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Chinese Government Hackers Break into White House Military Office in Charge of Nuclear Football

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Hackers linked to China’s government broke into one of the U.S. government’s most sensitive computer networks, breaching a system used by the White House Military Office for nuclear commands, according to defense and intelligence officials familiar with the incident.

One official said the cyber breach was one of Beijing’s most brazen cyber attacks against the United States and highlights a failure of the Obama administration to press China on its persistent cyber attacks.

Disclosure of the cyber attack also comes amid heightened tensions in Asia, as the Pentagon moved two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups and Marine amphibious units near waters by Japan’s Senkaku islands.

China and Japan—the United States’ closest ally in Asia and a defense treaty partner—are locked in a heated maritime dispute over the Senkakus, which China claims as its territory.

U.S. officials familiar with reports of the White House hacking incident said it took place earlier this month and involved unidentified hackers, believed to have used computer servers in China, who accessed the computer network used by the White House Military Office (WHMO), the president’s military office in charge of some of the government’s most sensitive communications, including strategic nuclear commands. The office also arranges presidential communications and travel, and inter-government teleconferences involving senior policy and intelligence officials.

Read more from this story HERE.

China Launches Its First Aircraft Carrier, Experts Doubt Its Strategic Value

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In a ceremony attended by the country’s top leaders, China put its first aircraft carrier into service on Tuesday, a move intended to signal its growing military might as tensions escalate between Beijing and its neighbors over islands in nearby seas.

Officials said the carrier, a discarded vessel bought from Ukraine in 1998 and refurbished by China, would protect national sovereignty, an issue that has become a touchstone of the government’s dispute with Japan over ownership of islands in the East China Sea.

But despite the triumphant tone of the launching, which was watched by President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, and despite rousing assessments by Chinese military experts about the importance of the carrier, the vessel will be used only for training and testing for the foreseeable future.

The mark “16” on the carrier’s side indicates that it is limited to training, Chinese and other military experts said. China does not have planes capable of landing on the carrier and so far training for such landings has been carried out on land, they said.

Even so, the public appearance of the carrier at the northeastern port of Dalian was used as an occasion to stir patriotic feelings, which have run at fever pitch in the last 10 days over the dispute between China and Japan over the East China Sea islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

Read more from this story HERE.

Powder Keg: Now Over 50 Taiwanese Vessels Challenge Japanese Claim to Islands (+video)

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About 40 Taiwanese fishing boats and 12 patrol ships intruded into Japanese territorial waters near the Senkaku Islands on Tuesday morning to assert Taipei’s claim to the Japan-controlled chain.

The armada further intensified the territorial dispute that has already seen ties between Japan and China deteriorate.

It was the first time such a large number of foreign vessels has intruded into the territorial waters since the diplomatic row over Japan and China broke out last month.

The Taiwanese fishing ships started entering waters near the islands around 7:40 a.m., and had left the area by midday, according to Japan Coast Guard officials.

The coast guard repeatedly sought to prevent the Taiwanese ships from approaching the islets by spraying water over them.

But the accompanying Taiwanese patrol ships responded to the warnings by announcing that it is their right to operate in Taiwanese territorial waters, according to the Japan Coast Guard.

There were no major clashes between the Japanese and Taiwanese maritime authorities, but officials confirmed that three Taiwanese patrol ships had fired their water cannons at the Japanese patrol boats.

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Here’s a video of the confrontation:

Apple Supplier Foxconn Faces Massive Worker Riot in China

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A large-scale incident involving some 2,000 Foxconn Technology Group factory workers has forced the closure of one of the tech supplier’s plants in China, the company confirmed Monday.

The company described the incident as a “personal dispute between several employees” that escalated to include thousands of people. Some 40 people were taken to the hospital, and “a number” of individuals were arrested. According to the statement from Foxconn, local police were in control of the situation by 3 a.m., some four hours after the dispute began.

The incident, which a worker at the scene described as a “riot,” took place in Taiyuan, a city in central China. Foxconn employs 79,000 workers at the facility. Production at the plant has been halted, but Foxconn said in a second statement that the factory will resume activity on Tuesday.

Foxconn, which supplies parts to Apple and other manufacturers, has drawn harsh criticism for its labor policies. A spate of suicides at the company’s factories in 2010 garnered media coverage of alleged harsh working conditions, including unsafe facilities and illegal amounts of overtime.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Coming Global Disorder

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Woody Island is a speck of land in the middle of the South China Sea, not quite a square mile in size. Over the past 80 years it has been occupied by French Indochina, Imperial Japan, the Republic of China, the People’s Republic of China, South Vietnam, and, after a brief war in 1974, the People’s Republic again. Now known as Yongxing to the Chinese (or Phu Lam to the Vietnamese, who still lay claim to it), the island has an airstrip, a harbor, and a few hundred Chinese residents, none native-born, many of whom make their living as fishermen.

