Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

Chinese Operations Expanding Businesses in America

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Even after more than a year of the China virus, why is no one saying NO?

Let’s begin in California shall we?

Chinese autonomous vehicle startup Pony.ai has received a permit from California’s Department of Motor Vehicles to test its driverless cars without human safety drivers behind the wheel on specified streets in three cities.

China’s Robocars Are Way Behind Their U.S. Counterparts Getty Images

Pony has been authorized to test autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in California since 2017, but the new permit will let it test six autonomous vehicles without safety drivers on specific streets in Fremont, Alameda County; Milpitas, Santa Clara County; and Irvine, Orange County. According to the DMV, the vehicles are designed to be driven on roads with speed limits of 45 miles per hour or less, in clear weather and light precipitation. The first testing will be in Fremont and Milpitas on weekdays between 10AM and 3PM.

A total of 55 companies have active permits to test driverless vehicles in California according to the DMV, but Pony is only the eighth company to receive a driverless testing permit, joining fellow Chinese companies AutoX, Baidu, and WeRide, along with US companies Cruise, Nuro, Waymo, and Zoox. Nuro is the only company so far to receive a deployment permit that allows it to operate its autonomous vehicles in California commercially.

Pony.ai, which is based in Guangzhou and Silicon Valley, was valued at $3 billion after a $400 million investment from Toyota last year. The company said earlier this month its robotaxis will be ready for customers in 2023. Pony claims it’s the first company to launch autonomous ride-hailing and provide self-driving car rides to the general public in China.

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More than 100 American cities, towns and counties have purchased surveillance systems made in China that the U.S. government has restricted for use by its own agencies, according to a new study.

Critics say China’s ruling Commnist Party has used the system to crush dissent at home and repress minorities.

Thermal-imaging and video technology from companies Dahua and Hikvision cost municipalities many thousands of dollars, according to the new report from IPVM, video surveillance researchers, and TechCrunch, a tech-focused publication.

China has allegedly relied on Hikvision and Dahua to surveil the Uyghur Muslim minority population in China. Dahua denies that its technology targets ethnic groups and also has rejected allegations of impropriety it says were implied in the 2019 defense authorization law.

The FY 2019 National Defense Authorization Act prohibited the use of Hikvision and Dahua by federal agencies for public safety, security and surveillance purposes. The study found that local governments did not stop purchasing the technology even after it was effectively banned at the federal level.

“The biggest spender, according to data and as previously reported by IPVM, showed that the Board of Education in Fayette County, Georgia, spent $490,000 in August 2020 on dozens of Hikvision thermal cameras, used for temperature checks at public schools,” wrote TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker.

Hikvision created a map of where the technology was purchased in the U.S. since 2015 and reported that Dahua and Hikvision technology sales to U.S. government entities rose 80% between 2019 and 2020 because of its fever-camera sales.

Details on the Pentagon Targeting Extremism

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Your task is to check out the resumes of each of these people. For further context keep reading.

*** The 17 page DARPA document is here.

Flags from the left-wing Antifa movement. Depictions of Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character that’s been misappropriated by racist groups. Iconography from the far-right Proud Boys, including the phrase “stand back and stand by” from former President Donald Trump.

They are all signs that extremists could be infiltrating the military, according to internal training materials that offer a more detailed view into the array of radical groups and ideologies the Pentagon is trying to keep out of the ranks.

“There are members of the [Department of Defense] who belong to extremist groups or actively participate in efforts to further extremist ideologies,” states a 17-page briefing obtained by POLITICO that was compiled by the DoD Insider Threat Management and Analysis Center, which is part of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

“Be aware of symbols of far right, far left, Islamist or single issue ideologies,” it warns, stressing that members of the military and civilian personnel have “a duty and responsibility” to report extremist behavior or activity.

The materials were prepared as part of a broader Pentagon effort to crack down on extremists who may be lurking inside the military after dozens of ex-service members were arrested for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the presidential election.

The prevalence of extremists in the Defense Department appears to be small. For example, the 222,000-strong Marine Corps recently reported that it kicked out four members last year for extremist activity.

