North Korea imported at least $640 million (£493 million) worth of luxury goods from China last year, in defiance of UN sanctions outlawing such trade over North Korea's nuclear and missile programmes, a South Korean politician said on Monday.

The United States has urged strict implementation of sanctions as part of a "maximum pressure" campaign which Washington has credited with bringing impoverished North Korea to the negotiating table.

But there have been signs the campaign has been losing steam since North Korea suspended nuclear and missile tests and leader Kim Jong-un vowed steps towards denuclearisation at a US-North Korean summit in June - and as China and Russia called for relaxed sanctions.

Lu Wei, once the gatekeeper of the internet for the entire population of China, pleaded guilty on Friday to abuse of power and accepting what amounted to US$4.6 million in bribes over the span of his 15-year career.

Lu Wei also made a final statement to the court, and admitted guilt and expressed regret,” Xinhua said.

Wei became the head of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), in 2014, after a career in which he rose to become the director of the state news agency Xinhua, then worked at the Beijing municipal party committee, and the party’s Central Publicity Committee.

As head of the CAC, Wei controlled China’s notorious regime of internet censorship—which included blocking access to Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and introducing criminal charges against citizens who posted banned content.

China's President Xi Jinping today officially launched the world's longest sea bridge that cost £14 billion to build and connects Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China.

The 55-kilometre (34-mile) crossing, which includes a snaking road bridge and underwater tunnel, will open to traffic tomorrow at 9am local time, linking Hong Kong with the southern mainland city of Zhuhai and the gambling enclave of Macau, across the waters of the Pearl River Estuary.

The submerged tunnel, which is under the Lingding Ocean near Hong Kong, is connected by two artificial islands each occupying 10,000 square metres (one million square feet). At 6.75 kilometres (4.2 miles) long and 40 metres (131 feet) deep, the tunnel creates a gap in the bridge that will allow cargo ships to pass through the busy delta.

Xi presided over an inauguration ceremony attended by Hong Kong's and Macau's city leaders at a new port terminal in Zhuhai.

US President Donald Trump threatned Russia and China that Washington intends to build up its nuclear arsenal until “people come to their senses.”
The president said his words were directed towards Moscow and Beijing, as he prepared to unilaterally leave the Intermediate Nuclear Forces in Europe (INF) treaty. The US president implied China should be part of any new nuclear arms control treaty.

“Russia has not adhered to the agreement,” neither in form or in spirit, Trump told reporters outside the White House on Monday, before departing for a campaign rally in Texas.

Until people come to their senses, we will build it up

One wonders what went on in Russian minds during last month’s spectacle of US President Trump raking Beijing over the coals on accusations of meddling, in the upcoming US midterm elections, to try to undermine his trade policies.
Certainly the Chinese, who evidently didn’t expect it, were shocked and outraged, but it was behavior to which Moscow was accustomed to being on the receiving end of – this time aimed at someone else for a change.

Geng Shuang, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, called Donald Trump’s claims “totally far-fetched and fictional,” and advised the “US side to stop its unwarranted accusations and slander against China and refrain from wrong words and deeds that might hurt our bilateral relations and fundamental interests.”

The Justice Department has brought its first criminal case over alleged Russian interference in the 2018 midterm elections.

Elena Khusyaynova, 44, a St. Petersburg, Russia-based accountant, was charged in a criminal complaint with conspiracy to defraud the United States for taking part in a scheme to spend in excess of $10 million since the beginning of the year on targeted social media ads and web postings intended “to sow division and discord in the U.S. political system.”

Khusyaynova, who is not in U.S. custody, allegedly works for Concord, a Russia-based firm that special counsel Robert Mueller's office indicted in February for alleged interference in the 2016 election.

A crucial Pentagon report on the US defense industrial base and “supply chain resiliency” bluntly accuses China of “military expansion” and “a strategy of economic aggression,” mostly because Beijing is the only source for “a number of chemical products used in munitions and missiles.”

Russia is mentioned only once, but in a crucial paragraph: as a – what else – “threat,” alongside China, for the US defense industry.

Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development said on Thursday that Moscow and Beijing are working on an inter-governmental agreement to boost the use of the ruble and yuan in mutual trade settlements.

“The document is currently being prepared, the process is not easy,” said Deputy Minister of Russia’s Economic Development Sergey Gorkov, as quoted by TASS. “Russia and China have had some experience of using national currencies in bilateral trade.”

