Important Takeaways:
- FBI says China is ‘defining threat of our generation’ with hackers ready to ‘wreak havoc’ in US
- FBI Director Christopher Wray has said the national security threats in the US are ‘more complex and sophisticated than ever’ as he claimed China is ‘becoming more aggressive’
- He said: “Today’s national security threats are more complex and sophisticated than ever. We’re seeing hostile nation-states becoming more aggressive in their efforts to steal our secrets and our innovation, target our critical infrastructure, and export their repression to our shores.
- “Front and center is China—the defining threat of our generation. To put it simply, the CCP [Communist Party of China] is throwing its whole government at undermining the security and economy of the rule-of-law world.”
- Wray warned officials that “China’s hacking program is larger than that of every other major nation combined.”
- “If each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intelligence analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, China’s hackers would still outnumber FBI cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1”, he added.
- In the alarming speech, the FBI claimed China is engaging in “traditional espionage and economic espionage, foreign malign influence, election interference, and transnational repression—often working in tandem.”
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Important Takeaways:
- From Taiwan to South Korea to Silicon Valley, some of the most important nodes in the global tech economy are in disaster-prone places
- Considering that Wednesday’s quake was the strongest in Taiwan in 25 years — and that earthquakes of similar strength have killed tens of thousands of people or more in other countries — this could have been much worse.
- There was one other way in which Taiwan — and the world — avoided a worse outcome from the earthquake: the island’s all-important semiconductor manufacturing industry seemed to emerge largely intact.
- To say that Taiwan is important to the global tech industry is like saying oxygen is important to breathing. Taiwan as a whole is responsible for making 80 to 90 percent of the world’s most advanced computer chips — ones for which there is no current substitute.
- While earthquakes and volcanoes are just one threat to Taiwan’s semiconductor foundries, the better-known one is the People’s Republic of China.
- Should Taiwan’s chip foundries be destroyed in such a conflict, the damage to the global economy could be on par with the Great Depression.
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Important Takeaways:
- China Warns Citizens Inside USA: Prepare for “Various unexpected situations”
- A strange warning has been issued by China to any of its citizens located in the United States: “take safety precautions and be prepared for ‘various unexpected situations.’
- According to the China Ministry of Foreign Affairs, several Chinese students and company employees have recently been subjected to “unwarranted interrogations and harassment” by US airport law enforcement officers, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on its WeChat account on Friday.
- Their phones, computers and other luggage items were searched piece by piece, and several people were banned from entering the country, it said.
- To most casual observers, this “warning” from China makes no sense. At worst, perhaps twenty people from China have had unusual incidents trying to enter the United States; hardly a reason for such a large warning. Unless . . .
- So-called “Conspiracy theorists” are wondering if this “warning” is actually a “signal” to Chinese forces already inside the US; sort of a notice to “prepare for action?”
- [Even the South China morning Post reported on this] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3257317/china-issues-travel-advisory-citizens-visiting-us-warning-unwarranted-interrogations-and-harassment
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Important Takeaways:
- China’s Largest Base Has Replicas Of Taiwan’s Presidential Building, Eiffel Tower
- Through satellite images, we explore China’s premier large-scale training site that has some ominous and bizarre features.
- China has made massive investments in modernizing its military over the better part of the past three decades and has established new and improved research and development and training bases to support those efforts. The People’s Liberation Army has fully embraced the idea of utilizing highly realistic facilities to prepare its forces for the sorts of environments they’d be likely to fight in during future conflicts, drawing significant lessons from the experiences of the U.S. military and those of its allies.
- The Zhurihe Training Base in remote Inner Mongolia is the largest of these sites and notably features a huge full-size mockup a portion of downtown Taipei, the capital of the island of Taiwan, including highly elaborate recreations of its Presidential Office Building and Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There’s also a cloverleaf highway interchange, a mock airfield and, bizarrely, a replica of France’s Eiffel Tower.
- Interestingly, this isn’t the only Eiffel Tower replica in China, either. There is another one in Tianducheng, China, a suburb of Hangzhou in the country’s Zhejiang Province, which has an overall aesthetic meant to evoke the architecture in the French capital Paris. There is another recreation of the Eiffel Tower at the Window of the World theme park in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, situated on the mainland just outside Hong Kong.
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Important Takeaways:
- China’s ‘Unrestricted Warfare’: Is It Here Already?
- China-linked hackers appear to be looking to attack U.S. infrastructure, especially key components such as the electrical grid, water reservoirs and treatment plants, pipelines, and transportation and communications systems, among other targets.
- The goal is seemingly to disrupt the U.S. everything critical to life – if you have no electricity, your cellphone will not work; no water will come out of the tap; gas pumps will not pump gas; flights and trains will stop, and disease from disabled sewage treatment plants will spread. There will be havoc and panic. The government and military will be unable to protect the nation. That is what is meant by “unrestricted warfare.” Not a bullet was fired. It did not have to be. According to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, it is perfect.
- What are some of the steps that should be taken?