An obscure tropical island may seem an odd starting point for an essay on the coming global disorder. Yet great conflicts have been known to flare over little things in faraway places. “On the morning of July 1, [1911,] without more ado, it was announced that His Imperial Majesty the German Emperor had sent his gunboat the Panther to Agadir to maintain and protect German interests,” wrote Winston Churchill in his history of the First World War. The proximate causes of the German foray to this deserted Moroccan bay “were complicated and intrinsically extremely unimportant.” But the real purpose of the kaiser’s move was to test—and, he hoped, to break—Britain’s alliance with France and, perhaps, scope out the possibility of establishing a German naval base in the north Atlantic. “All the alarm bells throughout Europe,” Churchill recalled, “began immediately to quiver.”

Could another Agadir crisis be lurking in the South China Sea? On July 24, 2012, Beijing decreed that henceforth the little village of Sansha on Woody Island would be considered a “prefecture-level city,” complete with a mayor, a people’s congress, a military garrison—and claims to administer the 770,000 square miles of surrounding waters, an area larger than the Gulf of Mexico. Beijing’s coup was protested loudly by Vietnam and more quietly by the U.S. State Department, which fretted that the move ran “counter to collaborative diplomatic efforts to resolve differences” in the South China Sea. In response, Beijing called a U.S. embassy official to the carpet and demanded that the United States “shut up.”

China’s leaders are fond of advertising their country’s “peaceful rise,” and the pro-China chorus in the West has sought to engage Beijing as a “responsible stakeholder” in global affairs. Yet in the last three years alone, Beijing has provoked quasi-military confrontations over disputed waters with Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and even the United States, all the while insisting that it has “indisputable sovereignty” over nearly the whole of the sea. “China is a big country and other countries are small countries,” explained Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi at a regional summit in 2010. “And that is just a fact.”

What is also a fact is that the South China Sea sits on estimated oil reserves of 213 billion barrels and equally massive reserves of natural gas. Fully one-third of the world’s overall volume of trade passes across the sea every year. Each of the sea’s other claimants has reasons to accommodate Beijing even as they resent its bullying habits. China, it is sometimes noted, sees the sea not just as an economic resource and an extension of its sovereign domain, but as the natural basin for a 21st-century version of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, this time under Beijing’s sway.

Read more from this story HERE.

Japanese-Chinese Island Dispute Heats Up With Beijing Defense Minister “Reserving the Right to Act”

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China’s national defense minister warned Tuesday that Beijing reserves the right to take further action against Japan in the ongoing dispute over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.

Standing next to U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Gen. Liang Guanglie said Japan should bear full responsibility for the dispute, which has triggered violent protests in China against the Japanese. Panetta has been pressing both Liang and defense leaders in Japan to find ways to resolve the problem peacefully and diplomatically.

Liang, however, made it clear during a press conference that while China still would like to see a negotiated solution, he hopes the Japanese government “will undo its mistakes and come back to the right track of negotiations.” Tensions over the string of islands, called the Senkakus in Japan and Diaoyu in China, spiked last week when the Japanese government said it was purchasing some of the islands from their private owner.

The island dispute has been a hot topic during Panetta’s weeklong tour of the Asia-Pacific region. But his session with Liang also touched on a wide expanse of issues as the U.S. and China try to find a way to improve their military relationship.

U.S. relations with China have been rocky, especially over America’s support of and arms sales to Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its own. The U.S. also has been critical of China for its lack of transparency regarding its massive military buildup.

Read more from this story HERE.

Belarus Going Nuclear, China & Russia Helping

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Europe’s last dictatorship may soon go nuclear as it announces major construction of its first nuclear power plant while at the same time it is apparently aiding Communist China with its mobile launchers for intercontinental ballistic missiles.

On Thursday, September 13, the Russian-based engineering company Atomenergoproyekt told the Belarusian Telegraph Agency (BelTA) that it will commence major construction on Belarus’s first and only nuclear power plant on June 15, 2013.

On Wednesday, a day before the announcement, a meeting of the sixth operational group on the nuclear power plant project was held and led by Belarus’s First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Semashko.

Additional representatives of the “Belarusian government, NPP construction directorate (customer), the united company NIAEP-Atomstroyexport (the general designer of the power plant and the general contractor), Belarusian subcontractors, and the Grodno Oblast administration,” were also present at the meeting, according to BelTA.

