Senators Probe Netflix Partnership With Chinese Genocide Denier

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Republican senators are demanding Netflix explain its decision to adapt a Chinese science fiction trilogy written by a Xinjiang genocide denier into an original series.

The senators, including Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Rick Scott (Fla.), are marshaling support against the streaming giant’s plan to adapt Chinese author Liu Cixin’s bestselling Three-Body Problem trilogy into a live-action series. Cixin defended his government’s brutal suppression of Muslim Uighurs in a 2019 interview with the New Yorker.

“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is committing atrocities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR),” the legislators wrote. “Sadly, a number of U.S. companies continue to either actively or tacitly allow the normalization of, or apologism for, these crimes. The decision to produce an adaptation of Mr. Liu’s work can be viewed as such normalization.”

Bela Bajaria, a Joe Biden campaign megadonor who gave as much as $500,000 to a group affiliated with the candidate, was in charge of “international content” when Netflix ordered the series. She now oversees all of Netflix’s original series across the world, according to the Wall Street Journal. Netflix, which did not return a request for comment, previously told the Washington Free Beacon that she “works on the series side of the business.”

Netflix’s collaboration with Liu reflects Hollywood’s willingness to cater to the massive Chinese market, even if it means turning a blind eye to the country’s human rights abuses. Disney’s recent live-action remake of Mulan even thanked Xinjiang authorities—some of them directly implicated in the Uighur crackdown—in its closing credit. Hollywood studios also routinely avoid topics that might anger Chinese censors, going so far as to change movie villains’ nationalities from Chinese to North Korean. (Read more from “Senators Probe Netflix Partnership With Chinese Genocide Denier” HERE)

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South Korean President Calls for Official End to Korean War

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South Korean President Moon Jae-in is urging an official end to the 70-year Korean War, a move he hopes will foster renewed progress toward peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Moon made the proposal during a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, which opened on Tuesday. While the direct fighting between the two Koreas ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement, North and South Korea have never formally ended the war, which began in 1950.

“The war must end, completely and for good,” Moon said in his address. “I hope that the U.N. and the international community provide support so that we can advance into an era of reconciliation and prosperity.” (Read more from “South Korean President Calls for Official End to Korean War” HERE)

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Pakistani Christian Sentenced to Death for Refusing to Convert to Islam

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In the depths of a squalid Pakistani jail cell – kept far from the rest of the inmate population at Lahore’s District Prison – a poor Christian factory worker is awaiting execution.

A judge convicted Asif Pervaiz, 37, of blasphemy and he was sentenced to death earlier this month. Those advocating for Pervaiz’s innocence claim it was not blasphemy and that he merely refused to buckle to pressure and convert to Islam.

“This is a tragic situation; the first case in Pakistan’s recent history where a Christian has been accused of blasphemy for refusing to embrace Islam,” Pervaiz’s attorney, Saif Malook, told Fox News. “This man, Asif’s boss, wanted him to leave Christianity, and Asif knew he would suffer a lot by saying no. But he kept his faith.”

Pervaiz’s nightmare began in 2013 after his supervisor, Muhammad Saeed Khokher, at the garment factory where he worked allegedly pressured him to become a Muslim on multiple occasions, according to Malook. When he refused, Khoker went to police with allegations that the devoted Christian had sent him “blasphemous” text messages defaming the Muslim Prophet Muhammed.

Khokher has since denied that he had attempted to compel his work subordinate to convert. In Pakistan, insulting the Prophet carries a mandatory sentence of capital punishment, and the court has vowed that Pervaiz will be “hanged by his neck until death.” (Read more from “Pakistani Christian Sentenced to Death for Refusing to Convert to Islam” HERE)

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‘Beyond a Doubt’: COVID-19 Pandemic Could Have Been Prevented If China, WHO Acted

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The coronavirus pandemic likely “could have been prevented” if the Chinese government acted more transparently and the World Health Organization wasn’t “complicit in the spread and normalization” of their propaganda during the outbreak’s early days, an audit from the House Foreign Affairs Committee reportedly says.

The 96-page document authored by Republicans in the committee — which the New York Post says it exclusively obtained Monday before its planned release — also reportedly calls for the resignation of WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom over his “detrimental impact on the COVID-19 response.”

“It is beyond doubt that the Chinese Communist Party actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world,” it said, according to the New York Post.

“Research shows the CCP could have reduced the number of cases in China by up to 95 percent had it fulfilled its obligations under international law and responded to the outbreak in a manner consistent with best practices,” it added, while also saying “it is highly likely the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented.” . . .

The document also accuses WHO of ignoring warnings from Taiwan and Hong Kong about the risk of human-to-human transmission and then falsely claiming for weeks that Chinese researchers found “no evidence” of that happening, the New York Post reported. (Read more from “‘Beyond a Doubt’: COVID-19 Pandemic Could Have Been Prevented If China, WHO Acted” HERE)

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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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