Tag: china

Chinese Hack of Microsoft Engineer Opened Door to US Government Email Breach

The recently uncovered Chinese hack of hundreds of thousands of emails from top U.S. officials began with the breach of a Microsoft engineer’s account, the company stated on Sept. 6.

The Chinese hacking group, which Microsoft dubbed Storm-0558, penetrated the engineer’s account, giving it access to a cryptographic key that the group later used to break into the U.S. government accounts, Microsoft said in a blog post after a months-long investigation.

The revelation offered details on a Chinese state-sponsored cyberattack that alarmed Washington, which spanned 25 organizations and affected the State and Commerce departments, as well as at least one lawmaker and a Washington think tank.

Among the individuals whose email systems were breached were Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Daniel Kritenbrink. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said in August that he was also a victim of the hacking campaign.

Microsoft stated that the Chinese hackers had likely exploited the crash of the company’s internal system in April 2021 that leaked the key, which the engineer’s corporate account had access to. The hacker group subsequently forged credentials to compromise Microsoft’s Outlook on the web and Outlook systems. The tech giant stated that it has corrected the technical vulnerabilities.

The hacking attempt surfaced at a sensitive time. The investigation began the same day that Secretary of State Antony Blinken headed to China to engage with senior Chinese officials, the highest-ranking official under the Biden administration to do so. CNN, citing two unnamed U.S. officials, reported in July that the Biden administration believes that the hacking operation had given Beijing clues about U.S. thinking ahead of the U.S. visit.

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US OKs First-Ever Foreign Military Financing Arms Package for Taiwan

The Biden administration has approved the first-ever military aid package for Taiwan using Foreign Military Financing (FMF), a State Department program that gives foreign governments money to buy US arms.

The Associated Press noted that FMF is typically reserved for sovereign, independent states, and the US does not recognize Taiwan as a country. US officials told AP that the only other time FMF has been used for a non-nation-state was assistance to the African Union, a bloc of 55 African states.

The FMF package is worth $80 million, but the administration did not disclose its contents in a notification to Congress. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act included $2 billion in FMF funds for Taiwan. This marks the first time the funds have been used.

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Vivek Ramaswamy partnered with the Chinese government to advance ‘Chinese biopharmaceutical research abroad,’ but changed tune when much-hyped endeavors went belly up

Since announcing his candidacy for President of the United States, Vivek Ramaswamy has branded himself as a fierce China hawk, going as far as to declare that he would ban American companies from doing business with the Chinese government.

But not so long ago, Mr Ramaswamy was singing a very different tune.

The career biopharma boss has made a hasty 180 degree turn away from his pro-China advocacy and corporate fundraising in recent years.

The Dossier reviewed Vivek Ramaswamy’s business ties in China and found that he aggressively sought to partner with the Chinese government on multiple endeavors throughout the country.

It began in 2017. As the CEO and founder of the biotech company Roivant, Ramaswamy partnered with the CIVIC Group, the state-run investment company of the Chinese government, to form a corporation called Sinovant, which would serve as Roivant’s Chinese (Sino means Chinese or relating to China) “vant” arm.

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Biden Wanted To Partner With Communist Chinese App To Spy On Americans

A Forbes report has revealed that the Biden Administration attempted to forge a contractual agreement with TikTok that would have allowed the government to control features of the Chinese app to spy on Americans.

Forbes managed to get hold of a draft of the contract between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) that would have essentially allowed multiple US agencies to access the app’s records and operations in exchange for allowing it to continue operating in the U.S.

The report notes that the draft agreement dating from mid 2022 would have given the Department of Justice and Department of Defense direct access to TikTok users’ activities, allowing for searches of TikTok’s US headquarters, files, and servers without providing any notice.

The U.S. government would have basically been using the exact same methods via TikTok that the Communist Party in China uses to monitor its citizens.

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The Real Risks of Doing Business in China

This June in London, I hosted the first two foreigners to have served time in China’s prisons and gone public about it. There may well be at least 5 million prisoners in China (excluding those in the prison camps of Xinjiang and Tibet), according to former foreign correspondent turned due diligence investigator Peter Humphrey, many of them there for trivial or indeed political reasons, and at least 5,000 are foreigners. As the Biden administration continues a series of visits to Beijing, seeking a diplomatic reconciliation that the Chinese leadership seems to have little interest in, foreign officials should keep the plight of Chinese prisoners in mind.