The construction site of the proposed power plant was examined by officials prior to their meeting. Excavation and work on the foundation is already well under way. Builders are scheduled to have the bed drainage completed by November 20. This drainage will “simultaneously protect the bottom part of the excavation pit from frost penetration,” according to BelTA.

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China Deploys Warships After Japan Announces Disputed Island Purchase

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China deployed two navy vessels and launched a verbal assault on Japan after Tokyo announced it had ‘bought’ a group of islands disputed by the two countries in the East China Sea.

Osamu Fujimura, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, yesterday confirmed that his country had agreed to purchase the islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, from a Japanese family it claims owns them.

The government will reportedly pay a total of 2.05 billion yen (£16.4 million) for the islands and the transfer of their ownership will be completed by the end of this month.

However as Mr Fujimura spoke, China’s state-controlled news agency Xinhua reported that two Chinese surveillance vessels had arrived in the region to “assert the country’s sovereignty”. Japanese media said the Japanese Coast Guard was monitoring the vessels.

Japan’s move to “nationalise” the disputed islands escalated a simmering and long-standing feud between the two nations over the territory, which is administered by Japan but also claimed by China and Taiwan.

Read more from this story HERE.

Communist Leader’s Absence Sets Off Rumor Mills in China

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The strange disappearance from public view of China’s presumptive new leader is turning a year that was supposed to showcase the Communist Party’s stability into something of an annus horribilis.

Over the past week, the new leader, Xi Jinping, has missed at least three scheduled meetings with foreign dignitaries, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last Wednesday and the prime minister of Denmark on Monday. So far officials have declined to provide an explanation for his absences.

That set off furious speculation on the Internet that the 59-year-old Mr. Xi’s health, either physical or political, has taken a turn for the worse. Some diplomats say they have heard that Mr. Xi suffered a pulled muscle while swimming or playing soccer. One media report, since retracted, had it that Mr. Xi was hurt in an auto accident when a military official tried to injure or kill him in a revenge plot. A well-connected political analyst in Beijing said in an interview that Mr. Xi might have had a mild heart attack.

Whatever the actual reason, Mr. Xi’s unexplained absences are conspicuous on the eve of what is supposed to be China’s once-in-a-decade transfer of power. It also adds to a litany of woes that have disrupted the Communist Party’s hopes that a seamless political transition would send a signal of stability to the Chinese people and the world at large.

Two unusual political scandals have sidelined people considered contenders for seats on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, most recently including a close ally of President Hu Jintao’s. China’s economy has fallen into an unexpectedly deep slump, confounding government forecasts for a measured slowdown. Party leaders have also yet to announce a date for the 18th Party Congress, the event to mark the retirement of this generation of leaders and the accession of the next, though it is supposed to take place as soon as next month.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama’s (un)American Auto Bailout (+video)

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By Michelle Malkin. Cue “Fanfare for the Common Man” and rev up the Government Motors engines. Wednesday is Great American Auto Bailout Day at the Democratic National Convention. Party propagandists have prepared a prime-time-ready film touting the “rescue’s” benefits for American workers. UAW President Bob King will sing the savior-in-chief’s praises.

But like all of the economic success stories manufactured by the White House, the $85 billion government handout is a big fat farce.

“I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back,” Obama bragged on the campaign trail. Here’s the inconvenient story they won’t tell you:

GM is once again flirting with bankruptcy despite massive government purchases propping up its sales figures. GM stock is rock-bottom. Losses continue to be revised in the wrong direction. According to The Detroit News, “The Treasury Department says in a new report the government expects to lose more than $25 billion on the $85 billion auto bailout. That’s 15 percent higher than its previous forecast.”

The claims that GM paid back its taxpayer-funded loans “in full” — a story peddled in campaign ads narrated by Hollywood actor Tom Hanks — were debunked by the Treasury Department’s TARP watchdog this summer. GM still owes nearly $30 billion of the $50 billion it received, and its lending arm still owes nearly $15 billion of the more than $17 billion it received. Bailout watchdog Mark Modica of the National Legal and Policy Center adds: “In addition to U.S. taxpayers anteing up, Canada put in over $10 billion, and GM was relieved of about $28 billion of bondholder obligations as UAW claims were protected. That’s an improvement of almost $90 billion to the balance sheet, and the company still lags the competition.” Read more from this story HERE.

The Romney Campaign has finally figured out that this false story about the GM bailout is just smoke and mirrors. See the campaign’s new ad, just released yesterday: