RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/doj-indicts-two-chinese-suspects-for-hacking-u-s-firms-stealing-trade-secrets-and-coronavirus-research/

The Justice Department on Tuesday indicted two Chinese nationals who are suspected of hacking numerous U.S. firms to steal trade secrets and coronavirus research.

The Trump administration warned in May that China was attempting to steal or set back American research on a coronavirus vaccine. The new indictment alleges that one of the two suspects began searching for vulnerabilities at a Maryland-based healthcare company on January 27 of this year, days before the company announced it had begun research on a vaccine.

The suspects, Li Xiaoyu and Dong Jiazhi, are believed to reside in China.

“Li and Dong, former classmates at an electrical engineering college in Chengdu, China, used their technical training to hack the computer networks of a wide variety of victims” since at least 2009, the indictment states. The victims include firms focused on “high tech manufacturing; civil, industrial, and medical device engineering; business, educational, and gaming software development; solar energy; and pharmaceuticals.”

The hackers purportedly worked in some cases for their own profit, stealing “hundreds of millions of dollars in trade secrets,” while in others they were employed by China’s Ministry of State Security.

“China has now taken its place, alongside Russia, Iran and North Korea, in that shameful club of nations that provide a safe haven for cyber criminals in exchange for those criminals being ‘on call’ to work for the benefit of the state,” DOJ National Security Division head John Demers said in a statement.

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Following Tuesday’s indictment, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) introduced a bill that would allow the president to impose sanctions on foreign entities involved in hacking of American companies.

“We refuse to allow our innovation to be exploited by China, Russia, or any other hackers,” McCarthy said in a statement. “We are going to protect the cure from falling into the wrong hands so that no one can use it as leverage for their own malicious ends.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/07/21/church-attacks-explode-with-an-unbridled-

One of the last times people saw flames in France’s Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul church was during the Allied bombing in 1944. What’s happening now isn’t World War III, but it certainly feels like it, as things get increasingly violent on every continent.

While believers around the world pray for an end to the chaos, arsonists, knife-wielders, and vandals are taking the battle to them.

After a string of attacks rocked U.S. churches last week, Americans gathered this Sunday with the hope that things might finally calm down. They didn’t. If anything, the insurgents expanded their campaign to the global scene.

Arson in Paris, excrement along church walls in southern France, statues defaced in Calgary, it all points to a dangerous turning point in this mob mentality.

Two regimes are fighting an ideological war in America today. But what side are you on? And how can you sharpen up on how to defend your position? Learn more now >>

“I don’t like to use the word too lightly,” Eric Metaxas said, “but there’s something satanic about it.”

Here at home, churches from Queens to Chattanooga fell victim to the forces of anarchism and anti-Americanism gripping this country since George Floyd’s death.

In New Haven, Connecticut, parishioners of St. Joseph’s Church woke up to satanic symbols sprayed across the doors. “It was certainly shocking and disturbing,” the Rev. John Paul Walker told reporters.

But even that was minor compared to what happened at Virginia’s Grace Covenant Church right outside of Washington, D.C., where a man walked into a Bible study Saturday and viciously stabbed the pastor leading it.

https://jamieglazov.com/2020/07/21/glazov-gang-farrakhans-betrayal-of-black-slaves/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Dr. Charles Jacobs, the president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/in-defense-of-sebastian-gorka/

The real root of the left’s antipathy towards him is his stance on radical Islamism, support for Israel and loyalty to Trump.

As soon as the White House announced last week that U.S. President Donald Trump was planning to appoint Sebastian Gorka to the National Security Education Board, the anti-“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) chorus pounced on the opportunity to renew its smear campaign against the former West Wing staffer.

The progressive periodical, The Forward, for example, promptly dusted off an old “award-winning investigative report” on Gorka—author, most recently, of The War for America’s Soul—ostensibly exposing a dark past and dubious present.

The left-wing Jewish newspaper gleefully reiterated its previous false accusation that Gorka—a naturalized American, born and raised in Britain, where his parents had fled to escape Communist Hungary—swore a “lifelong allegiance to a Hungarian neo-Nazi group.”

The group in question is Vitézi Rend (Order of Vitéz), a nationalist organization that expressed “pride” in Gorka’s having worn its badge, tunic and ring at Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

While it’s true that Gorka sported these symbols, he did so in honor of his father, Paul Gorka, who was granted the Hungarian order of merit in 1979 for his bravery in resisting the Communist dictatorship that followed the fascists.

The merit was established in 1920 by Miklós Horthy. Horthy, the wartime Hungarian regent accused of not doing enough to prevent the subsequent Nazi deportation of Jews during World War II—and whose own son was kidnapped by Nazi commandos—was eventually replaced by the fascist Arrow-Cross Regime, allied to Adolf Hitler.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16263/china-slave-labor-nike

In March, the non-partisan Australian Strategic Policy Institute, in a report titled “Uyghurs for Sale,” accused Beijing of forcing more than 80,000 Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities to produce products for Nike and 82 other brands.

The report’s accusations against Nike are damning. “A factory in eastern China that manufacturers shoes for U.S. company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and police guard boxes,” it noted…. There, people have been kept against their will in inhumane conditions. This facility, a Nike supplier for more than three decades, produces approximately eight million pairs of shoes each year.

U.S. law provides that products made with forced labor can be seized, but those made in horrific conditions in China and elsewhere routinely are cleared through Customs and end up on the shelves of American retailers.

“Slave labor.”

That is the term U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo used on July 16 when speaking about China to television anchor Bill Hemmer on his Fox News show.

The polite phrase is “forced labor.” America’s top diplomat, however, was dropping the diplomacy and employing America’s most powerful weapon: Unvarnished truth.

The unvarnished — and horrific — truth is that the Chinese party-state has institutionalized slavery, ramped it up to industrial scale, and offered slaves to foreign companies. Moreover, compounding its crime, China picks its slaves from racial minority groups inside its borders.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16259/afghanistan-bounty-iran

Some U.S. media and politicians have been expressing their indignation of late over Russia’s alleged offers of bounty money to the Taliban for every American soldier it kills in Afghanistan…. These same journalists and political figures, however, never raise a similar accusation against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been offering the Taliban bounty money to kill American servicemen for years.

One of Iran’s motivations in extending help to its erstwhile enemy, the Taliban, is probably to foil any U.S. effort to exercise influence in Afghanistan.

Iran also may be hoping to frustrate progress in armistice talks between U.S. and Taliban representatives currently being conducted in Qatar. Iran might wish to maintain its own historical influence in the Afghan provinces adjacent to Iran. Iran seems to have allied itself with those Taliban cells opposed to the talks and has hosted these radical Taliban groups in its eastern provinces bordering Afghanistan.

The real issue here is why the U.S. media, journalists, and politicians remain silent about it.

Some U.S. media and politicians have been expressing their indignation of late over Russia’s alleged offers of bounty money to the Taliban for every American soldier it kills in Afghanistan. This unsubstantiated story is then expanded to include an insinuation that the Trump Administration has failed to take action against Russia.

These same journalists and political figures, however, never raise a similar accusation against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been offering the Taliban bounty money to kill American servicemen for years.

Iran’s bounty program for killing U.S. troops began as early as 2010. In one instance, a report indicated that a Taliban messenger was dispatched from Kabul to Iran to pick up $18,000 to be distributed to Taliban cells in Wardak Province, Afghanistan. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Terrorist Finance Targeting Center (TFTC) confirmed the relationship between the Taliban and its Iranian sponsors by sanctioning both parties. Money is passed from Iranian companies in Kabul to Taliban agents; Taliban offices in the Iranian cities of Mashhad, Yazd, and Kerman also help facilitate military and intelligence cooperation between Iran and the Taliban.

During the time when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, Shia Iran opposed Kabul’s radical Sunni regime. But after Al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan-based 9/11 attack on the United States, Iranian intelligence agencies began to open links both to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), for instance, issued Iranian passports to Al-Qaeda and presumably the Taliban.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/07/20/report-china-is-using-forced-labor-to-manufacture-face-masks-n666122

The New York Times reports that China is using what amounts to slave labor to manufacture face masks.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to drive demand for personal protective equipment, Chinese companies are rushing to manufacture the gear for domestic and global consumption. A New York Times visual investigation has found that some of those companies are using Uighur labor through a contentious government-sponsored program that experts say often puts people to work against their will.

The Uighurs are an ethnic minority in China, which is majority Han Chinese.

The report may shed some light on video we and many others posted last week.