Humphrey, together with Romanian theologian and teacher Marius Balo, came to London to testify in the British Parliament on forced labor, denial of health care, psychological torture, and mistreatment. Humphrey, who spent 48 years working on China, served two years in China’s prisons on trumped-up charges of “illegally acquiring personal information” of Chinese nationals—as a result of his work as a corporate due diligence investigator—and was denied medical treatment for prostate cancer.

As a result, his cancer was exacerbated, and he fought a life-and-death struggle with the illness for five years after his release. Balo, who served eight years in China’s prisons on false charges of complicity to contract fraud and was released last year, watched at least two fellow foreign prisoners die due to denial of medical care. “The Chinese prison system weaponizes prisoners’ health as an instrument to extort confessions, refusing to provide medical attention to prisoners who refuse to admit guilt,” Humphrey explained.

As the United States seeks to reset its relationship with China, and other democracies wrestle with how to address the challenges posed by Beijing, they must not forget China’s prisoners. Often we think of prisoners of conscience—dissidents, religious practitioners and the millions of Uyghurs and Tibetans in China’s gulags—but Humphrey and Balo are reminding the world that ordinary prisoners detained for alleged crimes are also victims of human rights abuse in China. “In their aggregate,” Humphrey said, “the harsh conditions in China’s pre-trial detention facilities and prisons add up to torture.”

There is simply no access to justice, for a start. “Among the millions of prisoners in the system, not a single prisoner has had a fair and transparent trial. Not a single one,” Humphrey said. “Sentences tend to be reckless, inconsistent, and disproportionate to any offense. So the entire system is arbitrary and subject to the whims of Communist Party officials. The system works in favor of anybody with connections to use the law to bash people they dislike.” Balo agrees. “Justice in China is always based on someone’s whims, the party’s whims, expressed through its foot soldiers,” he said.

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CHINESE MILITARY SAYS IT’S FIGURED OUT HOW TO BUILD LASER WEAPONS THAT CAN FIRE INDEFINITELY

The Chinese military has announced what could be a major breakthrough in energy weapon tech — if it holds up.

As the South China Morning Post reports, representatives from the country’s National University of Defence Technology say they’ve developed a state-of-the-art cooling system that would allow high-energy lasers to remain powered up “infinitely” without getting too hot.

While laser technology has existed for decades, these high-energy beams generate so much excess heat that they often go haywire, hampering previous attempts at similar weapon systems around the world.

The new Chinese cooling system, according to the report, would use gas that blows through the weapon to remove excess heat and allow for weapons to shoot precise laser beams for an indefinite amount of time without losing power or getting distorted.

“High-quality beams can be produced not only in the first second, but also maintained indefinitely,” the team wrote in a new paper on the purported cooling tech, published in the Chinese-language journal Acta Optica Sinica.

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‘He Was Alive’: Tormented Chinese Doctor Recounts Harvesting Organs In Back Of Van

Stepping into the van guarded by armed soldiers with five surgeons and nurses, Zheng Zhi didn’t know he was entering into a world that would haunt him for the next quarter of a century.

Dr. Zheng, then a resident doctor at one of China’s largest military hospitals, knew little more than they were on a “secret military mission” near a military prison located around the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian.

A light blue fabric covered the four sides of the vehicle, shielding it from any curious glances.

When the door opened, four burly soldiers carried in a man whose limbs were bound with thin ropes that had cut deeply into his flesh. The man was no more than 18 years old; his organs, the surgical crew had been told the day before, were “healthy, fresh.”

A doctor instructed Dr. Zheng to “step on” the man’s legs and “don’t let him move.” He pressed the man’s legs down with his hands and to his shock, they were warm to the touch. Blood was now flowing from the man’s throat.

He watched a doctor slice open the man’s stomach and two others reach in to remove a kidney each. The man’s legs twitched and his throat moved—although no sound came out.

“Cut his artery and veins, quick!” a doctor told Dr. Zheng. As he did so, so much blood gushed out that it splashed all over Dr. Zheng’s gown and gloves. That was when he got the order to extract the man’s eyes.

Dr. Zheng looked at the man’s face. Staring back at him was a pair of wide-open eyes.

“It was horrifying beyond words. He was looking right at me. His eyelids were moving. He was alive,” Dr. Zheng recounted to The Epoch Times in July, the first time he agreed to use his real name to recount his story.

