We Don't Have to Trade With China

 This China:

Senator @YuenPauWoo claims anti-China witch hunt, demands feds counter "irresponsible speculation" by #cdnmedia over Communist interference in elections. https://t.co/nVTDcQ4uXS #cdnpoli @ScooperCooper pic.twitter.com/mH8D28FrwY

— Blacklock's Reporter (@mindingottawa) December 16, 2022

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Government documents released earlier this week confirm that the Privy Council Office, the nerve centre of the federal bureaucracy which supports Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, had signs of Beijing’s alleged attempts to interfere with the 2019 general election.

Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair acknowledged having seen the 2020 memo while he was public safety minister to reporters on Friday, adding that its determinations “certainly” played a role in shaping increased government focus on electoral interference. ...

The Feb. 20, 2020, document states that investigations into the 2019 election revealed “an active foreign interference (FI) network” under the heading of “Canada-China.”

Most of the rest of the “daily intelligence brief,” produced by bureaucrats at PCO’s Intelligence Assessment Secretariat, is censored. But it provides a glimpse into what and when the government knew about alleged clandestine attempts to interfere in the 2019 federal election.

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The issue of foreign interference in elections was examined in a Commons committee on Dec. 13, with Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic Leblanc addressing China’s role in Canadian society at large.

“The Chinese government regularly attempts to interfere in various aspects of Canadian society, elections would not be excluded from some of their efforts to interfere,” Leblanc told the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.

He added that experts from the security apparatus tracking these threats “have confirmed that none of these attempts to interfere have constituted in any way something that would have had an adverse effect on the election results and the election outcomes.”

Leblanc was responding to a question from Conservative MP Michael Cooper on whether or not Beijing had interfered in the 2019 and 2021 elections.

Cooper also asked Leblanc whether he had been briefed about that interference and said that he and other ministers did as part of their routine responsibilities.

“I have participated in some of these discussions. It’s not frequent, but certainly it’s something that I would be updated on by security and intelligence officials in the government,” Leblanc said, who would not elaborate on details to protect national security information.

Cooper then quoted from a Daily Foreign Intelligence Brief document from the Privy Council Office (PCO) dated February 2020 and submitted to the committee, which mentions there had been an “active foreign interference network” linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) around the 2019 elections.

Leblanc said he wasn’t familiar with that specific report, but said he took at “face value” what Cooper had quoted.

Cooper also mentioned CSIS documents discussing the targeting of politicians and riding associations by foreign interference and asked Leblanc to identify them.

“Just because Mr. Cooper wants to participate in some theatrics that are not responsible for Canadian democracy doesn’t mean he’s going to get an answer that doesn’t exist,” Leblanc said.

 

Answer the g-d- question, Dominic.

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Oh, that must be something:

Hong Kong's top court has overturned the conviction of an activist who tried to stage a Tiananmen Square vigil last year, finding police acted unlawfully.

Lawyer Chow Hang-tung - who was jailed in January - will remain in custody as she faces two other charges under the city's national security law.

But she won her appeal against her "unauthorised assembly" conviction on Wednesday.

A judge ruled the police hadn't properly justified the vigil's ban.

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In #China, they must be shaking their heads in disbelief. #CFIUS just determined it does not have jurisdiction to stop a #Chinese company from buying land near Grand Forks #AirForce Base: https://t.co/dCNs3ylxaN. A proposed plant can be used for spying on satellite uplinks.

— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) December 14, 2022

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Just 15 years ago, Southeast Asia's longest river carried some 143 million tonnes of sediment – as heavy as about 430 Empire State Buildings – through to the Mekong River Delta every year, dumping nutrients along riverbanks essential to keeping tens of thousands of farms like Cung's intact and productive.

But as Chinese-built hydroelectric dams have mushroomed upriver, much of that sediment is being blocked, an analysis of satellite data by Germany-based aquatic remote sensing company EOMAP and Reuters shows.

The analysis reinforces an estimate by the Mekong River Commission, set up in 1995 by countries bordering the river, that in 2020 only about a third of those river-borne soils would reach the Vietnamese floodplains. At the current rate of decline, the commission estimated, less than five million tonnes of sediment will reach the delta each year by 2040.

Stretching nearly 5,000 kilometres from the Plateau of Tibet to the South China Sea, the Mekong is a farming and fishing lifeline for tens of millions as it swirls through China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia before reaching Vietnam.

"The river is not bringing sediment, the soil is salinised," said Cung, 60, who has grown rice at his family's 10-hectare farm for more than 40 years.

"Without sediment, we are done," he said. His diminishing harvest now brings in barely half of the 250 million dong ($10,636) annually that he earned just a few years ago, and his two children and several neighbours have left the area to seek more stable and lucrative work elsewhere.

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I'm sure that this is nothing to be concerned with:

On 23 October 1962 Chinese solders entered and engaged in intense artillery fire in what was then a far-flung Himalayan region in north-eastern India called North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), bordering China and Bhutan.

Today it is Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state with more than a million people that China continues to claim as its territory, and where the latest flare-up between the two sides in more than a year took place.

"Explosions lit up the sky and echoed between the mountains," Indian army personnel told Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist and author of the China's India War: Collision Course on the Roof of the World.

Chinese soldiers overran an Indian position, killing 17 Indian soldiers and capturing 13 others. Facing little resistance from the surprised and ill-equipped Indian forces they forged ahead. Next day, they seized Tawang, a Buddhist monastery town nestling in a nearby valley.

 

Also:

India on Thursday successfully test-fired a long-range “Agni-5” intercontinental nuclear-capable ballistic missile, a government minister said, that is expected to strengthen its deterrence against long-time rival China.