Gorkov added that Russia and China have been successfully implementing the terms of ruble-yuan currency swap agreement, clinched in 2014 to boost trade using national currencies and eliminate dependence on the dollar and the euro. The deal was extended at the end of 2017.

China’s local governments may have accumulated 40 trillion yuan ($5.8 trillion) of off-balance sheet debt, or even more, suggesting further defaults are in store, according to S&P Global Ratings.

“The potential amount of debt is an iceberg with titanic credit risks,” S&P credit analysts led by Gloria Lu wrote in a report Tuesday. Much of the build-up relates to local government financing vehicles, which don’t necessarily have the full financial backing of local governments themselves.

Last week, the Global Times confirmed that the Hong-20, China's newest long-range stealth bomber was ready for imminent trial flights.

Now, it seems Chinese media, as per Defense Blog, has indicated that the stealth bomber will be unveiled during a massive military parade in 2019.

As President Donald Trump continues to ramp up trade pressure on China, Beijing may be "less motivated to cooperate" with the U.S. over sanctions against North Korea, an expert told CNBC Wednesday.

"China has been taking steps to relax its enforcement of sanctions even before the trade tensions with the United States flared up," according to Scott Seaman director of Asia at political risk consulting firm Eurasia Group.

But as the trade war between the world's two largest economies drags on, China could find more reasons to relax its enforcement of sanctions against North Korea, he said.

China’s soybean imports in June jumped 13.1 percent from a year ago as buyers scooped up Brazilian supplies to avoid potentially higher costs on U.S. soybeans that are subject to Beijing’s tariffs, customs data showed on Friday.

The Chinese government has said the mission is part of a four-stage plan to build a moon base. “We hope to start the construction of the [robot-manned] lunar base around 2025 and realize a manned landing on the moon around 2030,” Zhao Xiaojin of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Group told Xinhuanet in March.

But Gossel said putting a satellite at L2 could also enable Chinese attack spacecraft to zoom past the moon — about a quarter-million miles away — and then sneak up on critical U.S. intelligence and communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, just 28,300 miles up — as occurred in the 2011 apocalypse-themed film “Melancholia.”

China is two years away from sending a lighting satellite to space, according to Wu Chunfeng, chairman of space contractor Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute Co (CASC).

The device has been designed to illuminate an area as large as 80km and works by complementing the light of the moon at night, Mr Wu explained during a national mass innovation and entrepreneurship activity held last week.

And the precise illumination range will be controlled within a few dozen metres, Mr Wu added.

The device's power of illuminating the Earth will be eight-time stronger than the one of the real moon, enough to replace the lights on the street.

“Something has to be done...How can my government be subsidizing China and driving me out of business?”

Those are the words of Jayme Smaldone, who runs a 12-employee housewares company in Rahway, N.J., who first became aware of the problem when he noticed websites selling Chinese knockoffs of his “Mighty Mug,” a desktop coffee cup he designed with an anti-topple base.

And it appears President Trump has listened to Jayme among many others, as The New York Times reports that he plans to withdraw from a 144-year-old postal treaty that has allowed Chinese companies to ship small packages to the United States at a steeply discounted rate, undercutting American competitors and flooding the market with cheap consumer goods.

The G-20 in Buenos Aires on November 30 could set the world on fire – perhaps literally. Let’s start with the US-China trade war. Washington won’t even start discussing trade with China at the G-20 unless Beijing comes up with a quite detailed list of potential concessions.

The word from Chinese negotiators is not at all bleak. Some sort of agreement could be reached on about a third of US demands. Debate on another third could ensue. But the last third is absolutely off-limits – due to Chinese national security imperatives, such as refusing to allow the opening of the domestic cloud computing market to foreign competition.

Naturally, as long as the housing bubble keeps inflating and prices keep rising, there is nothing to worry about as the population will keep spending money buoyed by illusory wealth appreciation. It is when housing starts to drop that Beijing begins to panic.

Fast forward to today, when Beijing may be starting to sweat because whereas Chinese property developers usually count on September and October to be their “gold and silver” months for sales, this year has turned out to be different. As the SCMP reports, not only were sales figures grim for September, but the seven-day national holiday last week also brought at least two "fangnao" incidents – when angry, and often violent, homeowners protest against price cuts offered by developers to new buyers.

