People Schiff Refuses to Call for Testimony on the Ukraine Case

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With the newly drafted rules that the Pelosi office published to set-up the vote for a ‘formal’ impeachment inquiry sets out that the Republicans can only make requests for witnesses yet Congressman Schiff and those on the majority in the HPSCI can refuse. Swell huh? Then there is the matter that Schiff is quite selective with those he wants to testify omitting so many others with regard to UkraineGate.

This is a long very complicated affair so to boil it down, members of Congress know full well the money-laundering and even cases of murder when it comes to Ukraine and you should have a sense of it as well.

During the Robert Mueller Russian collusion investigation, there were several lawyers and FBI money-laundering experts where you can bet much of this information came across their desks. You must also understand that any sitting president and in this case President Trump just cannot deliver taxpayer dollars in the form of foreign aid to countries teeming in corruption without affecting diplomatic policy and asking for cooperation to root out corruption. Perhaps some of the Schiff witnesses that have provided testimony including LTC. Alexander Vindman should rethink some of this actions and conclusions with regard to Trump’s interactions with matters dealing with Ukraine and China and countless other countries.

As an example of the complications that Congressman Schiff and his committee are ignoring include at least two Ukrainian oligarchs that essentially stole an estimated $5.5 billion from Ukraine, Ihor Kolominsky and Gennady Bogolyubov. He is also ignoring seeking the testimony of Congresswoman Debbie Jessika Mucarsel-Powell. She represents the Florida 26th District and prior to that she was a volunteer for John Kerry’s presidential campaign and then later the Obama presidential campaign. Debbie’s husband, Robert Powell was paid $700,000 is on retainer as an attorney for Ukrainian Oligarch Ihor Kolominsky’s companies. Daily Beast reported in part last year: “Kolomoisky, who sicced his own private army on the Russians after they invaded eastern Ukraine, has been accused of sponsoring contract killings.” Swell client there Robert.

The matter of the corruption with regard to Ukraine extends quite beyond the Bidens and Burisma. In fact it goes far past just a few million dollars, in fact the numbers really exceed 6 billion. More on that later.

Corruption in Ukraine should be measured in not years but rather decades. The corruption does not stay within Ukraine but spreads to Cyprus, the United Kingdom and even all the way to Delaware and Ohio.

On January 16, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) published key findings from a report by Kroll that backed allegations of large-scale fraud at PrivatBank, which was taken over by the state in December 2016. These include claims by employees that the bank acted as a “vacuum cleaner”, with business development geared towards attracting deposits that were then dispersed as loans to companies related to the bank’s owners, Igor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov. According to Kroll, a “loan recycling scheme” was devised to conceal the fraud, whereby new loans were continually issued to new related parties to repay the principal and interest on older loans. Multiple internal transactions within the Privat group, including between the Ukrainian operation and units in Cyprus and Latvia, were also reportedly used to disguise fund flows.

***

Prior to this, in fact in 2007 and 2008, the US has been active in Ukraine for some time. In 2007, the firm Vanco won a contract to extract gas from the Black Sea, a deal that was annulled by Tymoshenko after the firm passed on the rights to another company that included eastern Ukrainian and Russian business interests.Yanukovych’s government worked hard to win over US and multinational firms for oil and gas extraction in Ukraine. Kyiv signed a contract with the US-based Chevron at the end of 2013 to extract shale gas in the west of the country. Another deal with the energy giant ExxonMobil – for gas in the Black Sea area – was abandoned following opposition protests.

But the news about the appointment of Hunter Biden has sparked allegations of nepotism – not least because it was revealed just a few weeks after his father’s visit to Kyiv on April 22. Neither Burisma or the US State Department responded to DW’s requests for comment. White House spokesman Jay Carney would say only that Hunter Biden was a private citizen and that his job had no impact on US policy. Ukrainian media reports about Burisma reveal an impenetrable web of companies, most of which are registered in Cyprus. One name, Mykola Slotshevski, appears more than once. The 47-year-old is thought to have been the original owner of the company – at least until recently.

Now Schiff compelled Rudy Giuliani to preserve all documents. Others named in the Schiff schedule include: Igor Framan, Lev Parnas, Joseph di Genova, Victoria Toensing, Hunter Biden, Burisma Holdings Ltd., Joseph Biden, the Democrat National Committee and even Hillary Clinton. This had to be just a gesture as none of them have been called for testimony.