But the Pentagon says one is too many and the true numbers are not known because adherents who have been recruited by extremist groups or encouraged to enlist often organize and communicate in secret.

“No one truly knows,” Audrey Kurth Cronin, the director of American University’s Center for Security, Innovation and New Technology, told a House panel this week. “No serious plan can be built without defining the scope of the problem.”

The internal training materials focus on extremist behavior and symbolism — of all different stripes — and point out the risk of making false assumptions about people who do not pose any threat. This includes pointing out that religious conservatives are often mistakenly lumped together with white supremacists or other extremists.

The Department of Homeland Security has said white supremacist extremists are the most lethal terror threat facing the U.S. And while Republicans accused far-left groups such as Antifa of taking part in the insurrection, FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers this month there’s “no evidence” those groups played a role.

Last month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a force-wide stand down requiring all units to discuss the threat of extremism within 60 days.

He called it the first step in “a concerted effort to better educate ourselves and our people about the scope of this problem and to develop sustainable ways to eliminate the corrosive effects that extremist ideology and conduct have on the workforce.”

The stand downs also include “listening sessions” to hear from Pentagon personnel about their experiences with activity, such as one held on Friday by a unit of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division.

The department published broad guidance for commanders to address address extremism, which focuses on reinforcing the military’s core principles enshrined in the oath they take to the Constitution and several case studies of military members who were prosecuted for engaging in extremist activity or plotting with radical groups.

But those materials did not identify specific threat groups, and Austin has provided wide leeway for individual units and commands to address the challenge as they see fit.

The internal briefing shared with POLITICO was compiled by the human resources office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a small Pentagon agency of several hundred military personnel, civilian employees and contractors that manages research into breakthrough technologies.

Pentagon spokesman Jamal Brown noted that military units and individual components have been given broad authority to tailor their own approaches to addressing the extremist threat with their employees. He could not immediately say how many personnel have received this specific information and deferred questions about it to DARPA.

Jared Adams, a spokesperson for DARPA, explained in an email that “our training module was copied verbatim from the material provided by the DOD Insider Threat Management & Analysis Center of the Defense Counter Intelligence and Security Agency.

“We did not add any symbols and used all the imagery provided,” Adams said.

The briefing was sent to civilian employees as part of required training across the department for “Extremism and Insider Threat in the DoD.” Adams said it is required training to be completed by this month. Employees have to digest the material and then answer some questions.

The more detailed materials break down extremist movements into three main categories, including “Patriot” extremism, anarchist extremism, and ethnic/racial supremacy.

More here from Politico.

Scientists are Growing Aborted Baby Hair on Lab Rats

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Is there a word more descriptive than depravity that really works to define this work between the University of Pittsburgh and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases? Where is the rest of the media on this? Anyone in Congress? Planned Parenthood provided the fetuses….

 

A new video from the Center for Medical Progress exposes a gristly experiment at the University of Pittsburgh that involved scalping five-month aborted babies and implanting their scalps onto rodents.

Now, Pennsylvania leaders are demanding an investigation and urging the university to stop its experiments using aborted baby body parts.

“Publicly available information demonstrates that Pitt hosts some of the most barbaric experiments carried out on aborted human infants, including scalping 5-month-old aborted fetuses to stitch onto lab rats,” the Center for Medical Progress said in a statement.

The information comes from a study that University of Pittsburgh researchers published in September 2020 in the journal “Scientific Reports.” It describes how scientists used scalps from aborted babies to create “humanized” mice and rats to study the human immune system.

Along with the study, the researchers published photos of their experiment – horrific images that show tufts of babies’ hair growing on the rodents.

The Center for Medical Progress video raises even more concerns about unethical and potentially illegal practices at the university, including babies potentially being born alive in abortions, killed and then dissected for their organs.

It also suggests the University of Pittsburgh and local Planned Parenthood, which supplies aborted baby body parts, may be involved in an “illegal quid pro quo” partnership.

