Tag: china

China Creating ‘Humanized Pigs’ with Gene Editing Then Infecting Them with Coronavirus

China’s state-run Global Times newspaper celebrated on Thursday the alleged discovery of a scientific process to create a “humanized pig” more susceptible to severe Chinese coronavirus cases, which scientists could infect and use for research.

The propaganda outlet attributed the scientific achievement to the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS). The CAS, a research institution, is the world’s largest organization of its kind and a formal arm of the Chinese government. The Times published an illustrative figure on the development of “humanized” pigs that appears to have first surfaced in a study published in August that promoted the use of genetically modified pigs for Chinese coronavirus research based on how rapidly scientists could generate them and their heightened similarities with the human body.

The August study – published in Cell Discovery, a journal sponsored by the CAS, revealed that Chinese scientists had attempted to use CRISPR gene-editing technology to remove the genetic protective shields that make Chinese coronavirus not a significant threat to most pigs. CRISPR technology became the source of global controversy in 2018 after a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, claimed to have used the method to genetically modify unborn baby twins to make them immune to HIV. The Communist Party sentenced He to three years in prison for conducting the human experiment without the full approval of the Party.

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Following Debacles In Iraq And Afghanistan, Failed Interventionists Are Now Agitating For Wars In Ukraine And Taiwan

If you thought for one moment that the embarrassing multi-decade debacle in Afghanistan would lead to some soul-searching from the failed interventionists responsible for America’s 21st-century Vietnam, think again. Instead of taking a step back to understand exactly why and how their grandiose plans to use the mightiest military in history to impose a top-down, secular, Western-style democracy didn’t quite pan out, they’re doubling down on failure.

When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail, and when you’re a global interventionist, wars fix everything. This time, their target is Ukraine. And Taiwan. Because why start a war with Russia when you can start a war with Russia and a war with China?

According to the same foreign policy blob that brought us such hits as “Saddam Hussein is going to nuke us with all his WMDs” and “Donald Trump is totally getting blackmailed by Vladimir Putin over a magical sex tape,” America needs to prepare for war with Russia because Russia is allegedly massing troops on…its own border with Ukraine.

America’s porous border with Mexico, across which hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have been flooding unimpeded since the day President Joe Biden took office, is apparently no big deal at all and not remotely worthy of an American military presence. But Ukraine’s border with Russia? To the failed foreign policy blob, that is priority numero uno.

The Russia-Ukraine border must be defended, with American blood and treasure, at all costs. And if you suggest that maybe America should fix America’s border first, it’s because you’re racist or something.

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To Deny the “Lab Leak” COVID Theory, the NYT and WPost Use Dubious and Conflicted Sources

That COVID-19 infected humanity due to a zoonotic leap from a “wet market” in Wuhan — rather than a leak from a lab in the same Chinese city — was declared unquestionable truth at the start of the pandemic. For a full year, anyone dissenting from this narrative was deemed so irresponsible that they were banned from large social media platforms, accused of spreading “disinformation.” No debate about COVID’s origins was permitted. It had been settled by The Science™. Every rational person who believed in science, by definition, immediately accepted at the start of the pandemic that COVID made a natural leap from bats or pangolins; that it may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan which just so happens to gather, study and manipulate novel coronaviruses in bats was officially declared a deranged conspiracy theory.

The reason this consensus was so quickly consecrated was that a group of more than two dozen scientists published a letter in the prestigious science journal Lancet in February, 2020 — while very little was known about SARS-CoV-2 — didactically declaring “that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” The possibility that COVID leaked from the Wuhan lab was dismissed as a “conspiracy theory,” the by-product of “rumours and misinformation” which, they strongly implied, was an unfair and possibly racist attack on “the science and health professionals of China.”

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China moon rover to investigate cube-shaped ‘mystery house’ object

The Yutu-2 rover is on a roll. It’s been exploring the far side of the moon since early 2019, as part of China’s Chang’e-4 lunar lander mission. It now has its eyes set on a strange-looking cube-shaped object it spotted in the distance.  

Andrew Jones, a journalist who covers the Chinese space program for SpaceNews and Space.com, highlighted a new rover update in a series of tweets Friday. The nickname for the cube-shaped object translates to “mystery house.” 

The rover team is planning to drive over and get a closer look at the object.

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Biden administration purchased surveillance technology from CCP-linked firm, which is banned from doing business with the government

According to recent reports, different federal agencies of Joe Biden’s U.S. government have made technology purchases from a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is on the list of companies from which the government has been banned from making purchases since the 2019 Defense Spending legislation was implemented during the Trump era.

Despite the federal ban, Fox News reported, U.S. government agencies have reportedly purchased surveillance technology from the firm Lorex, a subsidiary of controversial Chinese firm Dahua Technology.

Dahua Technology is one of several Chinese-based companies that were included on the list of firms banned from marketing technology to the U.S. government under the 2019 defense spending bill, citing fears that the Chinese regime could use the devices to conduct espionage.

The Dahua firm was additionally placed on a federal list of companies that have trade restrictions because the company is linked to the Chinese government’s efforts to suppress the Uighur population in China’s Xinjiang region.

As records released by Fox News show, federal agencies spent thousands of dollars on Lorex video surveillance equipment, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, which purchased Lorex hard drives in May through a Washington, DC technology supplier.

Records also show that the Department of the Army and the Defense Department’s Defense Finance and Accounting Service also purchased Lorex equipment. 