What does Congress know? Plenty. Back in September, there was some interesting floor presentations on key Ukraine corruption items. Reference the congressional record from September 25, 2019, pages 4 and 5. Ukraine corruption reached Delaware and Ohio, beyond our congresswoman in Miami.

Will America see any real consequence of some of these people anytime soon? Hardly. In case you want to know why, we have to get somewhat technical and in fact we may have to wait on the UK to finish their own legal process prosecuting all things Ihor Kolomoisky and this banking scam involving PrivatBank where that pesky $6 billion went missing. By the way, that bank had to be nationalized by Ukraine in an effort to stabilize and recover some of the monies.

So if you do want to get into the weeds, read on. Courtesy of Kyiv Post.

Ihor Kolomoisky is a Ukrainian oligarch and the former governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. He owns media, steelmaking, ferroalloy, oil and gas assets, as well as luxury real estate, water terminals, and airplanes. All of these assets are part of the informal Privat business group controlled by him and business partner, Gennadiy Bogolyubov. Due to ongoing court cases, the assets are now partially frozen.

However, the freeze was imposed only on those assets directly registered to the billionaire or involved in an a series of alleged schemes to withdraw $5.5 billion dollars from PrivatBank, the country’s largest financial institution.

Other Kolomoisky assets are hidden in offshore or registered on trusted individuals.

Law enforcement agencies aren’t the only ones who want to see the ownership structures of Kolomoisky’s companies. His former business partners are also curious.

Businessman Vadym Shulman has been pursuing Kolomoisky in court since 2015. Earlier, in 2014, another oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, engaged in litigation with Kolomoisky and accused him not only of appropriating his business, but even of murder.

Shulman and Pinchuk are demanding that the ownership structure of the long list of companies registered in offshore jurisdictions be disclosed. These companies own real estate, steel and ferroalloy plants in the United States and Georgia.

None of these companies is directly registered to Kolomoisky. But all of them have common managers, lawyers, and even addresses. According to both businessmen’s lawsuits, they are all controlled by Kolomoisky.

The same group of managers run not only these companies, but also several groups of firms involved in the PrivatBank case.

Panikos Symeou is the managing partner of the Cypriot law firm Symeou & Konnaris LLC. According to its website, this company highly values privacy and trust.

Fugitive Ukrainian businessmen like oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko and former National Bank head Serhiy Arbuzov apparently also appreciate these qualities. Panikos Symeou was the head of their Cypriot firm Sabulong Trading, LTD.

In 2017, this company was among the offshore companies that the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine confiscated $1.3 billion from. They had been stolen from the country by the criminal organization created by ousted former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Ihor Kolomoisky entrusts Panikos Symeou with a much wider list of assets — for example, media, steel factories, tire production companies and water terminals.

Symeou’s role is very clear in the ownership structure of Dnipropetrovsk television channel Pryvat TV Dnipro (Channel 9). Symeou is the trusted individual through whom Kolomoisky owns the channel. 

The ownership structure of Pryvat TV Dnipro, LLC (Channel 9). (Nadiya Burdey/Anti-Corruption Action Center)

Steel business in the US

Panikos Symeou also has a clear role in the ownership structure of steel factory Warren Steel Holdings LLC in the state of Ohio. The company is nominally registered to the offshore firm Halliwel Assets, Inc in the British Virgin Islands. But, in 2015, one of owners of the factory disclosed the names of all its beneficiaries in court.

According to case materials, the factory belongs to three Ukrainian businessmen: Vadym Shulman, Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky. The latter controls the factory through Symeou.

Shulman initiated that court case. In 2001, he bought the derelict factory and relaunched it. Then, in 2006, Bogolyubov and Kolomoisky became its co-owners.

In 2012, Schulman said he began to suspect his partners of fraud. During his own investigation, he discovered that Warren Steel had concluded loan agreements and sales contracts with other companies controlled by Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov on conditions that were unprofitable for the factory.

According to Shulman, his partners burdened the factory with debts to their own companies in order to receive full control over the assets of Warren Steel.

Shulman’s hypothesis was confirmed in August 2014 when Kolomoisky’s representative, Panikos Symeou, agreed to another $25-million loan for Warren Steel Holdings from the company Optima Acquisitions, LLC. That company was also controlled by Kolomoisky, Shulman said. The media repeatedly reported this without providing any evidence.

