Donald Trump famously pulled the US out of the 2015 UN Paris Accord on climate change, saying it represented a bad deal for America – with DeSantis known to share many of the 45th president’s views. 

China – the world’s biggest polluter – wouldn’t have to contribute to any global fund, because it is still considered a developing nation, despite its vast wealth. 

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Techno-Authoritarianism Is Here to Stay: China and the Deep State Have Joined Forces

“If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church

The votes are in.

No matter who runs for office, no matter who controls the White House, Senate or the House of Representatives now or in the future, “we the people” have already lost.

We have lost because the future of this nation is being forged beyond the reach of our laws, elections and borders by techno-authoritarian powers with no regard for individuality, privacy or freedom.

The fate of America is being made in China, our role model for all things dystopian.

An economic and political powerhouse that owns more of America’s debt than any other country and is buying up American businesses across the spectrum, China is a vicious totalitarian regime that routinely employs censorship, surveillance, and brutal police state tactics to intimidate its populace, maintain its power, and expand the largesse of its corporate elite.

Where China goes, the United States eventually follows. This way lies outright tyranny.

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TikTok Has A Child Pornography And Chinese Espionage Problem

TikTok allegedly has child sex abuse material hiding in plain sight all over the social media platform, according to a Forbes investigative report.

According to the report, graphic social media content depicting lewd and pornographic acts from minors is easy to come across on the video-sharing app.

“They typically read like advertisements and come from seemingly innocuous accounts,” Forbes reports. “But often, they’re portals to illegal child sexual abuse material quite literally hidden in plain sight—posted in private accounts using a setting that makes it visible only to the person logged in.”

The grotesque material can be found in “post-in-private” accounts, which predators easily access using specific phrases to avoid algorithms that would lead to a violation.

According to Forbes, Seara Adair, child sexual abuse survivor and children’s safety advocate, told a TikTok employee that she believes users bypass the AI system by posting a few seconds of a black screen.

“There’s quite literally accounts that are full of child abuse and exploitation material on their platform,” Adair told Forbes. “Not only does it happen on their platform, but quite often it leads to other platforms – where it becomes even more dangerous.”

Adair claims to have seen videos showing “a child completely naked and doing indecent things.”

A Forbes investigator reports several of the post-in-private handles were easy to access, others would require pledges to contribute images, and some recruited girls at least 13 years old.

Mahsau Cullinane, a spokesperson for TikTok, said in an email to Forbes that the platform has “zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material and this abhorrent behavior which is strictly prohibited on our platform.” adding that the company has every public and private video posted on the platform go through TikTok’s AI moderation and additional human review, if needed.

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China’s Collection of DNA Data Linked to Bioweapons, Religious Persecution, Organ Harvesting

Police in China’s Fuzhou City recently bragged about solving a break-in by conducting a DNA test of a blood smear from a mosquito that allegedly stung the burglar. However, the incident, which made global headlines, brings to the fore the threats associated with the exploitation of DNA databases.

The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ambitious efforts to collect genomic data—from inside and outside of China—to solve crimes and maintain social control have already been raising concerns for years.

The National Counterintelligence and Security Center has warned that the CCP, for years, has been collecting American healthcare and DNA data, through both legal and illegal means. U.S. officials recently said that such sensitive data might be potentially exploited by American enemies to create targeted biological weapons.

“There are now weapons under development, and developed, that are designed to target specific people,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) reportedly said at the Aspen Security Forum in July this year.

“That’s what this is, where you can actually take someone’s DNA … their medical profile, and you can target a biological weapon that will kill that person or take them off the battlefield or make them inoperable.”

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The Self-Licking Boot Of US Militarism

A new Bloomberg article titled “‘Sloppy’ US Talk on China’s Threat Worries Some Skeptical Experts” discusses the dangerous cycle in which pressures in the US political establishment to continually escalate hostilities with Beijing provokes responses that are then falsely interpreted as Chinese aggression.

Bloomberg’s Iain Marlow writes:

The hawkish narrative “limits room for maneuver in a crisis,” said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Any effort to defuse tension could be characterized as “conciliatory or not tough enough,” he said.

