Tag: China

FBI Investigating Chinese Funding of California Plane Maker: Report

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Federal authorities are investigating Chinese investment in a California-based plane maker after shareholders alleged that the firm’s technology was being transferred to China, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The FBI and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) have launched separate reviews of Chinese investment in small plane manufacturer Icon Aircraft Inc., according to the WSJ, which cited company documents and people familiar with the matter. The authorities are investigating allegations that technology from the company with military applications was transferred to China.

The investigation follows a lawsuit filed in June 2021 by a group of minority shareholders, including former Boeing CEO and chairman Phil Condit, who alleged that Pudong Science and Technology Investment Co. (PDSTI), a Chinese firm which owns 47% of Icon’s shares, was exploiting the company for its technology’s military applications to the detriment of the firm’s bottom line.

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China Says It Will Not Sell Olympic Tickets to the General Public Citing COVID-19 Concerns

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The Organizing Committee of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which are just days away from starting, has announced that it will not be selling tickets to the general public due to COVID-19 concerns.

Initially, individuals living on mainland China were the only people allowed to purchase tickets for the event, but the committee has now revoked that plan, citing “the current grave and complicated situation of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In a statement, the committee wrote that the new policy is being put in effect to “ensure the safety of all participants and spectators.”

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Chinese Officials Call to End Overseas Deliveries Because of Omicron Variant

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A ship arriving at the Hamburg harbor.

Officials in Beijing have urged for an end to overseas deliveries, saying that the Omicron coronavirus variant can spread by opening packages that originate in other countries, BBC News reported.

The officials calling to end overseas deliveries cited the case of a woman who contracted the Omicron variant after opening a parcel later found to have traces of the variant on it, BBC News reported. The officials noted that the woman had no prior travel history.

The virus was discovered on the surface of a letter the woman received from Canada as well as on the inside of an unopened letter, health official Pang Xinghuo told reporters on Monday, BBC News reported. Dozens of letters from the same batch were tested, with five reportedly containing traces of COVID-19.

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Commentary: Pro-Government Zealots Remove Statues on Campus – Just Like China in Hong Kong

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When students, faculty, and university administrations pull down statues on campus in an effort to censor history, they are engaging in the same authoritarian politics that characterize China’s control over Hong Kong.

Within 48 hours, Hong Kong University (HKU), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and Lingan University witnessed the removal of artwork commemorating the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square.

At HKU, “the Pillar of Shame” was an apt name for the monument that memorialized the atrocity as an example of Chinese government oppression that the communist regime is now trying to whitewash.

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Senators Introduce Bipartisan Legislation to End U.S. Reliance on Chinese Minerals

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Mark Kelly and Tom Cotton

A Republican and Democratic senator introduced legislation Friday that aims to end U.S. reliance on rare-earth metals sourced from and produced in China.

The Restoring Essential Energy and Security Holdings Onshore for Rare Earths (REEShore) Act would prevent supply disruptions and bolster domestic production of the minerals, according to Sens. Tom Cotton and Mark Kelly, the bill’s sponsors. They said the legislation is important for American national security and development of advanced technologies.

“The Chinese Communist Party has a chokehold on global rare-earth element supplies, which are used in everything from batteries to fighter jets,” Cotton said in a statement. “Ending America’s dependence on the CCP for extraction and processing of these elements is critical to winning the strategic competition against China and protecting our national security.”

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Chinese Spy Suspected to Have Infiltrated UK Parliament

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The U.K.’s domestic spy service, MI5, informed the House of Commons speaker that a woman is suspected to have been used by China to exert influence over British lawmakers, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.

The suspect, Christine Lee, is a London-based solicitor who “knowingly engaged in political interference activities on behalf of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party,” authorities said Thursday, AFP reported.

House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle confirmed to AFP he had informed lawmakers of the incident through an email, AFP reported. “The Speaker takes the security of members and the democratic process very seriously, which is why he issued this notice in consultation with the security services,” a spokesperson for Hoyle told the outlet.