In 2015, Shulman filed suit against Warren Steel Holdings, LLC, Panikos Symeou, the company Halliwel Assets, Inc and the president of the Warren Steel factory Mordechai Korf.

TRUSTED PERSON № 2: Mordechai Korf

Mordechai Korf is Ihor Kolomoisky’s American business partner and the director of his multiple steel and manganese enterprises in the United States. In particular, Korf was not only the president of the Warren Steel factory, but also the co-owner of Optima Acquisitions LLC, which gave loans to the factory.

Optima Acquisitions is an investment company registered in Delaware, a state that does not disclose firms’ beneficiaries. Korf has run this company since 2008. Optima Acquisition also owns another American company, Optima Specialty Steel, Inc., which owns several steel factories in various U.S. states.

Journalists have previously tied the name Kolomoisky to the Optima group of companies, but this connection was only confirmed during Optima Specialty Steel’s bankruptcy case. According to case materials, Korf, Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov each owned 33 percent of Optima Acquisitions LLC in 2017.

The connections of Ihor Kolomoisky and Mordechai Korf. (Nadiya Burdey/Anti-Corruption Action Center)

At the end of 2017, Optima Specialty Steel completed its plan of reorganization (bankruptcy) and was rebranded as Specialty Steel Works, Inc. The corporate agent was changed as well as the entire leadership of the company.

In an official press release, the company stated that it would continue to manufacture and sell steel products through its four wholly-owned subsidiaries: Michigan Seamless Tube & Pipe, the Niagara LaSalle Corporation, the Corey Steel Company and Kentucky Electric Steel. Each of  these companies owns a factory in the United States.

Michigan Seamless Tube & Pipe predictably owns a factory located in Michigan. The company manufactures seamless cold-drawn pipes for the aerospace, mining, construction, automotive and agricultural industries.

The Niagara LaSalle Corporation owns a factory that manufactures steel parts for automotive, construction, and agricultural machinery in Indiana.

The Corey Steel Company’s factory is located in Cicero, Illinois. It manufactures steel bars.

 

At the end of 2018, another American company, Steel Dynamics, Inc., acquired Kentucky Electric Steel.

Kolomoisky’s tires

In Ukraine, the name Panikos Symeou is not only connected with the business structures of Kurchenko and Kolomoisky’s Dnipro television channel. The Cypriot is also the co-owner of a Ukrainian plant for producing oversized tires through the company Manita Investments Limited.

The beneficiary controller of the tire plant is Dnipro resident Anna Yesipova. One hundred percent of the plant’s shares is the Cypriot company Manita. It, in turn, is owned by another Cypriot company Sykon Secretarial Limited. Fifty percent of the latter belongs to Panikos Symeou.

The Ukrainian Factory of Oversized Tires and a Romanian factory operate under the same brand name and have one website. An excerpt from the State Register of Romania contains the address of company Euro Tyres Manufacturing SRL’s website: www.eurotire.net. The same website also contains the address of the Ukrainian branch, the Ukrainian Factory of Oversized Tires, that owns factory premises.

Therefore, according to the Eurotire website, the factory is part of a large international corporation which manufactures oversized tires for Eurotire’s mining equipment. The representative offices of this company are located in the United States, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Ukraine and Russia. The factories that manufacture such tires are only located in Ukraine and Romania.

A screenshot from the EuroTire YouTube channel showing the countries where the company operates. (Youtube/Eurotire)

In particular, the corporation supplied tires for the company Ferrexpo PLC in Ukraine, which is controlled by Ukrainian dollar billionaire Kostyantyn Zhevago. Ferrexpo PLC owns the Ukrainian Poltava Mining and Processing Plant OJSC, which mines iron ore.

EuroTire’s advertising video states the company cooperates with Ferrexpo PLC.

According to a report published on the Euro Tyres website, more than $300 million were invested in this factory in 2007.

As of March 15, 2019 the owner of the factory is the Romanian company Euro Tyres Manufacturing SRL. This company belongs to two other offshore companies: EuroTyre S.A from the British Virgin Islands and the American Euro Tyres Corporation.

But Panikos Symeou is not the only person who ties Kolomoisky to the international Eurotire corporation. There are also two other links. One of them is the oligarch’s business partner, Uri Laber.

TRUSTED PERSON №3: Uriel Tzvi Laber

Uriel Tzvi Laber is an American who has been actively developing business in Ukraine since the 1990s. Laber is especially interested in oil. During 1997-1999, he founded two fuel companies, Mavex LLC and Petroleum-Invest, LLC.