China has been consistent on Taiwan and there’s little public evidence to suggest it’s sped up the timeline to take Taiwan, said a former senior US official who worked on China policy but asked not to be identified.

The former official said the hawkish tone in DC has contributed to a cycle where the US makes the first move, interprets Chinese reactions as a provocation, and then escalates further.

Bloomberg quotes Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund, who says this cycle of self-reinforcing escalation could “end up provoking the war that we seek to deter.”

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‘We Have No Choice’ Other Than Cooperate With China As A Partner On Climate Change, State Department Says

State Department spokesman Ned Price said Wednesday that the U.S. has “no choice” than to cooperate with China as a partner on climate change.

Daily Caller healthcare reporter Dylan Housman pressed Price on whether the U.S. approach to collaborate with China, a large coal producer, on energy is effective given that President Xi Jinping only mentioned climate change once in his 72-page report to the Communist Party of China (CCP) congress.

“We have no choice but to find ways to cooperate with the PRC when it comes to climate,” he said. “We’ve demonstrated our ability to do so in the past and in fact it was about a year ago at the previous COP where Secretary Kerry and his counterpart announced a joint agreement that helped us make tremendous headway towards our ultimate climate goals.”

“The decision by the PRC over the summer to suspend cooperation on climate for that reason was deeply regrettable, not only because what it represents to the bilateral relationship, one of those areas of shared mutual interest, but it was even more regrettable because of the collective toll that it would take on the international community on the globe,” he continued.

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Chinese drone airdrops machine gun-wielding robot dog

Recent footage of a Chinese drone dropping off a dog-like robot with a machine gun strapped to its back has gone viral, providing a glimpse at the future of unmanned warfare.

Video clips, which were originally published by Chinese media earlier this month, showed large unmanned aircraft system with eight propellers hovering in to drop off a robot dog. The robot has its legs tucked in as it’s dropped off, but begins to unfold its legs and stand upright and walk.

As the robot dog begins to move, it is evident that it has some type of light-machine gun mounted on its back. The weapon appears to be a QBB-95 or QBB-97, which are both drum-magazine fed weapons used by Chinese forces.

Another video appears to show the same drone-based robot dog delivery from a different view.

The Drive reported the footage appeared earlier this month on an account on the Chinese social media app Weibo named “Kestrel Defense Blood Wing.” The Weibo-verified account appears to be affiliated with the Chinese armsmaker known as Kestrel Defense.

Another video went viral this summer showing a Chinese robot dog actually aiming and firing at targets on a range. In the video, the robot had to move its entire body and take several seconds to fine tune to aim the gun and it would reel back under the recoil of sustained automatic fire.

The U.S. military has also been developing dog robots. The U.S. robotmanufacturer Ghost Robotics has also showcased a dog robot equipped with a 6.5 mm rifle pod.

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CCP Runs Police Outpost in New York City, Part of Global Network of Transnational Repression

Chinese authorities have opened at least one “overseas police service station” in the United States as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) global transnational repression, according to human rights group Safeguard Defenders.

“These operations eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation and violate the international rule of law, and may violate the territorial integrity in third countries involved in setting up a parallel policing mechanism using illegal methods,” the Spain-based group said in a recent report.

The report, titled “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild,” examined the initiative first launched by ten “pilot provinces” in 2018. These stations were also called 110 Overseas, named after the country’s police emergency services phone number.

An outpost in New York City was among the “first batch” of 30 overseas police service stations in 21 countries set up by the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou city, the capital of the southern coastal province of Fujian. Other Chinese cities also set up their own outposts abroad.

The Chinese police authorities’ division in New York was opened on Feb. 15, according to Dongnan News, a media outlet backed by Fujian provincial government. The center, called Fuzhou Police Oversea Service Station, is located at 107 East Broadway, inside the headquarters of the American ChangLe Association (ACA), a non profit with close ties to the Chinese regime.

Safeguard Defenders identified 54 overseas police service stations across five continents, including in cities from Toronto to Dublin.

Yet the total number of such stations is unclear. “There is no complete list of such “110 Overseas” police service stations available,” the report stated. “[T]he number is undoubtedly larger and such stations more widespread,” it added.

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