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Commentary: The Sinking Ship of the Democratic-Media Alliance

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Almost no one seems to grasp the colossal irony of the current American political condition. The uniquequality of it is that the country is divided between two political forces which, in the tedious hyperbole of contemporary political jargon, view each other as an “existential threat to democracy.” The Democrats can’t sell the bunk that January 6 was an “insurrection;” they can’t wish away concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election. All they have is the tired claim that Trump is a threat to democracy, and in their advocacy of that falsehood, they have made themselves the threat to democracy.

Trump emerged politically in 2015 to universal mockery. Nothing could have been more certain than that this vulgar and sleazy huckster (as he was portrayed,not without some reason), would bomb out trying to recalibrate his downmarket celebrity brand to catapult him into the White House.

As Trump cleaned up in the 2016 Republican primaries, the Democratic strategists reached to the bottom of their campaign bag of tricks. Late in the campaign came the 11-year-old Billy Bush tape, in which Trump had made some inelegant locker-room macho comments about how a celebrity could take almost unlimited liberties with women. This failed to kill him. It was stale, dated, and not exactly a startling revelation.

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Intel Bends Knee to China, Scrubs All Mentions of Xinjiang Forced Labor from Letter

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U.S. technology company Intel scrubbed all mentions of forced labor in Xinjiang, China, from its letter to suppliers after receiving stiff backlash from China.

Intel sent a letter written by vice president Jackie Sturm to suppliers in December 2021, urging them to avoid sourcing from the Xinjiang region, home to China’s Uyghur Muslim minority, citing the company’s forced labor policies.

“Multiple governments have imposed restrictions on products sourced from the Xinjiang region,” Sturm wrote. “Therefore, Intel is required to ensure our supply chain does not use any labor or source goods or services from the Xinjiang region.”

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Border Patrol Saw 134 Percent Increase in Fentanyl Seizures in Fiscal Year 2021

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The lethal synthetic drug fentanyl has been increasingly trafficked into the U.S., and, in fiscal year 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported a 134% increase in seizures of the illicit drug.

Fentanyl is 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine, and a lethal dose is about 2 milligrams, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which has recently warned about the increase in fentanyl-laced pills cartels in Mexico are manufacturing with chemicals provided by China.

The drug is fueling an overdose epidemic in the U.S., and is the leading killer 18-45 year olds nationwide.

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China Made an Artificial Intelligence ‘Prosecutor’ That Can Charge People with Crimes

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Chinese scientists reportedly developed an artificial intelligence (AI) program capable of filing criminal charges.

The AI “prosecutor” is given a verbal definition of a case and then decides whether to file charges, according to the South China Morning Post, citing researchers involved in developing the program. The prosecutor files charges with a 97% accuracy rate, and is intended to reduce prosecutors’ workload.

“The system can replace prosecutors in the decision-making process to a certain extent,” said Shi Yong, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ big data and knowledge management laboratory that developed the program.

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U.S. Tech Giant Apologizes to China After Telling Suppliers to Avoid Products from Xinjiang

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U.S. chip maker and technology company Intel apologized to its Chinese business partners and customers Thursday after telling its suppliers to avoid sourcing from the Xinjiang region of China.

Intel sent a letter to suppliers earlier this month urging them to avoid products, labor and materials from Xinjiang, home of China’s Uyhgur Muslim minority. The letter, written by Intel’s Jackie Sturm, vice president and general manager of global supply chain operations, said Intel had an expectation that suppliers were “prohibiting any human trafficked or involuntary labor” in their supply chains.

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Commentary: The World May See a Red Revolution Before a Green One

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Chinese flag

In the current day and age, energy security is a prerequisite for national security. When America became energy independent in 2019, it freed us from the political whims of unstable countries. But dogmatic leftists across the world have made it clear that they will sacrifice energy security for their idea of necessary climate policy, seemingly undisturbed by the transfer of that security to communist and authoritarian regimes in China and Russia. As a result, the world might see a Red Revolution before it ever sees a Green one.

While in recent years the US has embraced its liquified natural gas (LNG) boom, European countries steered the other way, ramping down fossil fuel production and increasing their dependence on fossil fuel imports. They have justified this as a “necessary” sacrifice until solar and wind deployment catches up. They are seemingly unconcerned that Russia has become the EU’s largest supplier of fossil fuels, supplying around 40% of the EU’s LNG and coal. 