In an exclusive interview on Fox News Sunday, Tiankai insisted that the very name of the location where said incident took place clearly shows whose vessel was “on the offensive” and who was “on the defensive.”

"Where the incident took place, you were right to say it was in South China Sea. So it’s at China’s doorstep," Tiankai said. "It’s not Chinese warships that are going to the coast of California, or to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s so close to the Chinese islands and it’s so close to the Chinese coast. So who is on the offensive? Who is on the defensive? This is very clear."

Before last year, Richard Ochieng’, 26, could not recall experiencing racism firsthand.

Not while growing up as an orphan in his village near Lake Victoria where everybody was, like him, black. Not while studying at a university in another part of Kenya. Not until his job search led him to Ruiru, a fast-growing settlement at the edge of the capital, Nairobi, where Mr. Ochieng’ found work at a Chinese motorcycle company that had just expanded to Kenya.

But then his new boss, a Chinese man his own age, started calling him a monkey.

It happened when the two were on a sales trip and spotted a troop of baboons on the roadside, he said.

“‘Your brothers,’” he said his boss exclaimed, urging Mr. Ochieng’ to share some bananas with the primates.

The Trump administration is moving deliberately to counter what the White House views as years of unbridled Chinese aggression, taking aim at military, political and economic targets in Beijing and signaling a new and potentially much colder era in U.S.-China relations.

China has sold $3 billion of sovereign dollar bonds. This is only the third such move by Beijing in the last 14 years, and the first involving bonds with a 30-year maturity.

China sold $1.5 billion of five-year bonds at 3.25 percent, $1 billion of 10-year bonds at 3.5 percent, and $500 million of 30-year bonds at four percent, the Finance Ministry said on Friday, as quoted by Reuters.

Beijing is the largest holder of US debt. As of July, China had $1.17 trillion invested in debt minted by the US Treasury.

The only promise that is new about the promised peace plan is the way it will be forced on the Palestinians: no one has promised that the plan itself will be new. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the outside—brought onside with the promise of continued military aid despite their crimes against humanity and violations of international law and the Palestinians weakened by being silenced, economically crushed and stripped of any friends to help them, the United States and Israel are now free to attempt to impose a peace plan on the Palestinians.

GOOGLE CEO SUNDAR PICHAI has refused to answer a list of questions from U.S. lawmakers about the company’s secretive plan for a censored search engine in China.

In a letter newly obtained by The Intercept, Pichai told a bipartisan group of six senators that Google could have “broad benefits inside and outside of China,” but said he could not share details about the censored search engine because it “remains unclear” whether the company “would or could release a search service” in the country.

Pichai’s letter contradicts the company’s search engine chief, Ben Gomes, who informed staff during a private meeting that the company was aiming to release the platform in China between January and April 2019. Gomes told employees working on the Chinese search engine that they should get it ready to be “brought off the shelf and quickly deployed.”

The intelligence agencies of the US, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand have been cooperating closely on countering China’s “foreign activities” since the start of the year, Reuters reports.

The so-called Five Eyes network is also sharing intelligence with allies such as Germany and Japan, in what has become a multinational coalition against Beijing’s alleged foreign meddling. Washington and its partners have accused China of using foreign investments to pull political strings – an accusation that Beijing denies.

“Consultations with our allies, with like-minded partners, on how to respond to China’s assertive international strategy have been frequent and are gathering momentum,” a US official told Reuters. The unnamed source added that informal discussions on the matter have quickly turned into “detailed consultations on best practices and further opportunities for cooperation.”

Over the past two weeks, with next to no media coverage, the United States has moved substantially closer toward open military confrontation with both Russia and China, the second- and third-ranked nuclear powers in the world.

On October 3, the United States threatened, for the first time since the Cold War, to directly attack the Russian homeland. UN Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison accused the country of violating the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty by developing a nuclear cruise missile and said that Washington was preparing to “take out” the weapon with a US strike.

This statement came just three days after a Chinese warship set a collision course with a US destroyer carrying out a so-called “freedom of navigation” operation in the South China Sea, forcing the American ship to maneuver to avoid a collision and the potentially deadliest military clash in the Pacific in decades.

A glimmer of hope for improvement in Sino-US relations emerged today after reports that President's Trump and Xi would meet at the G-20 summit and that the U.S. Treasury will avoid labeling China an FX manipulator. The glimmers were enough to send the offshore Yuan surging from 6.94 overnight to as low as 6.87 in hours.

