Tag: china

China could claim the moon as its own territory and BAN US astronauts from touching down, NASA boss warns – as the two countries battle in new space race to land on the lunar surface again

A chief at NASA is raising red flags over China’s ambitions to get to the moon. 

In a new interview, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says he and others within the scientific agency are growing increasingly concerned over what the country plans to do when they make it to the moon. 

Nelson believes China could attempt to corner the market on resource-rich locations on the moon’s surface and try to block out the U.S. and other countries looking to make it to the lunar object.

‘There is potentially mischief China can do on the moon,’ said one other official monitoring the ‘space race.’ 

The concerns come less than one month after three Chinese astronauts returned from a six month trip in which they helped to build and open a new space station. 

In an interview with Politico, Nelson said he and others are concerned the Communist nation will attempt to claim territory over the moon upon their arrival.

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‘Mind Dominance’: The CCP’s Disinformation War on US Social Media

Clusters of new social media profiles emerge and interact with long-dormant accounts, seemingly exchanging viewpoints from across the American political spectrum.

Some sport American flags for profile pictures; others have images of beautiful women. Almost all are anonymous, though some impersonate real people.

In tweets and posts and messages they spread their views. Some stridently defend a woman’s right to have an abortion, others the right to life. Some defend the second amendment, others vehemently champion Black Lives Matter. Some claim that the United States is descending into a leftist tyranny. Still more say it’s headed toward fascism.

Above all, they post memes disparaging the United States’ political parties and governmental institutions. Here one finds a meme of President Joe Biden with a caption excoriating the Build Back Better slogan. Here one finds a meme of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) insinuating that the lawmaker has financial ties with Putin’s Russia.

It would be easy to conclude that these clusters of accounts are a perfect representation of the political polarization that has seized the United States in recent years. But it would be wrong.

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TikTok’s algorithm promotes posts about eating disorders and suicide, report finds

TikTok’s algorithms are promoting videos about self-harm and eating disorders to vulnerable teens, according to a report published Wednesday that highlights concerns about social media and its impact on youth mental health.

Researchers at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate created TikTok accounts for fictional teen personas in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The researchers operating the accounts then “liked” videos about self-harm and eating disorders to see how TikTok’s algorithm would respond.

Within minutes, the wildly popular platform was recommending videos about losing weight and self-harm, including ones featuring pictures of models and idealized body types, images of razor blades and discussions of suicide.

When the researchers created accounts with user names that suggested a particular vulnerability to eating disorders — names that included the words “lose weight” for example — the accounts were fed even more harmful content.

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Chinese Cybercriminal Hacker Group Stole $20 Million In COVID Relief Funds, Secret Service Says

U.S. Secret Service officials confirmed an exclusive report Monday alleging prolific cybercriminal hackers tied to the Chinese Communist Party have stolen nearly $20 million worth of COVID pandemic relief benefits.

Secret Service officials did not comment further upon corroborating the NBC News report. However, U.S. law enforcement officials and cybersecurity experts, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the pandemic fraud instance is the first publicly acknowledged example of theft linked to foreign and state-sponsored cybercriminals.

Officials said the hacker group in question is APT41, which they described as a “Chinese state-sponsored, cyber threat group that is highly adept at conducting espionage missions and financial crimes for personal gain” that operates out of the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu.

APT41 — also known as Winnti, Barium, and Wicked Panda — allegedly began stealing COVID relief money in mid-2020 from approximately 2,000 accounts associated with more than 40,000 financial transactions, including Small Business Administration loans and unemployment insurance funds in more than at least a dozen states.

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Scientist who worked at Wuhan lab says COVID was man-made virus

A scientist who worked at a controversial research lab in China has claimed that COVID was a man-made virus that leaked from the facility, according to a report.

Andrew Huff said COVID leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China two years ago and blamed authorities for the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11,” Britain’s The Sun reported Saturday.

The lab has been at the center of fierce debates about the origins of COVID, with both Chinese government officials and lab personnel denying that the virus leaked from the facility.

Huff, an epidemiologist said in his new book, The Truth About Wuhan, that the pandemic was the result of the US government’s funding of coronaviruses in China.

He said that China’s gain-of-function experiments, which were carried out with lax security, led to a lab leak at the Wuhan lab.

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BBC journalist was beaten up and arrested ‘for his own good to stop him catching Covid’ while covering protests that have rocked China, local cops claim: Reporter is seen screaming for help after locals tried to stop police attacking him

A BBC journalist covering historic protests against President Xi Jinping‘s lockdown rules in China was arrested and beaten by police officers, with Chinese officials later making the bizarre claim that he was detained for his ‘own good’ in case he caught Covid from the crowd.

Shocking footage from the anti-government protests in Shanghai shows Edward Lawrence, a camera operator for the BBC’s China Bureau, being dragged away by Xi’s officers as he screams ‘call the consulate now’ to a friend.

Mr Lawrence was beaten and kicked by the police officers and held in custody for ‘several hours’ before being released, as Chinese officials sought to crack down on the media and protesters in the city.

The British journalist said today that at least one local was arrested after they tried to stop the police from beating him during his arrest.

Shanghai police officers tried to dismiss the arrest as being for Mr Lawrence’s ‘own good’, claiming that he was arrested ‘in case he caught Covid from the crowd’. The BBC dismissed the farfetched explanation as implausible.

The UK’s Business Secretary Grant Shapps today denounced the officers’ actions as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘concerning’. He told LBC radio: ‘Whatever else happens, freedom of the press should be sacrosanct.’ 

Dr Alan Mendoza, executive director of the human rights group the Henry Jackson Society in London, told the Mail: ‘This latest outrage shows the true face of the Chinese Communist Party’s regime in attacking all the values the West hold dear. 

‘Media freedom is essential to our system and the Chinese crackdown against it needs the strongest of refutations from the UK Prime Minister. This is no time for him to go wobbly.’ 

China is facing its largest anti-government demonstrations since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, with protests erupting in at least seven cities over the country’s strict zero-Covid rules. 

The catalyst for the protests was an apartment fire last week in the western city of Urumqi in which ten people died. Many speculated that Covid curbs in the city, parts of which had been under lockdown for 100 days, had hindered rescue and escape, which city officials denied. 

The largest of the demonstrations has taken place in Shanghai – home to 26million residents – with many also boldly demanding that President Xi resign. 

China’s foreign ministry today insisted the government’s ‘fight against Covid-19 will be successful’.

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Apple turned off a private communication tool in China just before major protests broke out

Earlier this month, Apple restricted the use of AirDrop in China. The file-sharing tool for iOS was used by protesters to communicate freely without the risk of censorship, because the tool uses direct connections between devices, creating a local network that cannot be monitored by government internet regulators.

Initially, people could choose to receive AirDrops from everyone nearby. However, a recent iOS update has made that impossible. The update made a change to AirDrop’s usage that only applies in mainland China, while the rest of the world can still use it to communicate as before.

Users in China can only receive from everyone nearby for only ten minutes, putting restrictions on how it’s used.

AirDrop has been used by protesters in Hong Kong to communicate with other protesters and bystanders, as well as send messages to tourists from mainland China. On the mainland, protesters have used AirDrop to spread protest literature.

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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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