And, in 2010, Laber became a member of the Supervisory Board of Ukrnafta PJSC. As of March 11, 2019, he still holds this position. Laber is also the director of the American company Optima International of Miami, Inc. According to Bloomberg, this company manufactures tires and is s subsidiary of CB PrivatBank PJSC.

And, of course, Laber himself is director of the Eurotire group of companies.

The connections of Ihor Kolomoisky and Uri Laber. (Nadiya Burdey/Anti-Corruption Action Center)

The connections between Eurotire and Kolomoisky don’t stop there. The Ukrainian and offshore Eurotire companies are involved in PrivatBank-related cases.

As of 2019, the Ukrainian plant for producing over-sized tires is the subject of criminal proceeding by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine over the embezzlement of money from CB Privatbank PJSC, allegedly committed by the management and owners of a substantial part of the bank. Prior to the bank’s nationalization in 2016, one of its co-owners was Igor Kolomoisky.

The Ukrainian plant for producing over-sized tires received a loan in the amount of several million dollars from PrivatBank and did not return the money. When the National Bank uncovered problems inside PrivatBank and Kolomoisky committed to restructure its loan portfolio, employees of the bank transferred the debt from 193 existing companies to non-operating, newly-created companies, which did not have sufficient funds to service the loans. In particular, the debts of actually existing assets — like the the oversized tire plant, were transferred to a newly-created company.

Another offshore company, British Virgin Islands-registered Eurotyre S.A., which owns 99 percent of the factory in Romania, is connected to another embezzlement scheme

According to case materials, PrivatBank officials and owners created a criminal organization and, in 2008-2015, withdrew Hr 12,5 billion ($478 million) in the form of loans to 15 Ukrainian companies. Instead of mortgages, these companies transferred contracts for paid goods to the bank.

So in 2014, Ukrainian company Mondial, LLC concluded an agreement with the non-resident Eurotyre S.A. for the purchase of 21,000 tons of natural rubber for $77 million. This contract was created in the form of a mortgage which Mondial transferred to PrivatBank when it received the loan. Therefore, the company Eurotyre S.A. is obliged to transfer rubber worth $77 million to the bank.

In February 2019, the Pechersk District Court of Kyiv granted the Prosecutor General’s Office access to the contract and a number of other documents located at the office of Eurotyre S.A (Vanterpool Plaza, P.O. Box 873, Wickhams Cay I Road, Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands).

The court granted access to documents in criminal proceeding No. 42017000000001823 as of June 6, 2017 “on the fact of creating a criminal organization, as well as operating such an organization and participation in it in order to obtain the cash funds of CB PrivatBank PJSC in especially large volumes during 2008-2016 by former officials of CB PrivatBank PJSC.”

The court’s decision states that former PrivatBank officials involved “owners and managers of a number of business entities, as well as representatives and final beneficiaries of a number of foreign companies that are connected to the bank through individuals” in order to bring the bank to insolvency.

Kolomoisky’s silico-manganese industry 

Kolomoisky’s partners Korf and Laber also operate the oligarch’s ferroalloy business in the U.S. and Georgia.

In 2015, Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk pursued Ihor Kolomoisky in the High Court of London.

Pinchuk stated that, in the mid-2000s, he gave Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov money for the purchase of one of the largest iron ore mining companies in Ukraine. But he received neither the company, nor money from them. Pinchuk estimated the profit lost during all these years at $2 billion.

But in January 2016, a few days before court hearing, Pinchuk, Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov reached a peace deal: Kolomoisky pledged to give part of the money from the ferroalloy business to Pinchuk.

The ferroalloy holding includes the Nikopol, Zaporizhzhya and Stakhaniv ferroalloy factories and the Marganets and Ordzhonikidze mining and concentrating combines in Dnipropetrovsk region. In fact, none of these Ukrainian ferroalloy enterprises belong to either  Pinchuk or Kolomoisky.

In 2016, the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) published a presentation on the import of silico-manganese. The report also contains a list of Ukrainian ferroalloy factories. According to the Commission, these companies are controlled by Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov. The report also contains a list of the oligarchs’ other ferroalloy assets located in the United States, Georgia and Australia.

A slide from the 2016 report by the United States International Trade Commission (USITC).

