Hong Kong is Facing Recession due to Protests

Posted on November 18, 2019November 18, 2019 by Denise Simon

5 months of protests, fighting for real freedom has Hong Kong facing recession. Asian Airlines has cut flights due in part to cancellations by passengers for several airline carriers of up to 13%.

(UPI) — A government report last week projected a recession for the Hong Kong economy in 2019, which would be its first in a decade.

The forecast said the Hong Kong economy will have contracted by 1.3 percent by the end of the year, in no small part due to ongoing political protests that began to reject a proposed extradition law but have grown to include numerous issues.

Meanwhile, at the Polytechnic University where students and protestors were trapped, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to keep the protestors from fleeing.

Police say 4,491 people, aged from 11 to 83, have been arrested since protests began in June.

Demonstrators are angry at what they see as Chinese meddling in Hong Kong’s promised freedoms when the then British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. They say they are responding to excessive use of force by police.

China says it is committed to the “one country, two systems” formula granting Hong Kong autonomy. The city’s police deny accusations of brutality and say they show restraint. More here.

The European Union and the United States have condemned the escalating violence in Hong Kong amid fears of a bloody crackdown as authorities laid siege to a university campus occupied by pro-democracy demonstrators.

Hundreds of anti-government protesters armed with petrol bombs and other homemade weapons had retreated to the Polytechnic University after a weekend of mayhem, which saw roads blocked, a bridge set alight and a police officer shot with a bow and arrow.

Protesters who tried to make a run for freedom were met with volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets.

‘Unacceptable’

A spokeswoman for foreign affairs at the European Commission expressed “deep concern” on Monday over reports that Hong Kong first responders and medical staff were being detained by law enforcement forces, preventing them from providing assistance to injured people.

“Any violence is of course unacceptable and any action by the law enforcement authorities must remain strictly proportionate and fundamental freedoms, including in particular the right of peaceful assembly and expression, must be upheld,” Maja Kocijancic told reporters.

Britain also described itself as “seriously concerned” over the violence on Monday with a spokesperson for Prime Minister Boris Johnson saying London continues to urge “restraint on all sides and support the right to peaceful protest.”

The Foreign Office added that “it is vital that those who are injured are able to receive appropriate medical treatment, and that safe passage is made available for all those who wish to leave the area.”

The United States had earlier condemned the “unjustified use of force” in Hong Kong and called on Beijing to protect Hong Kong’s freedom, a senior official in President Donald Trump’s administration said.

‘We need help’

According to Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority, 38 people were wounded during the night of Sunday to Monday.

Dan, a 19-year-old protester on the Polytechnic University campus, said protesters may need international help.”

“We’ve been trapped here for too long. We need all Hong Kongers to know we need help,” he added, bursting into tears. “I don’t know how much longer we can go on like this.”

Police, who have faced an array of weapons including petrol bombs, bow and arrows and catapults, urged protesters to leave.

“Police appeal to everyone inside the Polytechnic University to drop their weapons and dangerous items, remove their gas masks and leave via the top level of Cheong Wan Road South Bridge in an orderly manner,” they said in a statement.

One country, two systems

Recent days have seen a dramatic escalation of the unrest that has plunged the Asian financial hub into chaos for almost six months.

Demonstrators angry at what they see as Chinese meddling in Hong Kong’s promised freedoms when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. They say they are responding to excessive use of force by police.

China says it is committed to the “one country, two systems” formula granting Hong Kong autonomy, with the city’s police accusations they use undue violence.

Chinese soldiers in a base close to the university were seen on Sunday monitoring developments at the university with binoculars, some dressed in riot gear.

Separately, Hong Kong’s High Court ruled on Monday that a British colonial-era emergency law revived by the government to ban protesters wearing face masks was unconstitutional.

It said the law was “incompatible with the Basic Law”, the mini-constitution under which Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997.

Trump’s Reelection Operation Targeted by Cyber Attacks

Posted on November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Denise Simon

Hey Hillary it is not Russia, but they are out there for sure. This time most notable attributions are pointing to Iran.