The video dates to at least Sept. of 2019, and apparently shows Chinese government officers in black guarding Uighurs who are blindfolded and shackled, kneeling, before being loaded onto trains. The video reportedly originates in Xinjiang, the province in which the Uighurs live and are forcibly moved from to work in factories elsewhere. Interestingly, many of the officers in black are wearing face masks.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/can-britain-find-a-leader-like-benjamin-disraeli/91193/

“Conservatism,” wrote Disraeli in his novel Coningsby, “assumes in theory that everything established should be maintained; but adopts in practice that everything that is established is indefensible.”

Much like the Conservative Party in Britain today, the party that Disraeli joined as a young MP was suffering a crisis of faith. Would it maintain old verities at the risk of political annihilation? Or jettison them for faddish ideals and make a play for popular esteem?

This is a moment for Boris Johnson to study his famous 19th century predecessor. Disraeli’s genius was to recognize that Conservatism’s roots remained vital and cherished by the British population. Only electors were denied the best that Toryism could offer, since the party’s leading politicians either abandoned their heritage or lacked the courage to defend it.

Tories are once more at a crossroads. And, like the 1840s, a conservative disposition remains alive in the United Kingdom while its leaders choose to curry favor more with the press than with the voting public. Apostasy starts at the head. Boris Johnson, James Delingpole writes, “is going to go down as the Prime Minister who cancelled London.”

The Prime Minister’s problem, Mr. Delingpole believes, “is that he is a fundamentally unserious person.” Cometh the times, cometh the man? Not with BoJo. Resolving the political and economic crises overwhelming the UK “requires courageous, principled leadership of a kind Boris is quite incapable of providing,” is Mr. Delingpole’s assessment.

https://spectator.org/irans-bad-luck-must-continue/

There’s an element of chance that affects the lives of men and nations. You can make your own luck or suffer what the world imposes on you.

Napoleon, always one to make his own luck, once was criticized that he won his battles by luck alone. He is reputed to have responded, “I’d rather have lucky generals than good ones.”

Iran has had a long run of bad luck this year. We need to do everything we can to keep it going.

In May, the Iranian regime reported that cyberattacks damaged computers at Bandar Abbas. That non-coincidence followed an Iranian cyberattack on Israel seeking to damage its water supply.

Iran’s bad luck continued in late June with what Iran contends was an accidental explosion at its Parchin military base. Parchin is, of course, where warheads and missiles are being developed. Around then, several damaging cyberattacks have reportedly occurred at other Iranian military facilities.

The best-reported explosion occurred on July 2 at the Natanz nuclear facility in a building where advanced centrifuges for enriching uranium were being constructed.

Gen. Gholam Jalali, the head of Iran’s civil defense organization, tried to blame the United States for the explosions but — in an enormously significant admission — conceded that “anti-revolutionary” elements might have committed sabotage.

Last week, at least seven ships caught fire at the port of Bushehr. Two fires could be coincidental. Seven can’t be.

On Saturday, a petrochemical plant and oil pipeline in western Kuzhestan province exploded, producing enormous fires.

https://spectator.us/oxford-vaccine-surpassed-expectations/

It has been yet another busy medical day in our ‘new-normal’ coronavirus world. Today, the Phase One results of the University of Oxford vaccine were published, confirming positive reports tantalizingly leaked last week. Also making the news is a press release from the pharmaceutical company Synairgen, touting very positive initial results from its inhaled protein, interferon-beta, in treating hospitalized patients with coronavirus.

In days gone by the publishing of results of a Phase One vaccine study would barely generate a ripple, even in the relevant medical speciality. But of course, this is no ordinary trial and we are truly in extraordinary times.

All medical products undergo a trial process, starting with studies which look purely at safety (not efficacy). Many trials fail at this stage. You may recall the disastrous Northwick Park study in 2006 which saw six healthy young people develop multiple organ failure from exposure. Once this hurdle is passed then a larger scale trial to look at efficacy is undertaken and if successful, a license is applied for and distribution follows.

Today, the preliminary findings for ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 (the COVID-19 vaccine) appear to show that it has surpassed expectations. Firstly, the safety hurdle seems to have been met, although 70 percent of the 1,077 volunteers apparently did report fever or headache. Secondly, and in line with the bullish press releases last week, the vaccine garners both an autobody and T-cell response which it is hoped may provide lasting immunity to the disease. This is vital as studies have shown that patient antibody levels may fall after just three months.

There are the usual caveats: the study was over a very small timeframe and was not intended to show if it is a working vaccine, so we know little of its long-term safety or effectiveness. Nevertheless, it is now full steam ahead for the larger Phase Three study and the likely riches of being first on the market.