Viktor Pinchuk filed an appeal to a Florida court with a request to disclose the ownership property ownership of Georgian American Alloys, Inc. (Delaware), CC Metals and Alloys, LLC (Delaware), Felman Production, LLC (Delaware), and Felman Trading, Inc. (New Jersey). Although these companies are formally registered in offshore jurisdictions and, accordingly, the companies’ owners are not visible, the directors of all these companies were and remain Kolomoisky’s partners Korf and Laber.

Another manager of the companies Felman Production, LLC, Felman Trading, Inc., and the Euro Tyres Corporation is Robert Powell, the husband of Florida Democratic Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell.

In the November 2018 midterm election, Debbie Powell won her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. That same year, the The Miami Herald reported that the Democrat’s husband had been working as the general lawyer in companies controlled by Ihor Kolomoisky for over 10 years. Robert Powell has earned $695,000 while working for these companies in the past two years.

  • “I have never worked for, represented…or received any payments from Kolomoisky,” Powell stated during his wife’s campaign.

Mordechai Korf confirmed the statement. He said that Powell concluded his contracts and that he did not have any direct relationship with Kolomoisky. According to Korf, Powell left the company in 2017.

The Democrat’s husband submitted companies Felman Trading and Robert Powell PA as the source of his income in his latest financial report in 2017.

However, according to Florida’s official register, he signs reports on behalf of Felman Production, LLC even in 2019.

Symeou, Privat, and water terminals 

Panikos Symeou and Uriel Laber’s entanglements don’t end with factories and the media. They are also tied to Ukrainian water terminals.

In an interview with the Ekonomichna Pravda news site, Igor Kolomoisky mentioned the Borivazh water terminal a few days before the second round of presidential election. The oligarh stated that former national bank chief Valeriya Gontareva was interested in this asset.

The head of the National Bank allegedly wanted to purchase the terminal for Hr 100 million ($3.8 million) and resell it for Hr 250 million ($9.5 million). That is why, Kolomoisky claims, she conducted the nationalization of Privatbank without any formal grounds. That was a violation of his rights, he alleges.

The American corporate investigations firm Kroll, which looked into PrivatBank before nationalization, has effectively refuted this claim. But in this context, the very mention of the terminal is interesting: it has never formally belonged to the oligarch.

The company Borivazh

According to case materials, the property of three companies — the Black Sea Fuel Terminal, the Illichivsk Sea Fishing Port and Borivazh — was re-registered at an underestimated value to three other controlled companies: Optima Trade, Agroterminal Logistic and Dar Torg.

The founders of Dar Torg are Cypriots Panikos Simeou and his partner Christakis Konnaris.

And wasn’t complete strangers who re-registered the property of all three terminals, which was valued in total at Hr 683 million ($26 million). According to the investigation, Anatoliy Tereshchenko, the 73-year-old head and accountant of Optima Trade, and Volodymyr Kigitov, founder of Black Sea Fuel Terminal PJSC at that time, did the re-registering.

Anatoliy Tereshchenko is no stranger in Kolomoisky’s world. He was officially employed at the company Mavex, which was co-owned by Kolomoisky partner Uriel Tzvi Laber until 2007.

Laber has been a member of the Supervisory Board at Ukrnafta PJSC since 2010. Fifty percent of this enterprise belongs to the state, while the other half is owned offshore and controlled by Kolomoisky.

And, of course, companies from this group — which formally do not belong to Kolomoisky — received hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from PrivatBank when it belonged to the oligarch. Borivazh LLC received more than $120 million. , the money was not returned to the creditor, and the property has already been re-registered to another firm.

Agroterminal Logistic also received a loan. This company has already paid Hr 996 million ($38 million) to the National Bank of Ukraine. But this is only a third of the Hr 3.6 billion ($137.4 million) in debt, according to loan agreement No. 120.

Recently, Ihor Kolomoisky explained that fear motivates him to register all his assets to trusted persons or offshores. He is supposedly afraid to disclose the ownership structures of companies because they could then be appropriated by President Petro Poroshenko. But Kolomoisky started registering businesses in offshores long before Poroshenko’s presidency. He started after 2000, during a period of active privatization.

This  publication is the first of an upcoming series of stories on the trusted persons of Ukrainian oligarchs by the pep.org.ua project of the Anti-Corruption Action Center. More information and documents about politically exposed persons and their close associates are available at pep.org.ua.