When the Pentagon recently awarded Microsoft a $10 billion contract to transform and host the US military’s cloud computing systems, the mountain of money came with an implicit challenge: Can Microsoft keep the Pentagon’s systems secure against some of the most well-resourced, persistent, and sophisticated hackers on earth?

“They’re under assault every hour of the day,” says James Lewis, vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Microsoft’s latest win over cloud rival Amazon for the ultra-lucrative military contact means that an intelligence-gathering apparatus among the most important in the world is based in the woods outside Seattle. These kinds of national security responsibilities once sat almost exclusively in Washington, DC. Now in this corner of Washington state, dozens of engineers and intelligence analysts are dedicated to watching and stopping the government-sponsored hackers proliferating around the world.

Members of the so-called MSTIC (Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center) team are threat-focused: one group is responsible for Russian hackers code-named Strontium, another watches North Korean hackers code-named Zinc, and yet another tracks Iranian hackers code-named Holmium. MSTIC tracks over 70 code-named government-sponsored threat groups and many more that are unnamed.

What are the superpowers of Microsoft?

“Microsoft sees stuff that just nobody else does,” says Williams, who founded the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec. “We routinely find stuff, for instance, like flags for malicious IPs in Office 365 that Microsoft flags, but we don’t see it anywhere else for months.”

Connect the dots

Cyber threat intelligence is the discipline of tracking adversaries, following bread crumbs, and producing intelligence you can use to help your team and make the other side’s life harder. To achieve that, the five-year-old MSTIC team includes former spies and government intelligence operators whose experience at places like Fort Meade, home to the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, translates immediately to their roles at Microsoft.

MSTIC names dozens of threats, but the geopolitics are complicated: China and the United States, two of the most significant players in cyberspace and the two biggest economies on earth, are virtually never called out the way countries like Iran, Russia, and North Korea frequently are.

“Our team uses the data, connects the dots, tells the story, tracks the actor and their behaviors,” says Jeremy Dallman, a director of strategic programs and partnerships at MSTIC. “They’re hunting the actors—where they’re moving, what they’re planning next, who they are targeting—and getting ahead of that.”

Microsoft, like other tech giants including Google and Facebook, regularly notifies people targeted by government hackers, which gives the targets the chance to defend themselves. In the last year, MSTIC has notified around 10,000 Microsoft customers that they’re being targeted by government hackers.

New targets

Beginning in August, MSTIC spotted what’s known as a password spraying campaign. Hackers took around 2,700 educated guesses at passwords for accounts associated with an American presidential campaign, government officials, journalists, and high-profile Iranians living outside Iran. Four accounts were compromised in this attack.

“Once we understand their infrastructure—we have an IP address we know is theirs that they use for malicious purposes—we can start looking at DNS records, domains created, platform traffic,” Dallman says. “When they turn around and start using that infrastructure in this kind of attack, we see it because we’re already tracking that as a known indicator of that actor’s behavior.”

After doing considerable reconnaissance work, Phosphorus tried to exploit the account recovery process by using targets’ real phone numbers. MSTIC has spotted Phosphorus and other government-sponsored hackers, including Russia’s Fancy Bear, repeatedly using that tactic to try to phish two-factor authentication codes for high-value targets.

What raised Microsoft’s alarm above normal on this occasion was that Phosphorus varied its standard operating procedure of going after NGOs and sanctions organizations. The cross-hairs shifted, the tactics changed, and the scope grew.

Microsoft’s sleuthing ultimately pointed the finger at Iranian hackers for targeting presidential campaigns including, Reuters reported, Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection operation.

One consequence of the 2016 US election is a rise in the sheer number of players fighting to hack political parties, campaigns, and think tanks, not to mention government itself. Election-related hacking has typically been the province of the “big four”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. But it’s spreading to other countries, although the Microsoft researchers declined to specify what they’ve seen.