But were the rumors true, and was China willing to reciprocate to what appeared to be an olive branch by the Trump admin?

Moments ago we got the answer.

With China, and specifically it currency, now the fulcrum security in defining not only daily emerging market sentiment, but also telegraphing Beijing's day-to-day feelings toward the US president, traders were keenly focused on what the PBOC's Friday yuan fix would be, especially after two days of central bank fixes that were below the average analyst consensus.

Hong Kong’s determination to tackle money laundering linked to human trafficking has been called into question after it emerged that police chiefs blocked an alert – prepared by a specialist law enforcement unit – warning banks in the city to be aware of the problem.

Anti-human trafficking campaigners expressed shock at news of the suppressed alert. That coincided with the publication of a report by the city’s Ombudsman which found a complaint that police were unreasonably withholding data on dirty money transactions linked to human trafficking was “unsubstantiated”.

The 24-page alert – titled “Combating Human Trafficking in Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific Region” – was prepared by the recently formed Fraud and Money Laundering Intelligence Taskforce (FMLIT) and was designed to sharpen the ability of financial institutions to spot and report suspicious transactions linked to the illicit trade in people.

It wasn't just U.S. soybean exports that encountered some serious shenanigans in August 2018 as part of China's trade war strategy with the United States. International U.S. trade data indicates that U.S. crude oil exports to China also collapsed during the month. In this case, all the way to zero.

Unlike what happened with soybeans, however, U.S. crude oil shipments didn't get diverted to another nation, but instead, never left the U.S. The following chart shows the value of U.S. crude exports to the world, to China, and to the world excluding China in the period since the U.S. government lifted a 40-year oil ban on the export of crude oil from the United States in mid-December 2015, where since the end of 2016, U.S. crude oil exports to China have made up 20-25% of the nation's total exports to the world on average.

Google has been in the spotlight this week as it appeals a 5 billion euro fine for running a monopoly in Europe and works to shut down its social network Google Plus after discovering a massive security vulnerability.

Chinese efforts to teach machines to think — through emerging technologies like neural nets, a form of artificial intelligence — represent phases of a process that concludes with “the next step, the integration of human and machines,” Ashley said. This, he said, could result in “cognitive advances not just in how we think, but [also] think about the stamina of the individual soldier; think about the ethical impacts of those kind of technologies and how they would be applied? And how does a democracy view those type of technologies? How will Russia and China leverage those?”

China's regional government in Xinjiang has amended its laws to effectively legalize internment camps targeting Muslim minorities. Some 1 million Muslims are currently thought to be held in such centers.

Deep inside the Washington Convention Center, underneath the bright-white-and-red logo of one of America’s biggest defense firms, sat a green-hulled armored vehicle with a curiously angular gun housing — and an even more curious pitch for customers who generally buy American.

Raytheon has high hopes for the Lynx, a new fighting vehicle designed by Rheinmetall in Germany — and perhaps one day, manufactured in the United States. And as the Pentagon begins to prioritize speed of acquisition over its traditional protectionism, this maker of missiles, rocket interceptors, and cyber defenses is placing bets on foreign partners with state-of-the-art products.

“For us, this is sort of a change in speed and direction for Raytheon,” said Richard Harris, vice president of business development for the company’s Land Warfare Systems division.

The project, code-named Dragonfly, would blacklist phrases like "human rights," "student protest," and "Nobel Prize," and has resulted in at least seven Google employees quitting for ethical reasons. Other employees have circulated a letter recognizing a "code yellow" emergency, suggesting that the Dragonfly initiative violates Google's ethical code, which states that the company will not build or deploy technologies "whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights," according to The Intercept.

The project has also drawn criticism from human rights groups, congressional legislators and Vice President Mike Pence - who called on the search engine giant to "immediately end development of the Dragonfly app that will strengthen the Communist Party’s censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers."

Google, meanwhile, lied in their attempts to downplay the project.

In accordance with what has become a time-honored Trump Administration tradition, officials from within the administration - and presumably speaking on behalf of President Trump - told reporters at the Financial Times that the US won't talk trade with China at the G-20 summit unless Beijing produces a detailed list of possible concessions as gesture that his side is serious about finding a resolution that CEOs, the IMF and, increasingly, investors worry could dampen economic growth and finally trigger a correction in US stocks. The report comes four days after Larry Kudlow, Trump's top economic advisor, said talks at the G-20 were being discussed. "We have been negotiating on and off and it has been unsatisfactory thus far...maybe, I want to underscore maybe Jonathan, there might be a meeting between Trump and Xi down in Buenos Aires".

