Report: North Korea Laundering Money Through U.S. Banks to Evade Sanctions

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North Korea has laundered money through US banks in an elaborate, years-long plot to evade international sanctions, according to a new report citing a leak of confidential documents from leading financial institutions.

The documents revealed that North Korea-linked organizations allegedly transferred more than $174.8 million illegally using shell companies and assistance from Chinese companies through US banks, including JPMorgan Chase and the Bank of New York Mellon, NBC News reported.

During that period, Washington had ramped up its sanctions against the Hermit Kingdom as Pyongyang pursued its nuclear and missile programs with vigor, according to the network.

Wire transfers from companies with shady ownership were made only days or hours apart in some instances, with amounts in round numbers and with no clear commercial reasons, according to the documents cited by NBC News. . .

Eric Lorber, a former Treasury Department official who worked on sanctions against the rogue regime during the Trump administration, told NBC News that “taken as a whole, you have what really, frankly, looks like a concerted attack by the North Koreans to access the US financial system over an extended period of time through multiple different avenues in ways that were fairly sophisticated.” (Read more from “Report: North Korea Laundering Money Through U.S. Banks to Evade Sanctions” HERE)

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Report: China Harvesting Data of Prominent Americans, Military for Intelligence

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By Breitbart. A recent report from the Washington Post claims that a Chinese data firm has been collecting the “digital crumbs” of data of prominent Americans and military members for some time. The company gathered data on 2 million people including 50,000 Americans with the “stated purpose of providing intelligence to Chinese military, government and commercial clients.”

The Washington Post reports that a Chinese company named Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology has been collecting the private information of prominent American citizens and military figures for the purpose of providing intelligence to the Chines military. This was discovered by an Australian cybersecurity consultancy firm that found a copy of the Chinese database left unsecured on the internet. The data appears to combine many sources together into one complete record on each individual, which the database claims will be used to provide “intelligence to Chinese military, government and commercial clients.” (Read more from “Report: China Harvesting Data of Prominent Americans, Military for Intelligence” HERE)

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Chinese Firm Harvests Social Media Posts, Data of Prominent Americans and Military

By The Washington Post. Biographies and service records of aircraft carrier captains and up-and-coming officers in the U.S. Navy. Real-time tweets originating from overseas U.S. military installations. Profiles and family maps of foreign leaders, including their relatives and children. Records of social media chatter among China watchers in Washington.

Those digital crumbs, along with millions of other scraps of social media and online data, have been systematically collected since 2017 by a small Chinese company called Shenzhen Zhenhua Data Technology for the stated purpose of providing intelligence to Chinese military, government and commercial clients, according to a copy of the database that was left unsecured on the Internet and retrieved by an Australian cybersecurity consultancy.

The cache, called the Overseas Key Information Database, or OKIDB, purports to offer insights into foreign political, military and business figures, details about countries’ infrastructure and military deployments, and public opinion analysis. The database contains information on more than 2 million people, including at least 50,000 Americans and tens of thousands of people who hold prominent public positions, according to Zhenhua’s marketing documents and a review of a portion of the database. (Read more from “Chinese Firm Harvests Social Media Posts, Data of Prominent Americans and Military” HERE)

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Israel Imposes Second Nationwide COVID Lockdown

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Israel is poised to enter another nationwide lockdown that would shutter schools, restaurants, markets, and more for two weeks, making it the first developed nation to shut down for a second time.

Cabinet ministers approved the second lockdown late Thursday, and it will be up for final approval Sunday with a full Cabinet vote. It would last for two full weeks, followed by two more weeks of stringent economic and social restrictions starting Sept. 18, Bloomberg reported Friday.

Israel successfully got the coronavirus under control in the spring and lifted the national lockdown in May. (Read more from “Israel Imposes Second Nationwide COVID Lockdown” HERE)

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Report: China Jails Christian Teenager for Practicing Banned Religion

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Police in southwestern China this summer sentenced a Christian teenager to three years in prison for practicing her faith, human rights magazine Bitter Winter revealed on Tuesday.