“What is different is that you’re getting additional countries joining the fray that weren’t necessarily there before,” says Jason Norton, a principal project manager on MSTIC. “The big two [Russia and China]—now, we can say they’ve been historically going after this since well before the 2016 election. But now you’re getting to see additional countries do that—poking and prodding the soft underbelly in order to know the right pieces to have an influence or impact in the future.”

“The field is getting crowded,” Dallman agrees. “Actors are learning from each other. As they learn tactics from the more prominent names, they turn that around and use them.”

The upcoming election is different, too, in that no one is surprised to see this malicious activity. Leading into 2016, Russian cyber activity was greeted with a collective dumbfounded naïveté, contributing to paralysis and an unsure response. Not this time.

You saw them in 2016, you saw what they did in Germany, you saw them in the French elections—all following the same MO. The 2018 midterms, too—to a lesser degree, but we still saw some of the same MO, the same actors, the same timing, the same techniques. Now we know, going into 2020, that this is the MO we’re looking for. And now we’ve started to see other countries come out and start doing other tactics.”

In 2016, it was CrowdStrike that first investigated and pointed the finger at Russian activity aiming to interfere with the American election. The US law enforcement and intelligence community later confirmed the company’s findings and eventually, after Robert Mueller’s investigation, indicted Russian hackers and detailed Moscow’s campaign.

MIT Technology Review visited Microsoft, the full summary is here.

US Intel Tips Forced China to Prosecute Fentanyl Operation

Posted on November 7, 2019November 7, 2019 by Denise Simon

A trial continues as fentanyl drug traffickers are sentenced in court, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2019, in Xingtai, north China’s Hebei Province. The court sentenced at least nine fentanyl traffickers Thursday in a case that was a culmination of a rare collaboration between Chinese and U.S. law enforcement to crack down on global networks that manufacture and distribute lethal synthetic opioids. (Jin Liangkuai/Xinhua via AP)

XINGTAI, China (AP) — A Chinese court sentenced nine fentanyl traffickers on Thursday in a case that is the culmination of a rare collaboration between Chinese and U.S. law enforcement to crack down on global networks that manufacture and distribute lethal synthetic opioids.

Liu Yong was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, while Jiang Juhua and Wang Fengxi were sentenced to life in prison. Six other members of the operation received lesser sentences, ranging from six months to 10 years. Death sentences are almost always commuted to life in prison after the reprieve.

Working off a 2017 tip from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security about an online drug vendor who went by the name Diana, Chinese police busted a drug ring based in the northern Chinese city of Xingtai that shipped synthetic drugs illicitly to the U.S. and other countries from a gritty clandestine laboratory. They arrested more than 20 suspects and seized 11.9 kilograms (26.2 pounds) of fentanyl and 19.1 kilograms (42.1 pounds) of other drugs.

In form, the enterprise resembled a small business, with a perky sales force that spoke passable English, online marketing, contract manufacturing, and a sophisticated export operation, according to U.S. and Chinese law enforcement.

But the business had grave implications. Police photographs of the seizure show a dingy, chaotic scene, with open containers of unidentified chemicals and Chinese police in rubber gloves and breathing masks.

Liu and Jiang were accused of manufacturing and trafficking illicit drugs. The others were accused of trafficking.

Chinese officials said the Xingtai case was one of three fentanyl trafficking networks they are pursuing based on U.S. intelligence, but declined to discuss the details of the other cases, which are ongoing.

Austin Moore, an attaché to China for the U.S. Homeland Security Department, said the Xingtai case was “an important step” showing that Chinese and U.S. investigators are able to collaborate across international borders.

Moore said Chinese police identified more than 50 U.S. residents who tried to buy fentanyl from the Xingtai organization. Those leads prompted over 25 domestic investigations and have already resulted in three major criminal arrests and indictments in New York and Oregon, he said.

Scrambling to contain surging overdose deaths, Washington has blamed Beijing for failing to curb the supply of synthetic drugs that U.S. officials say come mainly from China. In August, President Donald Trump lashed out at Chinese President Xi Jinping for failing to do more to combat illicit opioid distribution in China’s vast, freewheeling chemicals industry. U.S. officials have reportedly moved to link Beijing’s efforts on fentanyl to U.S. trade talks.