The news broke a day after Senate Democrats, in a last-minute intervention, excluded a bill banning the importation of goods made by millions of people detained in concentration camps by the Chinese Communist regime.

According to a memo from Senate leaders, the bill, which was being promoted as the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, was excluded from the annual defense appropriations bill, the Washington Free Beacon reported Dec. 2. 

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Disney censors The Simpsons episode with Tiananmen Square reference in Hong Kong

Disney+ has censored an episode of The Simpsons in Hong Kong, where the streaming service recently launched. The episode was censored over references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Until June last year, Hong Kong operated separately from China. Hong Kongers enjoyed more freedoms than the mainland.

However, since Beijing enforced the national security law in Hong Kong, the censorship laws enforced in China started applying on the island. 

On social media, Disney+ subscribers began reporting that an episode in Season 16 had been removed in Hong Kong. 

We’ve managed to confirm that the Season 16 episode “Goo Goo Gai Pan” has been removed in Hong Kong.

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China and India set to receive £1.5billion climate aid windfall – despite scuppering COP26 coal pledges

China and India are set to receive a £1.5 billion climate aid windfall despite scuppering a COP26 deal on reducing reliance on coal power.

Richer countries agreed to double funding for developing nations to prepare for global warming at the Glasgow conference earlier this month.

Despite having two of the fastest growing economies in the world, the UN designates China and India as ‘developing states’.

Analysis shows that the two countries received a total of about £700 million from developed countries in 2019, the latest figures available, as well as millions more from investment foundations and private donors.

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Who Nu?

They’re now trying to shut down everything again and make the world safe again for private jet-flying elites to escape from voters. This time they claim there’s a super-spreading, super-scary new variant of the Wuhan (pardon me, COVID-19) virus from Africa. As far as I’m able to discover there is no test for it, it has actually been around since July and it doesn’t seem particularly fatal. So far it has produced only mild cases. But the taste of totalitarian control has only whetted the desire for more, with the thought of destroying those “deplorable” productive citizens of the middle class as an added bonus.

How it got its name (Omicron) is another sign of the political nature of the thing.

Paul Nuki, the senior editor for Global Health Security and Campaigns at the UK Telegraph tweets the answer:

A WHO source confirmed the letters Nu and Xi of the Greek alphabet had been deliberately avoided. Nu had been skipped to avoid confusion with the word “new” and Xi [the name of the Chinese Communist boss] had been slipped to avoid stigmatising a region,” they said .

The NY Sun’s editors had fun with that excuse:  

As for Xi, the World Health Organization explains the omission as a move meant to avoid offending a whole “region.” That, to the uninitiated, implies that it feels an entire region would feel slighted were a virus given the same name as the surname of the Communist Chinese party boss, Xi Jinping. On that the sardonic Leo Rosten would probably mutter nu nu — as in “oh, come on.”

In the meantime, President Biden has sharply restricted travel to the U.S. from Africa which reminded people of how he accused President Trump of racism when he restricted travel from China and later from Africa to limit the Wuhan virus’s spread here.

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America last: Biden is selling 1/3 of oil reserves he’s releasing to China and India

The Biden administration is releasing 50 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gas prices.

Because, they say, we cannot be vulnerable to volatile energy supplies.

There’s more to the story.

First, not all of those barrels are going to U.S. consumers. A total of 18 million are expected to be sold to China and India, according to Fox Business.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm indicated Tuesday that the congressionally-approved sale of those 18 million barrels will help drive down U.S. oil prices, presumably by offsetting international oil shortages.

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What Elephant? The Media Again Buries A Hunter Biden Scandal on Foreign Deals During the Biden Vice Presidency

I previously wrote a column on the one year anniversary of the Hunter Biden laptop story that marveled at the success of the Biden family in making the scandal vanish before that 2020 election. It was analogized to Houdini making his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear in his act. The Biden trick however occurred live before an audience of millions. Now, in an encore, a new major story on Biden’s Chinese dealings has surfaced. Once again, poof!

The media has made the story disappear except for a couple of the usual outlets. Even with the New York Times reporting on the story, the disclosure of Biden’s role in securing one of the world’s largest cobalt mines for China (a key component to electric battery production) has been ignored by the major networks and many other print outlets. Once again, ABC. NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other media just cannot see the elephant.

What is most amazing about this continuing trick is that the story has all of the elements that the media longed to confirm during the Trump Administration on the financial dealings of the Trump children. The son of the President was involved in a successful effort to handover a strategically vital natural resource to the Chinese that would guarantee their dominance in one of the most important new industries of the “Green economy.” This occurred during a period when Hunter Biden and his uncle were accused of running a global influence peddling operation with foreign powers that cashed in on the Vice Presidency of Joe Biden. Then there is the fact that the story appears to contradict denials of continuing ownership in such foreign interests by the Bidens.

Finally, there is the fact that this windfall from the Chinese occurred in a field that Hunter Biden knew nothing about (much like his work on the board of the Ukrainian natural gas firm Burisma) and he was, by his own description, a hopeless addict. In his recent book, Hunter admits that he was a crack addict and alcoholic all the way up to the start of his father’s presidential campaign — in his words, “Drinking a quart of vodka a day by yourself in a room is absolutely, completely debilitating,” as well as “smoking crack around the clock.”

This elephant is truly difficult to unsee.

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