Brian Hook, State Department director of policy planning and head of a special action group on Iran created this week, told a press conference on Thursday that China will not be exempt from penalties if it continues buying Iranian oil after the second, and much more strict, rounds of renewed U.S. sanctions on Iran go into effect in November.
An 18-year-old unemployed man in northeastern China used social media recently to ask, “What law says you can’t call Taiwan a country?” He soon got his answer when Chinese police detained him, citing a law against “profaning the people’s feelings.”
The Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military and security developments warns that China is building up a fleet of long-range nuclear-capable bombers and is “likely” training its pilots to attack American targets.
The annual pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj, which observant Muslims are supposed to make at least once during their lives, officially begins on August 19. Mecca is located in Saudi Arabia, which is currently embroiled in serious disputes with Muslim nations such as Qatar, Iran, and Yemen, as well as Western countries with Muslim citizens who wish to make the pilgrimage, most notably Canada.
China’s state-run Global Times told readers to remain calm as the economy of Turkey teeters on the brink of collapse, but the real point of the editorial was to insist China is in far better shape than Turkey despite grappling with a currency crisis of its own.
The Pentagon warned on Thursday the Islamic State is “well-positioned to rebuild and work on enabling its physical caliphate to re-emerge.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a statement on Wednesday explaining that Jany Leveille, the apparent spiritual leader of the New Mexico compound where a group of Muslim extremists held 11 starving children and evidently killed a small child, is an illegal alien from Haiti who overstayed her visa by over 20 years.
The Iraqi government has removed 47 Kurdish officials from their posts in Kirkuk, beginning with the regional governor, since reasserting control over the disputed region in October 2017. The use of “Kurdish phrases” was banned on Tuesday by the state-run North Gas Company, which operates in Kirkuk.
The massive National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Donald Trump on Monday includes a provision that requires universities to choose between hosting Chinese language programs funded by the Pentagon or China’s Confucius Institute, which has been linked to the Chinese Communist Party and described as a threat to American academic freedom.
Jany Leveille, wife of Siraj Wahhaj and evidently the spiritual leader of his cult, was taken into custody by federal authorities on Tuesday just hours after a New Mexico judge controversially ordered all five members of the Muslim extremist group released on bond despite allegations of kidnapping, child abuse, and very likely killing a sick three-year-old child by withholding his medication.
The grim saga of Changsheng Biotechnology continues to roil China with news that the embattled pharmaceutical firm produced a second huge batch of substandard vaccine doses for children, doubling the number of doses originally estimated.
The latest evidence that President Donald Trump’s trade war is not the disaster “experts” predicted came via the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday: investors are moving their money into the United States as Trump’s aggressive policies destabilize competing markets.
Reuters offered a look on Tuesday at how high-tech surveillance techniques developed to monitor the Muslims of Xinjiang province are spreading across the rest of China, all the way to the capital city of Beijing. The account provides a textbook case of surveillance state mission creep, as techniques devised for what the Chinese government described as a unique emergency situation become part of everyday life.
Siraj Wahhaj and the four other adults arrested at a filthy New Mexico compound where 11 starving children were held and one apparently died were released with bond on Monday. The decision stunned many observers of the case, given the clearly abusive treatment of the children, the outstanding warrant from Georgia against Wahhaj for kidnapping his own son, and the fact that children rescued from the camp told police they were being trained to conduct terrorist attacks on schools.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan lashed out against the United States on Tuesday and called for a boycott on American electronics to retaliate against the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel. It was not clear from Erdogan’s remarks if he plans to implement a government ban on U.S. electronics imports or merely wants Turks to refrain from buying them.
Although he has previously been described as skeptical of President Donald Trump’s plan to create a “Space Force” branch of the U.S. Military, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said on Sunday that he supports the proposal.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei firmly “banned’ negotiations with the United States on Monday and said he doubted America will “confront Iran militarily.”
China continued its crackdown against the Quannengshen cult, better known as “The Church of Almighty God” or “Eastern Lightning” in the West, with an unspecified number of arrests and trials in August. According to Chinese media, movement leaders and key senior followers were targeted in the latest arrests.