Yu Haibin, deputy director of the Office of China National Narcotics Control Commission, on Thursday called allegations that Chinese supply is at the root of America’s opioid problem “irresponsible and inconsistent with the actual facts.”

“Drug crime is the public enemy of all humankind,” he added. “It’s about the life of human beings. It should not be related with the trade war or other political reasons.”

Chinese officials have been at pains to emphasize the efforts they have made to expand drug controls and crack down on illicit suppliers, even though synthetic opioid abuse is not perceived to be a significant problem in China.

But prosecuting cases against a new, rising class of Chinese synthetic drug kingpins has remained a challenge. Profit-seeking chemists have adroitly exploited regulatory loopholes by making small changes to the chemical structure of banned substances to create so-called analogs that are technically legal.

U.S. officials have been hopeful that China’s move earlier this year to outlaw unsanctioned distribution of all fentanyl-like drugs as a class will help constrain supply and make it easier to prosecute Chinese dealers.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 500,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the decade ending in 2017 — increasingly, from synthetic opioids like the ones sold by the Xingtai network.

The American opioid crisis began in the 1990s, when the over-prescription of painkillers like OxyContin stoked addiction. Many people who became hooked on pain pills later moved to heroin. Fentanyl — an even more potent lab-made drug that raked in profits — then entered the U.S. illicit drug supply, causing overdose deaths to spike.

***

The question of what, if any, responsibility China should bear for fuelling a deadly opioid crisis in the United States has been a bitter source of contention between the two superpowers.

China’s jailing of nine people Thursday for trafficking and selling fentanyl to US buyers following a rare joint probe with US law enforcement would suggest Beijing is moving to address the problem.

But experts warn that while the case is a big step, it is not enough to stop the drug from pouring into the United States — from China and increasingly from Mexico as drug cartels pick up the slack.

Here is a look at the opioid crisis and the tensions it has caused between China and the United States:

What’s fentanyl?

Fentanyl was introduced to the US market in the 1960s as an intravenous anaesthetic to manage severe pain. It is used for cancer patients or those receiving end-of-life care.

The drug is 50 times more potent than heroin, with only a few milligrammes — equivalent to a few grains of sand — enough to kill someone.

It is trafficked into the United States, primarily from China and Mexico, in the form of powder or tablets, and is sometimes mixed with heroin and cocaine.

Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids killed 32,000 people in the US last year according to government data.

The drug can be bought online and shipped to the United States via regular mail, posing a major challenge for postal inspectors sifting through mountains of packages.

What’s China doing about it?

Trump has long urged China to crack down on fentanyl.

It has even become a bargaining chip in the trade spat between the world’s two largest economies.

“High-level officials continue to blame China for the failure to stem the flow and that might be impacting the trade negotiations,” Bryce Pardo, a policy researcher at RAND Corporation, told AFP.

When Trump and President Xi Jinping declared a trade war truce at a summit in Argentina in December 2018, the Chinese side said it would designate all variants of fentanyl as controlled substances.

Trump hoped the move would be a “game changer” because China applies the death penalty against drug dealers.

It was not until five months later, in May, that China finally designated all fentanyl analogues as a controlled substance.

Before the ban, smugglers could skirt the law by changing the formula to make fentanyl-like drugs.

But three months later, Trump complained that China was still not doing enough.

Then came the news on Thursday that a court in northern Hebei province had handed a suspended death sentence to a smuggler and jailed eight others for terms ranging from six months to life after the first successful joint US-China investigation against a fentanyl operation.

Is it enough?

“It’s one case. You can count it as a success and it is,” Mike Vigil, a former head of international operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told AFP.

“But there is much more to be done. That’s a very tiny tip of the iceberg,” Vigil said.

Experts say China lacks the manpower to inspect all laboratories that produce fentanyl.