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Top Harvard Professor Found Guilty of Lying About Payments from China

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A prominent Harvard professor was found guilty Tuesday of lying about his ties to China, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Charles Lieber, a scientist in Harvard University’s chemistry and engineering departments, was found guilty on six counts of lying related to his work at the Wuhan University of Technology, the WSJ reported.

Lieber was first arrested by federal authorities in January 2020 and charged with making false statements regarding his participation in the Thousand Talents Plan, a Chinese recruitment program that aims to foster foreign academic talent. The Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged that Lieber was paid by the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) “$50,000 USD per month, living expenses of up to 1,000,000 Chinese Yuan (approximately $158,000 USD at the time) and awarded him more than $1.5 million to establish a research lab at WUT.”

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Chinese Tennis Star Now Denies Ever Making Sexual Assault Allegations

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Tennis star Peng Shuai denied she ever made sexual assault allegations on Sunday, addressing the matter for the first time since her initial post in early November, Reuters reported.

“First, I need to stress one point that is extremely important, I have never said or written that anyone has sexually assaulted me, I have to clearly stress this point,” Peng said from the sidelines of a cross-country skiing event in Shanghai, Reuters reported.

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Chinese-Backed Hackers Are Exploiting One of the ‘Most Pervasive’ Cybersecurity Flaws

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Hackers backed by China are using a recently-discovered vulnerability in a common software tool to gain access to data and systems belonging to internet infrastructure companies.

The vulnerability, known as Log4Shell, was discovered by Chinese cybersecurity researchers from Alibaba last week and is found in an open-source software tool called Log4J used by enterprise software companies and cloud infrastructure providers. If exploited, the flaw allows hackers to gain access to a company’s data and internal networks.

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Biden’s Air Force Opens Strategic Tanker Contract to Airbus Less Than a Year After $4B DOJ Sanction for Hiding China Ties

Neil W. McCabe

President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s administration opened up a significant chunk of a new Air Force tanker contract to the Leiden, Netherlands, based Airbus less than a year after the company paid a nearly $4 billion fine for corruption and despite its history of technology transfers to China.

“Airbus engaged in a multi-year and massive scheme to corruptly enhance its business interests by paying bribes in China and other countries and concealing those bribes,” said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division in a statement released at the end of January.

“This coordinated resolution was possible thanks to the dedicated efforts of our foreign partners at the Serious Fraud Office in the United Kingdom and the PNF in France,” Benczkowski said.

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Commentary: The Threat of a China-Centric New World Order

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Xi Jinping

Writing in the January/February 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs, the Hoover Institution’s Elizabeth Economy explores Chinese President Xi Jinping’s efforts to shape the international order by “fundamentally transforming the global system” to reflect Beijing’s interests and values. The leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), she explains, seeks nothing less than to replace the U.S.-led post–World War II global order with a “China-centric order with its own norms and values.” To understand what is at stake here, let’s talk geopolitics.

Since the end of the 19th century, the world has been what the great British geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder called a “closed political system.” The end of the age of discovery ushered in a post-Columbian world where, in Mackinder’s words, “Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.” The events of the 20th century confirmed Mackinder’s observation — through two world wars and one cold war, the center of the world’s geopolitical landscape shifted away from Europe to North America and Asia. At the end of this “long war,” which lasted from 1914 to 1989, the formerly Euro-centric international system was at first temporarily replaced by America’s “unipolar moment,” which gradually receded with the emergence of today’s bipolar geopolitical contest between the United States and China. 

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Analysis: The ‘Green Energy’ Supply Chain Has a Slave Labor Problem

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Jewhar Ilham last saw her father seven years ago.

“I don’t even know if he’s alive,” said Ilham, a Chinese-born Uyghur Muslim. “My cousin, she was a nurse, she was sentenced to 10 years for having a photo and an article of my father in her cell phone.”

Ilham’s father, Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, is an accomplished academic, having taught economics at Minzu University of China in Beijing and received several international awards including five Nobel Peace Prize nominations. But Chinese authorities arrested Tohti, who researched human rights violations committed by the Chinese Communist Party-controlled government, in 2014 and later sentenced him to life imprisonment after finding him guilty of “separatism.”

