Tag: china

Amazon deleted reviews of Chinese president’s book on government’s orders

Didn’t like Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book? Keep your mouth shut.

That’s what China told Amazon, according to a new report, when the country pushed the bookseller to delete all comments and reviews related to “The Governance of China,” a compendium of Xi’s speeches and writings.

Amazon complied. It’s another example of a US company bending to Chinese pressure in order to keep doing business in the huge and growing economy.

The government edict was delivered two years ago, according to the Reuters report citing two people familiar with the matter, but had never before been disclosed.

Now, on Amazon sites accessed within China, there are no reviews or star ratings for the book.

The censorship demand was made after some reviewers gave the leader’s tome less-than-stellar marks, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

It was a negative review that prompted the wholesale ban on reviews and ratings on the book, according to a source. The ban was for the book’s Amazon listing in China.

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Nike execs gave $60,000 to Democrat who blocked anti-slave labor bill

Several top Nike executives funneled more than $60,000 to the re-election campaign of Democratic Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden over the course of just 16 days in September.

On Wednesday evening, Wyden blocked the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act which the House passed unanimously Tuesday and the Senate was expected to overwhelmingly approve. President Joe Biden vowed to sign the bill once passed by both chambers and work with Congress to “ensure global supply chains are free of forced labor,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.

Nike, a major benefactor of Wyden, was one of several corporations to lobby against the bill, The New York Times previously reported. A March 2020 report from the bipartisan Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) concluded that the Oregon-based athletic apparel giant was one of several corporations suspected to either directly employ forced labor or source materials from suppliers using forced labor in Xinjiang.

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When Your Government Ends A War But Increases The Military Budget, You’re Being Scammed

The US Senate has passed its National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) military spending bill for the fiscal year of 2022, setting the budget at an astronomical $778 billion by a vote of 89 to 10. The bill has already been passed by the House, now requiring only the president’s signature. An amendment to cease facilitating Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in Yemen was stripped from the bill.

“The most controversial parts of the 2,100-page military spending bill were negotiated behind closed doors and passed the House mere hours after it was made public, meaning members of Congress couldn’t possibly have read the whole thing before casting their votes,” reads a Politico article on the bill’s passage by Lindsay Koshgarian, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis.

The US military had a budget of $14 billion for its scaled-down Afghanistan operations in the fiscal year of 2021, down from $17 billion in 2020. If the US military budget behaved normally, you’d expect it to come down by at least $14 billion in 2022 following the withdrawal of US troops and official end of the war in Afghanistan. Instead, this new $778 billion total budget is a five percent increase from the previous year.

“Months after US President Joe Biden’s administration pulled the last American troops out of Afghanistan as part of his promise to end the country’s ‘forever wars’, the United States Congress approved a $777.7bn defence budget, a five percent increase from last year,” Al Jazeera reports.

“For the last 20 years, we heard that the terrorist threat justified an ever-expanding budget for the Pentagon,” Win Without War executive director Stephen Miles told Al Jazeera. “As the war in Afghanistan has ended and attention has shifted towards China, we’re now hearing that that threat justifies it.”

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U.S. blacklists 34 Chinese entities, citing human rights abuses and ‘brain-control weaponry’

The Biden administration said Thursday it imposed trade restrictions on more than 30 Chinese research institutes and entities over human rights violations and the alleged development of technologies, such as brain-control weapons, that undermine U.S. national security.

The Commerce Department accused China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 of its research institutes of using biotechnology “to support Chinese military end uses and end users, to include purported brain-control weaponry,” according to a notice in the Federal Register.

The notice does not elaborate further on the alleged brain-control weaponry.

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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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