“The big problem is that there are so many laboratories and they have about 2,000 inspectors, which is not nearly enough,” Vigil said.

Scott Stewart, a security analyst at US intelligence consultancy Stratfor, said the flow of fentanyl and its precursor chemicals will not stop until China addresses “deeper problems” such as going after “powerful players” and lifting tax credits companies get for selling certain chemicals.

Is the ban working?

While the US welcomed China’s ban on all types of fentanyl, the move appears to have shifted production to Mexico, where drug cartels have quickly adapted to new law enforcement actions.

Chinese labs also produce the chemicals needed to make fentanyl and Mexican drug traffickers are importing them to produce the narcotic themselves, Vigil said.

“Precursor chemicals are fuelling the rise in the manufacture of fentanyl in Mexico by the major drug cartels,” Vigil said.

The DEA said Monday the cartels were making “mass quantities” of fentanyl-laced drugs.

China, for its part, continues to deny it is the source of the problem.

Following Thursday’s court case, Yu Haibin, a Chinese anti-drug official, pointedly said American deaths from overdoses had continued to rise after Beijing cracked down on all types of fentanyl.

China is about to Own Uganda

Posted on November 7, 2019November 7, 2019 by Denise Simon

It is called debt-trapping by China. China has been trapping small desperate nations for several years and few are paying attention. Imperialism? Yes on a global scale.

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Uganda is about to default to China. 39% of the debt in Uganda is owed to China. It could be that beyond Uganda, Tanzania, Ethopia and Kenya could be the next victims to debt-trapping. China financed a $4 billion oil pipeline as part of the Belt and Road initiative. When this default suraces, China will own the strategic sites that connects Beijing to the Persian Gulf. Railways are an essential part of the required transportation channels.

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African Stand reported in December last year that the Kenyan government risks losing the lucrative Mombasa port to China if the country fails to repay huge loans advanced by Chinese lenders, but both Chinese and Kenyan officials have dismissed that the port’s ownership is at risk.

Others think the Chinese government is in some ways gangsters, taking over mines all over Africa, sending thousands of Chinese workers, destroy the environment, bring the minerals such as copper, sink, gold, silver, diamonds etc home, and make deals with corrupt politicians to plunder the countries.

“The case is one of the examples of China’s ambitious use of loans and aid to gain influence around the world and of its willingness to play hardball to collect,” says the New York Times on December 12, 2017.

At a time in Somalia when local fishermen are struggling to compete with foreign vessels that are depleting fishing stocks, the government has granted 31 fishing licenses to China.

But Uganda’s auditor-general warned in a report released this month that public debt from June 2017 to 2018 had increased from $9.1 billion to $11.1 billion.

The report — without naming China — warned that conditions placed on major loans were a threat to Uganda’s sovereign assets.

It said that in some loans, Uganda had agreed to waive sovereignty over properties if it defaults on the debt — a possibility that Kasaija rejected.

“China taking over assets? … in Uganda, I have told you, as long as some of us are still in charge, unless there is really a catastrophe, and which I don’t see at all, that will make this economy going behind. So, … I’m not worried about China taking assets. They can do it elsewhere, I don’t know. But here, I don’t think it will come,” he said.

n December 2017, the Sri Lankan government handed its Hambantota port to China for a lease period of 99 years after failing to show commitment in the payment of billions of dollars in loans.

Also in September 2018, African Stand reported that China was taking over Zambia’s state power company and Kenneth Kaunda International Airport over unpaid debt rippled across Africa, despite government denials.

China’s Exim Bank has funded about 85 percent of two major Ugandan power projects — Karuma and Isimba dams. It also financed and built Kampala’s $476 million Entebbe Express Highway to the airport, which cut driving time by more than half. China’s National Offshore Oil Corporation, France’s Total, and Britain’s Tullow Oil co-own Uganda’s western oil fields, set to be tapped by 2021.

Big Warnings of China Military Expansion

Posted on October 28, 2019October 28, 2019 by Denise Simon

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 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.