“Local Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania abortion providers supply the aborted fetuses, while Pitt sponsors the local Planned Parenthood’s operations,” the investigation found.

What’s more, a number of the experiments using aborted baby body parts at the university are funded by U.S. taxpayers through the National Institutes of Health and, in particular, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases office, CMP found in its investigation.

The Pennsylvania Family Institute letter also urged the university to end its unethical research in an open letter in response to the investigation.

“We call on the University of Pittsburgh to stop all experimentation on aborted babies and the inhumane practice of grafting their skin and body parts onto rodents,” it says.

They urged the state legislature to conduct a full investigation of the university, Planned Parenthood and other groups involved in the experiments.

“This ghastly finding is a product of Pitt’s systemic practices of using aborted babies for inhumane research,” they wrote. “Pitt has been involved in hundreds of fetal kidneys and other organs from aborted babies being distributed for research as part of a project funded by the National Institute of Health. Pitt has also had scientists harvesting fetal livers ‘in vivo’ from fetuses delivered via labor induction.”

Information in the video comes from public documents, including research published in scientific journals and on the National Institutes of Health website.

Action: Sign the open letter calling on the University of Pittsburgh to end its experiments on aborted babies and supporting a full investigation by the Pennsylvania General Assembly. source

 

 

Biden Ignoring Ukraine in Favor of Russia

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The real hurt and consequence is Ukraine as you read on.

The Biden administration has waived sanctions on a company building a controversial gas pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The US also lifted sanctions on the executive – an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin – who leads the firm behind the Nord Stream 2 project.

The move came in a report on Russian sanctions delivered to Congress by the Department of State.

Critics say the pipeline is a major geopolitical prize for the Kremlin.

The project, which would take gas from the Russian Arctic under the Baltic Sea to Germany, is already more than 95% complete.

The Department of State report notes that Nord Stream 2 AG and its chief executive, Matthias Warnig, a former East German intelligence officer, engaged in sanctionable activity.

Nord Stream 2: Biden waives US sanctions on Russian pipeline - BBC News

How it bypasses Ukraine further putting Ukraine into a financial crisis –>

Ukraine crisis: Europe's stored gas high as prices soar - BBC News

But it concludes that it is in the US national interest to waive the sanctions.

 

The Department of State also imposed sanctions on four Russian ships involved in the building of Nord Stream 2, though detractors said that would not be enough to stop the pipeline.

Meanwhile:

Ukrainians breathed a collective sigh of relief last month when Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would withdraw the majority of more than 100,000 troops that had been shifted to the Russian-Ukrainian border. So did the U.S., NATO and the rest of Europe.

But nobody should be breathing easy: Putin isn’t one to stay on the retreat. So, where should we expect his next provocation? Very likely, the waters of the Black Sea.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and carved off the strategically vital peninsula of Crimea, the largest land grab from a sovereign state in this century. Since then, he has supplied money, training, arms and military advisers to separatist forces in the Donbas region of southeast Ukraine.

The recent buildup was probably a signal to the West of how relentless Putin will be on pressuring Ukraine, and of his deep opposition to it joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It was also a distraction from his persecution of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, and played well with Putin’s base in Russia, where his approval rating soared during the Crimea annexation. Finally, the buildup allowed the Russian military a pretty effective practice run, in case Putin does decide to roll the dice and invade across the border.

Although one should never underestimate Putin’s ability to surprise his geopolitical rivals, this doesn’t seem like the moment for a full-blown land incursion. Putin is already financially overextended with his overseas adventures. Reconstructing Syria will come with a huge bill. Support to Ukrainian separatists is expensive. He has a great appetite for expensive new weapons (militarizing space, for example). And he remains under significant sanctions from the West. source

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Seems President Biden got the lobby memo to support Moscow.

OS: Biden has not made any moves that would prevent completion of the pipeline, which would transfer natural gas from Russia to Germany while bypassing Poland and Ukraine. That’s a win for both Berlin and Moscow. It’s also a win for Washington lobbyists.