 

 

 

The Secret X-37B Just Landed After 2 Years in Space

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Though the Air Force doesn’t disclose the X-37B’s precise orbit, keen-eyed amateur astronomers have managed to track the vehicle from the ground — and so can you, thanks to their efforts.Check out Space.com’s satellite tracker to see where the X-37B is overhead during a mission. The view won’t be dramatic; the space plane usually looks like a star of middling brightness moving across the sky. More here.

The U.S. Air Force’s top secret spaceplane, the Boeing X-37B, landed in Florida early Sunday after 780 days—over 2 years and one month—in orbit around the Earth. And we still have no idea what it was doing while it was up there.

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-5 (OTV-5) mission was the fifth time that the uncrewed vehicle has flown around the world, beating the duration of the fourth mission, which landed in May of 2017 after 718 days in orbit. This most recent mission launched from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on September 7, 2017.

 

“The X-37B continues to demonstrate the importance of a reusable spaceplane,” Secretary of the Air Force Barbara Barrett said in a statement posted online. “Each successive mission advances our nation’s space capabilities.”

What are those capabilities? We don’t know the specifics. But according to the Air Force, the X-37B has the unique ability to “test new systems in space and return them to Earth” and the mission “successfully completed” all of its objectives.

Military leaders, many of whom were previously skeptical of the need for an entirely new branch of the armed services, appear to be excited about President Donald Trump’s Space Force and the way that the X-37B might play a role in that branch of the military. At least that’s the gist you get reading the Air Force’s press release.

“The safe return of this spacecraft, after breaking its own endurance record, is the result of the innovative partnership between Government and Industry,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein said in a press release. “The sky is no longer the limit for the Air Force and, if Congress approves, the U.S. Space Force.”

This latest mission launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida and landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility on October 27, 2019 at 3:51 a.m. The last time this spaceplane came back to Earth there was video of the landing. This time, however, there was no video, perhaps because the landing took place in the predawn hours.

“This program continues to push the envelope as the world’s only reusable space vehicle. With a successful landing today, the X-37B completed its longest flight to date and successfully completed all mission objectives,” said Randy Walden, Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office director.

“This mission successfully hosted Air Force Research Laboratory experiments, among others, as well as providing a ride for small satellites.”

The Air Force says it plans to launch the sixth X-37B mission from CCAFS in 2020. And you can bet good money we won’t know much about that launch either.

What do you think they were doing up there? A couple of missions ago, something like “aliens” may have been a ridiculous guess. But we’ve sure learned a lot about U.S. military contact with unidentified flying objects since this mission first launched in September of 2017.

I’m not saying they’re flying aliens around in a super secret Air Force spaceplane. But they’re probably flying aliens around in a super secret Air Force spaceplane.

Big Warnings of China Military Expansion

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McRaven, the former head of Joint Special Operations Command overseeing the U.S. Navy SEAL team that took down Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his Pakistan compound in 2011, noted that Chinese technologies such as 5G commercialization is already beating the United States.

The Chinese military displayed several weapons during its National Day parade, including a new supersonic jet that can reportedly reach speeds faster than Mach 3.3, at more than 2500 miles per hour.

The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares

The supersonic jet, called the DR-8, could play a key role in a potential conflict with the U.S. military in the South China Sea.

“China has invested a lot of resources into military science and technology development in a bid to enhance its nuclear deterrence capability over the past years, which Beijing believes represents a strategic measure in countering the global military hegemony [of the United States],” Hong Kong-based military analyst Song Zhongping said.

Additionally, China doubled its nuclear arsenal in the past decade and is set to double it again in the next, top U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) officials stated in August.

“China has long had a no-first-use policy, and yet they’ve doubled their nuclear arsenal in about the last decade, and they’re on track to double it again in the next decade,” said Rear Admiral Michael Brookes, director of intelligence for Stratcom.

As noted by Newt Gingrich:

Now, imagine that China launches a campaign against Taiwan with the help of Russian air forces.

This would entirely change the dynamic, making it much more difficult and costly (in blood and treasure) – and much less likely for any sort of U.S. victory. Now, instead of a focused conflict with China over a specific piece of territory, the U.S. would have to decide whether it wanted to risk engaging with a cooperative China and Russia at the same time.

For many years, China and Russia were like two estranged communist relatives, but that is changing. In recent years, China and Russia have cooperated in a number of military exercises – and their first long-range joint air patrol in the Asia-Pacific region this past summer.

Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin 24 times since 2013, while he has only met with his U.S. counterpart 16 times during that period.

This activity creates a real potential for a China-Russia strategic alliance which would turn much of our national security planning and strategy on its head.

Republic of China, Taiwan | Operation World

China considers Taiwan one of it’s own provinces yet Taiwan is independent which China is fighting. Known as the ‘one China policy’, Western nations including the United States are not to have any kind of relationship with Taiwan but the United States does and this is one of the causes in the trade negotiations.

After decades of China’s veiled threats to invade and a long-running campaign to get Taiwan’s allies to shift their diplomatic allegiance to Beijing, researchers, government officials, and lawmakers in Taipei all say that China is pursuing a new tactic in the runup to Taiwan’s Jan. 11 presidential vote: election meddling. “China is following the steps from Russia,” says Tzeng Yi-suo, head of cyberwarfare at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, which is advising Taiwan’s government on ways to counteract the interference. “In our election campaign periods, there is a most striking influence campaign coming from the Chinese Communist Party.”

China’s disinformation apparatus goes well beyond what it considers its borders, according to an analysis published by Harvard researchers in April. Using proxies around the world and some of the same social media platforms it bans at home, the government in Beijing posts 448 million comments a year aimed at promoting a pro-China agenda or sowing discord, the researchers found. In August, Twitter Inc. suspended 936 mainland Chinese accounts, part of a larger network of 200,000 spam accounts it disabled because of what it called a “significant state-backed operation” working to undermine Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations. On Sept. 20 it suspended an additional 10,000. Facebook Inc. and YouTube have disabled accounts for similar reasons. In December, new foreign-influence laws went into effect in Australia aimed at blocking China’s efforts to sway politics and key decision-makers in that country.

Chinese agencies have been launching an estimated 30 million cyberattacks against Taiwan a month, according to the government’s director general of cybersecurity, Jyan Hong-wei. The patterns indicate Chinese state involvement, he says. Read the full detailed summary here.

Two Raids Killing Baghdadi and More

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The mission was called Operation Mueller, named after the American girl that was doing international missionary work that became al Baghdadi’s sex slave and eventual dead victim. The mission by American Delta Force was planned in late summer and included major intelligence gathered by the Kurds.

There was an arrest a few months ago of an al Baghdadi wife and the cultivation of a al Baghdadi aid where information was gathered through respective interrogations of those people. Additionally, Iraq did offer some information.

Baghdadi would sometimes hold strategy talks with his commanders in moving minibuses packed with vegetables in order to avoid detection, Ismael al-Ethawi told officials after he was arrested by Turkish authorities and handed to the Iraqis.

“Ethawi gave valuable information which helped the Iraqi multi-security agencies team complete the missing pieces of the puzzle of Baghdadi’s movements and places he used to hide,” one of the Iraqi security officials said.

“Ethawi gave us details on five men, including him, whom were meeting Baghdadi inside Syria and the different locations they used,” he told Reuters. After the group largely collapsed in 2017, Ethawi fled to Syria with his Syrian wife.

Many details were provided CIA and they used a satellite and drones to watch the location for the past five months,” the official said.

Two days ago, Baghdadi left the location with his family for the first time, traveling by minibus to a nearby village.

The day after the Baghdadi operation, there was yet another by CIA. The CIA has targeted Islamic State militant group (ISIS) spokesperson Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir in a new operation that comes one day after the organization’s leader was killed in a Joint Special Operations Command raid.

“Continuing the previous operation, terrorist Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir, the right-hand man of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and an ISIS spokesman, was targeted in the village of Ayn al-Bayda, near Jarablus, in direct coordination between SDF intelligence and the U.S. military. Muhajir was named ISIS spokesperson in 2016 after his predecessor, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, was killed in a U.S. airstrike, also in Aleppo. Unlike Baghdadi and Adnani, who were known to be Iraqi and Syrian nationals, respectively, and were openly active in Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Muhajir’s identity was publicly unknown, though his nickname⁠—meaning “emigrant”⁠—suggested he may be a foreigner.

Due to Baghdadi having to move often and remain in isolation, a named figure was assigned to be the second in command. Abdullah Qardash was named and nominted by Baghdadi and was formally put in the top command upon the death of Baghdadi.Qardash was a former high-ranking officer in the Iraqi army, who served under the country’s late leader Saddam Hussein.