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Commentary: U.S. Drug Agents Ramp Up Fentanyl Counterattack on Chinese Mainland — as DEA Faces Its Own Troubles at Home

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U.S. drug agents are expanding operations in China – six years after America’s largest trading partner and global rival emerged as the main source of chemicals used to make highly lethal fentanyl. It’s now claiming 65,000 American lives a year.

The small crew of about a dozen Drug Enforcement Administration agents, including those in new outposts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, is nearly double the number in 2018. They face what seems like mission impossible: collaborating with Chinese agents to try to bust traffickers hidden somewhere in a sprawling export supply chain that’s linked to 160,000 companies.

“It’s such a massive chemical industry, and then there are layer upon layer of traders, brokers and freight forwarders,” says Russ Holske, the DEA’s director for the Far East, who set up the new offices in China before he retired. “It’s a daunting challenge.”

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Commentary: The Republican Party’s Multiethnic, Working-Class Coalition Is Taking Shape

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In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party’s aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP’s heartland base, the river valley-dwelling “Somewheres” from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, and the party’s bicoastal “Anywhere” rulers. The foot-soldier Republican “Somewheres,” disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican “Anywheres.”

Donald Trump, lifelong conservative “outsider” and populist dissenter from bicoastal “Anywhere” orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration, and China, coasted to the GOP’s presidential nomination. He did so notwithstanding the all-hands-on-deck pushback from leading right-leaning “Anywhere” bastions, encapsulated by National Review magazine’s dedication of an entire issue to, “Against Trump.” Trump’s subsequent victory in the 2016 general election sent the conservative intellectual movement, as well as the Republican Party itself, into a deep state of introspection.

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Democrat-Linked PR Firm Lobbies Against Bill Blacklisting Chinese Drone Manufacturer

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A public relations firm run by former Democratic operatives and tied to foreign influence campaigns is working on behalf of a Chinese drone manufacturer blacklisted for alleged human rights abuses to lobby a provision contained in Congress’ bipartisan legislative package targeting China.

DJI, a drone maker based out of Shenzhen, China, has paid CLS Strategies $190,000 in 2021 to lobby on drone legislation including the American Security Drone Act, according to lobbying disclosure forms. The act was reintroduced by Republican Sen. Rick Scott in January and prevents the federal government from procuring drones manufactured or assembled in China, with certain exceptions.

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Commentary: The U.S. Might Lose the Tech War in Its Own Hemisphere

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South America has sat within the U.S. sphere of interest since the Monroe Doctrine was enunciated in 1823. Now that may be changing, thanks to the inroads that Chinese telecom companies such as Huawei are making in the region’s economies. The advent of 5G networks is showcasing Beijing’s growing ability to rival Washington in South America.

That rivalry isn’t discussed too much in the region itself. Governments in Latin America mostly take a pragmatic approach, waiting for the lowest bidder while trying to remain as friendly as possible with each side. These tendencies hold true for most facets of U.S.-China competition in Latin America, but especially in South America, which is home to several major economies that are more politically and economically independent from the United States than closer neighbors such as Mexico.

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China Threatens to Fire Upon Any American Troops Defending Taiwan

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The Chinese military has issued a direct threat against any possible American military forces that attempt to defend the country of Taiwan, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The threat was made on Thursday in the Chinese state-controlled newspaper Global Times, in which it was written that “it is credible that the [People’s Liberation Army] will heavily attack U.S. troops who come to Taiwan’s rescue.”

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Space Force General Claims American Satellites Are Under Attack on Regular Basis

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A top general with the United States Space Force says that other nations often threaten and even outright attack American satellites in space, as reported by the New York Post.

General David Thompson revealed the alarming developments in an op-ed with the Washington Post, published on Tuesday. In the article, Thompson says that “the threats are really growing and expanding every single day. And it’s really an evolution of activity that’s been happening for a long time.”

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Sen. Grassley Asks Congress to ‘Expose the Extensive Ties’ Between China, Biden Family

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Congressional Democrats to investigate the ties between the Chinese Communist regime and the Biden family during an impassioned speech Monday.

The senior-most Senate Republican, together with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), released more evidence earlier this month showing Hunter Biden’s ties to Chinese businessmen affiliated with the Communist government.