Chinese government officials and state-run media outlets are denying reports that over a million Uighur Muslims from the province of Xinjiang have been herded into “re-education camps” where they are held without due process and, according to some reports, physically tortured.
Dean Cheng, the senior research fellow at the Asian Studies Center of the Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, joined SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Rick Manning on Friday’s Breitbart News Tonight to discuss President Donald Trump’s “Space Force” proposal and compare it to China’s military space programs.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan intends to go down in history as the most consequential leader of his nation since Ataturk. He is reaching that goal by unraveling Ataturk’s secular reforms and turning Turkey into an Islamist nation.
China’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Friday denying allegations that its financial assistance programs for Pacific nations are an effort to buy political influence and muscle out regional competitors, especially Taiwan. The Foreign Ministry insisted China’s $5.9 billion in pledged foreign aid comes with no strings attached.
The Turkish lira took a nosedive on Friday as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decisively lost the first battle in his “economic war” against the United States.
The latest broadside fired by China in its trade war with the United States was a list of $16 billion in American imports subjected to a 25 percent retaliatory tariff. One major item that was supposed to be on the list was quietly removed: oil. Analysts wonder if this conspicuous omission is a sign China is blinking in its economic staredown against the Trump administration.
Court filings in the case of Muslim extremist Siraj Wahhaj and four accomplices, arrested Friday at a squalid New Mexico compound where 11 starving children were being trained to attack schools with firearms, reveal the rescued children have identified the remains of a child recovered from the site as the body of Wahhaj’s three-year-old son Abdul-Ghani Wahhaj.
China’s aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea are generally viewed in the context of a security threat to the freedom of navigation and political warfare against Asian nations with competing territorial claims, but a report published this week by the ISEAS Yusof Ishak Institute of Singapore reveals a massive cash grab as well. China’s state-controlled industries are planning to make a great deal of money from those disputed islands and reefs.
Several sources close to the Chinese government said an escalating trade war with the United States is creating serious divisions in Beijing, all the way up to the office of the seemingly unassailable President Xi Jinping, according to a Reuters report Thursday.
A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday denounced a new round of U.S. sanctions as “categorically unacceptable” and “illegal,” while the Russian Foreign Ministry promised retaliatory sanctions are in the planning stages.
Horrifying details emerged on Wednesday in the case of Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the son of an imam linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who was arrested in New Mexico on charges of keeping 11 starving children in a filthy compound. According to court documents filed by prosecutors, Wahhaj was training the children to carry out school shootings.
Tendai Biti, former finance minister of Zimbabwe and a leader in the opposition Movement for Democrat Change (MDC) party, was arrested on the Zambian border Wednesday. Biti is one of the MDC officials who has declared challenger Nelson Chamisa the true winner of the recent presidential election, which secured a full term in office for interim President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
China’s shifting position on population control was signaled this week by a new postage stamp showing a happy family of pigs with three piglets – a strong signal to a populace long forced to have only one child per family and then grudgingly permitted to have two. The message was then transmitted even more clearly by a full-page article in a state-run newspaper mourning “the impact of low birth rates on the economy” and urging citizens to do something about it.
Chinese officials claim to have conducted a successful flight test for their first hypersonic bomber, the nuclear-capable Xingkong-2. Hypersonic planes and missiles move so fast they are difficult to detect and nearly impossible to intercept with current technology.
Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab said on Monday that the masterminds of Saturday’s drone assassination attempt against President Nicolas Maduro have been identified and two drone pilots are under arrest.
Dr. Robert Epstein, the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and a veteran of Breitbart News’ “Masters of the Universe” town hall on Internet freedom, joined SiriusXM hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on Monday’s Breitbart News Tonight to discuss the simultaneous banning of Infowars host Alex Jones by most major social media platforms.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani abruptly reversed his position on talks with the United States on Monday, just hours before tough U.S. sanctions went back into effect. After a week of arrogantly dismissing President Donald Trump’s offer of direct talks, Rouhani said he was willing to negotiate with the United States “right now,” without preconditions.