- The West has correctly identified the CCP as the malign threat that it is; now we have a responsibility to put into place the measures and deterrents to prevent it from attacking us through cyberspace or any other way. Let us not wait until we experience a 9/11-scale cyberattack that could be far more damaging to the U.S. than what took place on that dark day more than 20 years ago.
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Important Takeaways:
- The U.S. cannot afford a war with China. The size of our military has been shrinking, and our resources are stretched way too thin.
- Today, the U.S. has military bases in 80 different countries, and we have troops stationed in 178 different countries. That is insane.
- No empire in the entire history of humanity has had forces spread all over the planet like this. Our ammunition levels are extremely low due to major conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, and every war game that our leaders have conducted has shown us losing a war to protect Taiwan. So we should be trying to avoid sparking a war with China, because we are holding a losing hand.
- It is being reported that officials in Taiwan have confirmed that U.S. forces are now permanently stationed “on its islands in the Taiwan Strait”…
- Taiwan has officially confirmed the presence of US troops stationed on its islands in the Taiwan Strait permanently, a development that could further escalate mounting tensions with China.
- The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed in 2023 facilitated the deployment of these troops to conduct training programs for Taiwanese frontline forces.
- We are being told that U.S. troops have also been stationed on the Penghu islands and the Kinmen islands…
- According to reports from Taiwan’s United Daily News (UDN), US Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group are now permanently stationed at bases of the 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion, a Taiwanese army special operations force, located in outlying island counties of Penghu and Kinmen. Notably, Kinmen lies just over a mile from Chinese shores.
- Additionally, reports suggest an American military presence in the northeast city of Taoyuan on Taiwan’s main island, with service members providing specialized training on drone equipment for Taiwan’s elite Airborne Special Service Company.
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Important Takeaways:
- A synthetic opioid or super-strength painkiller, it was designed to be an alternative to morphine.
- Appalled at the incredible potency of nitazenes – and the obvious danger that any patients prescribed them would swiftly become addicted – medical regulators blocked the drug’s release.
- Nitazenes are back and they are now increasingly available on the black market.
- Many of these labs are in China, and the drugs are so powerful that they have been nicknamed ‘Frankenstein’ opioids.
- This is a terrifying development, because nitazenes are 20 times stronger than fentanyl, which in 2022 alone killed 75,000 people in America.
- Another reason for the appearance of nitazenes is a 2019 bilateral agreement between Donald Trump’s administration and China to crack down on the production of Chinese fentanyl.
- Underground Chinese laboratories, fearful of being caught producing the drug, turned to nitazenes instead.
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Important Takeaways:
- Russia and China on Friday vetoed a U.S. draft UN Security Council resolution which called for an “immediate and sustained ceasefire” in Gaza along with “the release of all remaining hostages” held by Hamas.
- This was the fourth time since the war began in October that the Security Council failed to agree on a resolution calling for a ceasefire.
- This time, the dispute was over the U.S. insistence on linking the ceasefire call to a hostage deal and condemnation of Hamas, rather than the unconditional ceasefire resolution demanded by Russia and China.
- S. and Israeli officials said the Biden administration had been working for weeks on mobilizing support for its draft resolution.
- In order to garner more votes, the U.S. strengthened the paragraph in the draft resolution that referred to the ceasefire.
- The U.S. draft resolution also included strong language expressing concern about a possible Israeli ground offensive in Rafah.
- The Security Council is expected to vote on an alternative resolution put forward by eight member states, calling for an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan to lead to a permanent ceasefire.
- The U.S. is expected to veto.
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Important Takeaways:
- World on the brink as Taiwan admits US troops are now stationed on Chinese border
- American troops are to be permanently stationed in Taiwan, according to Taipei, a huge move that will likely send tensions with China soaring as its president Xi Jinping covets the island.
- According to reports from Taiwan’s United Daily News (UDN), US Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group are now permanently stationed at bases of the 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion, a Taiwanese army special operations force, located in outlying island counties of Penghu and Kinmen. Notably, Kinmen lies just over a mile from Chinese shores.
- Additionally, reports suggest an American military presence in the northeast city of Taoyuan on Taiwan’s main island, with service members providing specialized training on drone equipment for Taiwan’s elite Airborne Special Service Company.
- Both the US Army and Chinese Foreign Ministry have yet to comment on these developments.
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Important Takeaways:
- The Biden administration is warning states to be on guard for cyberattacks against water systems, citing ongoing threats from hackers linked to the governments of Iran and China.
- “Disabling cyberattacks are striking water and wastewater systems throughout the United States,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan wrote in a letter to governors made public Tuesday. “These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities.”
- Hackers affiliated with the Iranian Government Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have attacked drinking water systems, while a People’s Republic of China state-sponsored group, Volt Typhoon, has compromised information technology of drinking water and other critical infrastructure systems, the letter warned.
- “Federal departments and agencies assess with high confidence that Volt Typhoon actors are pre-positioning themselves to disrupt critical infrastructure operations in the event of geopolitical tensions and/or military conflicts,” said the letter.
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