In Yunnan province, which borders Vietnam, the People’s Court of Jianshui county sentenced 19-year-old Jiang Guangmei to three years in prison on June 29.

“She was charged with ‘using a xie jiao [cult] organization to undermine law enforcement’ and also fined 3,000 RMB (about $430),’” according to the magazine. Police first arrested Jiang in September 2018 when she was 17 for writing articles about her religious experience as a member of the Church of Almighty God (CAG).

“[A]ccording to the [CAG’s] official history, the denomination whose Chinese name translates as ‘Eastern Lightning’ was founded in the belief that Christ is born again and back on Earth in the guise of a mysterious leader of the faith — a woman who may now be living in the New York metropolitan area,” the Daily Beast wrote of CAG in February. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has branded CAG a cult, or xie jiao in Mandarin, and banned the church in China.

Jiang’s crime of “writing articles about her religious experience” in CAG is an action targeted by the CCP as “a common pretext to jail members of China’s banned religious groups,” according to the report. According to Jiang’s verdict, she received her three-year prison sentence because she would not admit that practicing her faith was a crime. (Read more from “Report: China Jails Christian Teenager for Practicing Banned Religion” HERE)

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Hunter Biden’s Chinese Firm Helped Buy Out American Company to Create Jobs Overseas

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Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden delivered a speech in Macomb County, Michigan, on Wednesday, slamming the practice of outsourcing. Unmentioned was his son Hunter’s ties to a Chinese government acquisition of a Michigan company that is delivering jobs to China, Mexico, Europe, and South America. . .

Biden’s pitch, though, is muffled by his son Hunter’s ties to the Chinese government.

First detailed in Peter Schweizer’s, president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior contributor at Breitbart News, 2018 New York Times bestseller Secret Empires, Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), a private equity firm he founded that was funded with $1.5 billion from the Chinese government via the Bank of China.

The dealings of BHR, from which Hunter Biden stepped down in October 2019, were most recently noted in Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption.

Specifically, Hunter Biden sat on the board of BHR while the firm jointly acquired Michigan-based Henniges Automotive with the Chinese government-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) for $600 million. . .

While the deal was finalized and afterward, executives at Henniges announced manufacturing expansions in China, Mexico, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and South America. (Read more from “Hunter Biden’s Chinese Firm Helped Buy Out American Company to Create Jobs Overseas” HERE)

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Country That Refused to Lockdown Now Among World’s Safest From Virus

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After widespread criticism for its decision not to implement comprehensive lockdowns or mask requirements, Sweden now has one of the lowest coronavirus infection rates in the world.

“Sweden has gone from being the country with the most infections in Europe to the safest one,” said the country’s senior epidemiologist, Dr. Anders Tegnell, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, the Gateway Pundit reported.

“What we see now is that the sustainable policy might be slower in getting results, but it will get results eventually,” Tegnell said. “And then we also hope that the result will be more stable.”

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control last week said Sweden’s infection rate is about 12 cases per million, compared to 18 in Denmark and 14 in Norway.

Of 2,500 randomly selected and tested Swedes, zero tested positive, compared to 0.9% positive in April and 0.3% in May, the center said. (Read more from “Country That Refused to Lockdown Now Among World’s Safest From Virus” HERE)

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Serious Problem Identified: Chinese ‘Infection’ of U.S. Power Grid

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China and “probably one or two other” countries can shut down the U.S. power grid through a cyberattack. This disturbing revelation was made by Admiral Michael Rogers, former head of the National Security Agency, to Congress – in November 2014.

China has also become the world’s leading supplier of transformers – the “spine” of electricity grids — according to a 2014 U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) report. This also presents significant challenges to U.S. grid security.

For economic and security reasons, the United States should no longer purchase transformers and other electric grid equipment manufactured in China. It is important to end relationships that U.S. utilities have directly with Chinese businesses and multi-national companies manufacturing transformers in China.