Who Is Baghdadi's Successor? - The Syrian Observer

 

 

Your Forced RSVP to the Cancel Party

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This list is hardly a complete list but it should stimulate some critical thought when it comes to Progessives attempting to run our lives and force law and policy upon us. The Progressives equal the Democrats, the Socialists, the Liberals. The notion of civil society is fading fast.

The Fight Doesn’t End With Kavanaugh | Earthjustice

Consider the following:

  1. The impeachment inquiry consuming Washington DC is effectively cancelling not only the vote for Trump to drain the swamp but to undo and redo past administration(s) actions.
  2. Cancelling history, changing the education syllabus on civics, monuments and principles.
  3. Cancelling the protections of the Bill of Rights, mostly all of them forcing government, state and federal to dispense their own versions of protections.
  4. Democrat organizations conspiring with media to cancel real news and facts with opinion.
  5. Cancelling and omitting law for protests, demonstrations, gang violence and shame.
  6. Cancelling new life for late term abortions while opposing the death penalty.
  7. Cancelling public safety and sovereignty by enabling homelessness, sanctuary cities, and legal challenges on immigration law.
  8. Cancelling self-governance for full reliance on government(s).
  9. Cancelling access to health treatment(s) and medicines with overwhelming costs, deductibles and policy restrictions.
  10. Cancelling any privacy protections when it comes to banking records, healthcare records, personal habits, buying trends, education, travel and homelife.
  11. Cancelling consequences for unlawful acts while selectively applying consequences for others, application of indictments and sentencing is subjective.
  12. Cancelling constituent access and legislative input.

Each of these items require the reader to apply real events to prove the points. Admitting the truths is the first step to seeking solutions, importance and call to actions by voters.

In this fractured and separated landscape, hate and apathy prevail such that any notion of recovery is fleeing. We have class warfare, fake news, deep fakes, shadow operations, new definitions and promoted manufactured dangers.

We have lost confidence in enforcing law, statesmenship, leadership, trust where it has been replaced by distrust, fear, self-censorship and isolation.

Pew Research this past June published a fascinating study.

Many Americans see declining levels of trust in the country, whether it is their confidence in the federal government and elected officials or their trust of each other, a new Pew Research Center report finds. And most believe that the interplay between the trust issues in the public and the interpersonal sphere has made it harder to solve some of the country’s problems. This research is part of the Center’s ongoing focus on issues tied to trust, facts and democracy.

The first item in the study:

Three-quarters of Americans say that their fellow citizens’ trust in the federal government has been shrinking, and 64% believe that about peoples’ trust in each other.

When asked a separate question about the reasons why trust has declined in the past 20 years, people offer a host of reasons in their written answers. Those who think there has been a decline of trust in the federal government over these two decades often see the problem tied to the government’s performance: 36% of those who see the decline cite this. Some worry the government is doing too much, others say too little, and others mention the government doing the wrong things or nothing at all. Respondents also cite concerns about how money has corrupted it and how corporations control the political process. President Donald Trump and his administration are mentioned in 14% of answers, and a smaller share lays the blame on Democrats. Additionally, 10% of those who see decline lay fault at the feet of the news media.

Those who think interpersonal trust has declined in the past generation offer a laundry list of societal and political problems, including a sense that Americans on the whole have become more lazy, greedy and dishonest. Some respondents make a connection between what they think is poor government performance – especially gridlock in Washington – and the toll it has taken on their fellow citizens’ hearts. Overall, 49% of adults think interpersonal trust has been tailing off because people are less reliable than they used to be.

***

2 Nearly two-thirds (64%) say that low trust in the federal government makes it harder to solve many of the country’s problems. About four-in-ten (39%) who gave follow-up answers on why this was the case cite domestic concerns, topped by immigration and border issues, health care, racism and race-related issues, or guns and gun violence issues. Some also cite environmental issues, tax and budget matters, or political processes like voting rights and gerrymandering.

Another 70% of Americans believe that citizens’ low trust in each other makes it harder to solve problems. (They were not asked a follow-up question to explain their answer.)

3 Most think the decline in trust can be turned around. More than eight-in-ten Americans (84%) believe it is possible to improve the level of confidence people have in the government. Their written responses about how to make headway on trust problems urge a variety of political reforms, starting with more disclosure of what the government is doing, as well as term limits and restrictions on the role of money in politics. Some 15% of those who answered this question point to a need for better political leadership, including greater honesty and cooperation among those in the political class.

Read the full study here.