The tariff standoff might not feel like much now, but it certainly will take a toll in years to come, the International Monetary Fund warns.

The International Monetary Fund reduced its growth forecasts for the US and China Tuesday, citing the series of tariffs the two nations have imposed on each other, CNN Business reports.

"When you have the world's two largest economies at odds, that's a situation where everyone suffers," Maurice Obstfeld, the IMF's chief economist, said at a news conference.

President Donald Trump is expected within days to approve an initiative to overhaul US investment strategy in Africa.

Kenya is likely to benefit from the plan designed by key figures in the US Congress in response to China's enhanced economic and political influence in the Sub-Saharan region.

A State Department official told reporters last week that the shift will offer Africa "a better alternative to Chinese state investments".

Known as the Build Act (Better Utilisation of Investments Leading to Development Act), the legislation will double, to $60 billion (Sh6tn), funds for promoting US corporate investment in Africa.

For decades, whenever stevedore Giorgos Nouchoutidis arrived for work at the port of Piraeus, he would breathe in the fresh, briny sea breeze and feel a surge of pride.

This port has long been a metaphor for Greece. It's where ancient warriors in triremes set off for battle and where refugees in fishing boats arrived in the early 20th century, fleeing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It's also where Hollywood docked to film the 1960 movie Never on Sunday. The film's Oscar-winning theme song is a love anthem to the port.

"It's a blessed location," says Nouchoutidis, 67, reminiscing in his living room, under a watercolor painting of a ship. "It's across from the Suez Canal. It's deep enough for big ships. And it's my home. My father worked here," he says. "We didn't have machines back then. We used to load everything onto the boats with our own hands — bags of clothes, leather goods and knitwear made in Greece, all bound for North America and Australia."

President Trump may have been too quick to praise North Korea following Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's visit with Kim Jong Un over the weekend. Because in what will be remembered as a brutal snub, Chinese President Xi Jinping refused to meet with Pompeo during his visit to Beijing on Monday, while China's foreign minister said in no uncertain terms that the US shouldn't expect China's help with denuclearizing North Korea.

Always an industrious people when it comes to maximizing profit and cash flow, especially if it means breaking the law, it didn't take long for Chinese exporters to find a way to dodge hundreds of billions in US tariffs. Take the case of David Visse, a wood importers from Oregon, who this past June got a call from a supplier asking if he would like to get some Chinese plywood tariff-free. "How would that work", asked importer David Visse. The products carry an identification code that is checked by U.S. Customs agents.

"Don’t worry about it,” the supplier said. The plywood would be stripped of its Chinese markings, and “we’ll ship it under some other code."

Recently, a story about a special chip “the size of a grain of rice” that China allegedly put in countless electronic items to spy on everyone made the MSM rounds. Perhaps a few dolts in alt media also ran this. I have been thinking of a perfect way to debunk this crap. I have it.

If this spy chip is in your iPhone, then whoever produced the story will have it identified and be able to tell you the part designation and where it is on the circuit board. A part “the size of a grain of rice” is an ENORMOUS part for an iPhone; all parts except for the main processor are smaller than a grain of rice, and a grain of rice is much thicker than any circuit board in an iPhone, so it ought to be pretty easy to find. But you won’t find it because the story is a hoax.

Sino/US tensions risk boiling over into something much more serious than already.

Washington considers China’s significant political, economic, trade, and military strength as a threat to US national security.

Accusations by US officials against China, Russia, and other countries are all about wanting no nations compromising Washington’s hegemonic agenda – its aim for unchallenged control.

The Trump regime slammed what it called Beijing’s “unfair trade” and other practices, along with accusing the country of intellectual property theft, cyberwar, interfering in America’s electoral process, militarizing the South China Sea, and controlling offshore islands it claims belong to other regional countries.

The US also claims the right to conduct freedom of navigation operations close to Chinese waters its officials consider provocative.

Move to free up more cash for lending aims to generate momentum after economy started to stall amid growing trade conflict with Washington

Desperate for funding to fend off a financial crisis fuelled in part by mounting debt to China, Pakistan is playing a complicated game of poker that could hand Saudi Arabia a strategic victory in its bitter feud with Iran at the People’s Republic’s expense.