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Chinese-run biolab in California that was experimenting on deadly viruses was awarded over $500,000 in US TAXPAYER cash

A Chinese-backed biolab in California was awarded over half a million dollars in US taxpayer cash, records show.

The black market lab – which was raided earlier this year – was found to be making illegal Covid and pregnancy tests and storing disease-riddled mice and hundreds of samples of pathogens, blood, and other dubious chemicals.

Public records show that the company linked to the lab received nearly $150,000 from the US government under a Covid-era loan program, receiving two separate loans of $74,912 in April 2020 and February 2021.

Universal Meditech was also awarded a massive $360,000 tax credit in 2018 through California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s CalCompetes program – though UMI’s inability to meet program guidelines meant it never actually received those funds.

The company – which was based in Fresno, California, went bust in 2022 and was taken over by its main creditor, a company with Chinese owners who moved the operation into an unassuming warehouse in the sleepy town of Reedley.

UMI had been operating legally prior to its closure, with its Fresno facility properly licensed and permitted from the state to produce pregnancy, ovulation, and menopause diagnostic tests. 

While it had received the federal money as a legal company, a subsequent move by regulators to put

In December 2022, the Food and Drug Administration, which must issue pre-market approval for diagnostic tests, recalled approximately 56,000 of UMI’s Covid tests in California and Texas, citing the company’s lack of pre-market approval from the agency.

The recall did not mention the pregnancy tests.

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Illegal Chinese Bio-Lab Discovered in Fresno, California Was Subsidized by Gavin Newsom

The secret and illegal Chinese bio-lab that was recently discovered in Fresno, California, which was allegedly full of mice that were engineered to carry COVID-19, was subsidized by Governor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom is in the news constantly these days because he is basically the back-up plan for Democrats in 2024 if Biden can’t run. Do you think anyone in media will ask him about this?

Don’t count on it.

The California Globe reported:

Reedley Chinese COVID Lab Received Tax Credit of $360,000 From Gov. Newsom’s ‘GO-Biz’

At the epicenter of current controversy, an illegal California lab run by a Chinese biotech firm, Prestige Biotech, was recently discovered in a warehouse in Reedley, California. The lab contained mice which were genetically engineered to spread COVID-19.

According to National Review, “court documents further showed that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) conducted tests on the more than 800 chemicals found at the site and that over 20 infectious agents were found present, including Hepatitis B and C, streptococcus pneumonia, chlamydia, rubella, and Herpes 1 and 5.” As a federal investigation is underway, where will the money trail lead us?…

A document released on March 24, 2019 by Governor Newsom’s Office of Business and Economic Development, a California Competes tax credit allocation agreement of $360,000 was cemented with UMI.

This seems kind of newsworthy, doesn’t it?

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‘Four Pinocchios’: The Washington Post Admits Biden Has Been Lying About Hunter Not Accepting Money From China

President Joe Biden has been a regular recipient of “Pinocchios” by the Washington Post for his false statements on subjects ranging from election laws to abortion protections to deficit reduction. 

Biden is undeterred and regularly repeats false stories from his life that have ranged from an invented arrest with Nelson Mandela to a zombie-like train conductor. Undeterred, this week he continued with the false claim about the “Joey, Baby” conductor.

Now, the President has a fresh set of “Four Pinocchios,” but the false claim is far more serious than inventing a conductor or rewriting the history of the Second Amendment. 

The Post is admitting that Biden has been lying about how his son Hunter never made money from China. It is the latest indication that the protective media wall surrounding Biden is beginning to crumble under the weight of new evidence in the corruption scandal.

Glenn Kessler wrote yesterday that Biden has repeatedly and categorically maintained that his son did not receive money from China.

“But now, nearly three years later, Biden’s assertions have been directly rebutted by Hunter himself. In court testimony last week, the younger Biden acknowledged that he in fact had been paid substantial sums in China — the first official confirmation that this was the case.”

What is curious is that Kessler and the Post waited for Hunter to effectively confess rather than take notice of money transfers and records released by House committees investigating the corruption scandal. The Post and most of the media have taken little observable journalistic interest in independently confirming such payments or benefits. Instead, the media has adopted a largely passive stance and waited for confessions rather than find confirmation.

Nevertheless, as with the laptop, there is some credit to be given for eventually confirming what has long been known.

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