Companies involved with the pipeline spent more than $1 million lobbying on sanctions and other issues related to the project through the first three months of 2021.

Nord Stream 2 AG spent $840,000 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2021, on pace to surpass its nearly $3.6 million lobbying spending last year. The Swiss firm is wholly-owned by Russia’s state-run energy firm Gazprom. Alexei Miller, Gazprom’s executive chairman, is longtime Putin ally, as is Nord Stream CEO Matthias Warnig.

The company spent $600,000 to dispatch Vincent Roberti, a top lobbyist and prolific Democratic donor. Roberti reported lobbying on “issues related to the U.S. position toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, including potential financial sanctions affecting the project.” The firm spent another $240,000 to dispatch BGR Group’s Walker Roberts, a former Republican staffer for foreign affairs congressional committees.

Other foreign firms are also dispatching lobbyists to advocate for the pipeline. Five foreign companies partnering on the project — Austria’s OMV AG, the Netherlands’ Shell International, France’s ENGIE, and Germany’s Wintershall and Uniper SE — hired lobbyists at McLarty Inbound to lobby the State Department and the National Security Council. They collectively paid the firm more than $840,000 for lobbying in 2020 and $210,000 in the first quarter of 2021.

McLarty managing partner Richard Burt, the former U.S. Ambassador to West Germany and a member of several influential Washington think-tanks, reported lobbying for a slate of foreign companies that have partnered on the project on “Russian sanctions issues” and “natural gas as an element of European energy security.” Burt donated $2,000 to Biden’s 2020 campaign and $10,000 to pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country while he was a registered lobbyist for foreign companies partnering with Nord Stream on the pipeline. Biden’s campaign had not refunded Burt’s money at the time of publication, more than 6 months after the donations were given, despite pledging to reject lobbyist donations.

Because firms working for proponents of the pipeline registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act instead of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, details of which government officials the lobbyists met with remain hidden from the public.

Lobbyists for private entities that would otherwise be required to follow FARA disclosure requirements may choose to instead register under the LDA with the House Clerk’s Office and Secretary of the Senate so long as the “principal beneficiary” of the influence operation is not a foreign government or political party. Nord Stream is owned by a Russian state-run firm, but the Kremlin has insisted the pipeline is a “commercial project.”

At Least 18 Scientists Demand Lab Leak Investigation on Covid

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Primer: Who is Dr. Ralph Baric and what is his role in the Wuhan lab?

UNC-CH ranks as a world leader in COVID-19 research - here ...

This page lists documents in Professor Ralph Baric’s emails, which U.S. Right to Know obtained via a public records request. Dr. Baric is a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC). He has developed genetic techniques to enhance the pandemic potential of existing bat coronaviruses in collaboration with Dr. Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and with EcoHealth Alliance.

The emails show internal discussions and an early draft of a key scientists’ letter about coronavirus origins, and shed some light on relationships between U.S. and Chinese experts in biodefense and infectious diseases, and the roles of organizations such as EcoHealth Alliance and National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

Please email anything of interest we may have missed to [email protected], so that we can include them below.

Items from Baric emails

  1. Tracy McNamara, Professor of Pathology at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California wrote on March 25, 2020: : “The Federal govt has spent over $1 billion dollars in support of the Global Health Security Agenda to help developing nations create the capacity to detect/report/respond to pandemic threats. An additional $200 million was spent on the PREDICT project via USAID looking for emerging viruses in bats, rats and monkeys overseas. And now the Global Virome Project wants $1.5 billion dollars to run around the world hunting down every virus on the face of the earth. They will probably get funding. But none of these programs have made taxpayers safer right here at home.” (emphasis in the original)
  2. Dr. Jonathan Epstein, Vice President for Science and Outreach at EcoHealth Alliance, sought guidance for a request from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) about communicating “potentially sensitive dual-use information” (March 2018).
  3. EcoHealth Alliance paid Dr. Baric an undisclosed sum as honorarium (January 2018).
  4. Invitation to U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) U.S. China Dialogue and Workshop on the Challenges of Emerging Infections, Laboratory Safety, Global Health Security and Responsible Conduct in the Use of Gene Editing in Viral Infectious Disease Research, Harbin, China, Jan 8-10, 2019 (November 2018-January 2019). Preparatoryemails and a travel memorandum indicate the identities of the American participants.
  5. NAS invitation to a meeting of U.S. and Chinese experts working to counter infectious disease and improve global health (November 2017). The meeting was convened by the NAS and the Galveston National Laboratory. It took place on January 16-18, 2018, in Galveston, Texas. A travel memorandum indicates the identities of the American participants. Subsequent emails show that the WIV’s Dr. Zhengli Shi is present at the meeting.
  6. On February 27, 2020, Baric wrote, “at this moment the most likely origins are bats, and I note that it is a mistake to assume that an intermediate host is needed.”
  7. On March 5, 2020, Baric wrote, “there is absolutely no evidence that this virus is bioengineered.”