These actions are envisioned under a May 1 Executive Order President Trump issued on protecting the bulk-power grid. Chinese power equipment provided to the U.S. can be embedded with software and hardware to remotely commit mischief from Beijing, enhancing its ability to commit cyberattacks. . .

Meanwhile, Chinese transformer manufacturers are thriving. On its website, JiangSu HuaPeng Transformer Co. (JSHP Transformer) boasts that it has recently completed projects for customers in Houston, Las Vegas, and New Jersey. On August 5, Baobian Electric shipped the first of three phase reactors to the New Mexico Public Utilities Service Company. (Read more from “Serious Problem Identified: Chinese ‘Infection’ of U.S. Power Grid” HERE)

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Disney Under Fire for Filming ‘Mulan’ in Chinese City With Concentration Camps

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Disney has drawn a backlash for its indifference to religious freedom and human rights, cozying up to the Chinese Communist Party and filming parts of its new live action blockbuster Mulan in a city that incarcerates Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities.

In March, 2016, Disney threatened to boycott the state of Georgia over a religious freedom bill that guaranteed faith-based organizations and individuals the right to abstain from activities violating their “sincerely held religious beliefs.” . . .

While Disney saw fit to punish Georgia for its zealous dedication to religious freedom, now the company has rewarded the Chinese Communist Party for its egregious violations of human rights and religious freedom.

Disney’s elected to film its live-action remake of Mulan in China’s Xinjiang province, the very site of China’s documented widespread human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. China has interned at least one million Muslims in Xinjiang extrajudicial concentration camps and officials have reportedly subjected Uyghur women to hard labor and torture as well as forced sterilizations and abortions.

In the final credits of the film, Disney offers “special thanks” to eight government entities in Xinjiang, including the public security bureau in Turpan, a city in eastern Xinjiang where several re-education camps are located. (Read more from “Disney Under Fire for Filming ‘Mulan’ in Chinese City With Concentration Camps” HERE)

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Pentagon: Chinese Air Force Fast-Becoming MASSIVE Threat

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New attack drones, 5th-generation stealth fighter jets, reconfigured cargo planes and Russian-built air defenses are making China’s Air Force even deadlier. In fact, all of these advances present a great concern to U.S. war planners.

The size of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force is reported to include a total of 2,500 aircraft, making it the third-largest in the world, according to the Pentagon’s 2020 China Military Power report.

U.S. threat assessors are not merely concerned about the size of the Chinese Air Force but the increasing technical sophistication and multi-mission tactics with which it operates. For instance, as part of its discussion of Chinese airpower, the report notes that China operates highly advanced, Russian-built S-400 and S-500 air defenses.

These systems, among the best in the world, increasingly use networked digital processors, faster computer speeds and a wider range of frequencies to detect aircraft. Russian media reports have claimed that their air defenses can even track stealth aircraft, a claim that has yet to be formally verified.

Yet another concern with China’s air power is its fast-increasing attack range. The Chinese Y-20 cargo plane, for instance, is likely being configured into a tanker aircraft to nearly double the attack range of Chinese fighter jets. Technically speaking, while the U.S. Air Force’s KC-46 tanker is certainly different from its C-130s, it would not be at all technically difficult to convert a large Y-20 into a tanker configuration. (Read more from “Pentagon: Chinese Air Force Fast-Becoming Massive Threat” HERE)

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Russia Convinced It Has ‘Best Vaccine in the World’ After Promising Study Results

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A COVID-19 vaccine developed and tested in Russia successfully generated an antibody response and showed no serious adverse effects, according to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet on Friday.

The peer-reviewed data could put Russia at the top of its race with the U.S., Europe, and China for developing a successful vaccine against the virus. Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive officer of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, told Bloomberg on Friday that the country believes that their development is the “best in the world.”

“Russia has answered the questions that have been asked about it,” he said. “And we are convinced that we have the best vaccine in the world.” (Read more from “Russia Convinced It Has ‘Best Vaccine in the World’ After New Study Results” HERE)

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