For more information

A link to Professor Ralph Baric’s emails can be found here:Baric emails (~83,416 pages)

U.S. Right to Know is posting documents from our Biohazards investigation. See:FOI documents on origins of SARS-CoV-2, hazards of gain-of-function research and biosafety labs.

NR:

For well over a year, a certain clique of researchers tarred the idea that COVID-19 initially escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan as a conspiracy theory. Now, their grip on that narrative within the scientific community is loosening, as a growing chorus of experts calls for a closer look at this lab-leak hypothesis.

In a letter published this afternoon at Science, 18 scientists call for an investigation into the pandemic’s origins that does not discount the possibility of a lab leak. “Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” they write. “Knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.”

These researchers include Dr. Ralph Baric, a leading coronavirus expert who has done research on bat coronaviruses with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and several other prominent virologists. They have joined the WHO director-general, top intelligence officials, and other U.S. government experts in asserting that such a leak remains a possible explanation, despite a joint WHO-China study’s findings that such a theory is “extremely unlikely.” Like the Biden administration and 13 other countries that signed onto a U.S.-led statement after the report’s release, they raise concerns about how the panel reached its findings. Their letter comes as members of Congress have started to ramp up their scrutiny of a potential lab-leak origin. Already, the scientists’ letter has caught the attention of lawmakers involved in COVID investigation efforts, with Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Brett Guthrie, and Morgan Griffith, saying in a statement, “We look forward to working with them and all who will follow the science in order to complete this investigation.”

Jamie Metzl, an adviser to the WHO and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, explained the letter’s significance on Twitter. “The chokehold on public consideration of an accidental lab incident as a possible #pandemic origin has just been broken. Following publication of the Science letter, it will be irresponsible for any scientific journal or news outlet to not fully represent this viable hypothesis.”

The Science letter finds the joint WHO-China report lacking and evaluates the likelihood of the different origin theories that the panel assessed: “Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as ‘likely to very likely, and a laboratory incident as ‘extremely unlikely.’”

The authors of the letters add, “Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident.”

The letter doesn’t claim that the lab-leak hypothesis is more credible than the zoonotic origin theory. It’s notable, however, that a letter in a major scientific journal is putting these two theories on equal footing.

The Lancet, another journal, rejected a letter submitted by 14 biologists and geneticists in January arguing that “a lab origin cannot be formally discarded.”

Some figures associated with The Lancet have called the lab-leak scenario a conspiracy theory, including Jeffrey Sachs, the chair of the medical journal’s COVID commission, and Peter Daszak, the chair of the commission’s sub-committee on COVID’s origins. Daszak, whose nonprofit research group received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the National Institutes of Health for studies on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was a member of the joint WHO-China panel and has faced accusations that he failed to disclose potential conflicts of interest.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University chemical biology professor, told National Review last month that their efforts helped to create the false impression that there is a scientific consensus against the possibility of a lab-leak origin. “No such consensus existed then. No such consensus exists now,” he said.

This latest entry into the debate, in the pages of a preeminent scientific journal, shows that the ground is shifting away from a hollow narrative that has been all-too pervasive since the start of the pandemic.