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Commentary: Countering China’s Grand Strategy

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Policeman holding a rifle - in uniform

It has been clear for some time that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) seeks to displace the United States not only as a regional but also as a global hegemonic power. Indeed, we are now in the midst of a new “cold war,” not unlike its predecessor that pitted the United States against the Soviet Union. In the service of its goals, Beijing has pursued a coherent grand strategy. Although China seems to be effectively executing its grand strategy, its success is not foreordained. But countering it must be the strategic priority of the United States.

“Strategy” describes the employment of limited means to achieve the goals of national policy. In general, strategy provides a conceptual link between national ends and scarce resources, both the transformation of those resources into means during peacetime and the application of those means during war.

In the words of Edward Mead Earle:

strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation—or a coalition of nations—including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed. The highest type of strategy—sometimes called grand strategy—is that which so integrates the policies and armaments of the nation that resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory. (emphasis added)

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Wikipedia Moderators Are Debating Removing an Article About Communist Mass Killings for ‘Bias’

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Wikipedia moderators are currently considering removing an article titled “mass killings under communist regimes” over concerns of “bias.”

The article was flagged for deletion in September 2021 due to the “neutrality” of the article being disputed in addition to concerns over the “verifiability” of claims made in the article and whether it contained information already available in other areas of Wikipedia, according to a notice posted on the article.

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Disney+ Pulls ‘Simpsons’ Episode Mocking China From Hong Kong Platform

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Disney’s streaming service pulled an episode of ‘The Simpsons” that mocked Chinese censorship of the Tiananmen Square Massacre from its Hong Kong platform, according to multiple reports.

The episode, titled “Goo Goo Gai Pan,” featured the Simpson family traveling to Beijing, where they walk past a plaque in Tiananmen Square, the site of the 1989 massacre, that read: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.” Homer Simpson also referred to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong as “a little angel that killed 50 million people” in the episode.

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Biden’s Past Criticism of COVID Travel Plans Boomerangs as He Imposes His Own

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President Joe Biden was forced to confront his own past criticisms of travel bans on Friday when he imposed his own travel restrictions on mostly African countries where a new and concerning COVID-19 virus variant has emerged.

Back in 2020, then-candidate Biden derided then-President Donald Trump as ’xenophobic’ and argued travel bans wouldn’t ‘stop’ the pandemic I after the Republican candidate placed restrictions on travel from China and Europe amid the earliest COVID-19 outbreaks.

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Department of Commerce Blacklists Tech Companies Helping Chinese Military

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The U.S. Department of Commerce added several Chinese technology companies to its trade blacklist Wednesday for providing technological support to the Chinese military.

The Commerce Department added the firms to its Entity List, which imposes severe trade restrictions on covered entities, characterizing the companies as “acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

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Senator Marsha Blackburn Pens Letter to YouTube Slamming the Social Media Giant for Aiding the Chinese Communist Party by Demonetizing News Video

Kaitlin Housler

On Monday, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) penned a letter to YouTube after it was revealed the social media giant demonetized a news video discussing a story how former Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli allegedly sexually assaulted Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai.

An episode of Breaking Points, a popular YouTube show hosted by Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball, was demonetized after it ran a segment discussing the disappearance of the tennis star, the Federalist reports.

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Biden Admin Invites Taiwan to ‘Summit for Democracy,’ China Calls It a ‘Mistake’

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The Biden administration extended an invitation for its “Summit for Democracy” to Taiwan, upsetting China, which views the island as its own.

The list of invitees for the summit, which will be held in December, was released Tuesday by the State Department. The gathering was originally announced in February, with three main themes, “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights,” according to the White House.

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California’s Gavin Newsom Goes on Vacation to Mexico After Extending ‘State of Emergency’ Order

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Gavin Newsom

Just one week after declaring that he would extend a statewide “state of emergency” order, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) left for a vacation to Mexico with his family, as reported by the Daily Caller.

Newsom, his wife Jennifer, and their children left the state on Monday, and will not return until November 28th. On November 15th, Newsom signed another executive order extending numerous restrictions and other “emergency” measures that he first implemented in March of 2020, as the Chinese coronavirus first began to spread in the United States. Under his latest order, the rules and restrictions now will not expire until March of next year, with the added possibility that they may be arbitrarily extended again.

Despite some of the heaviest restrictions in the nation, including mask and vaccine requirements, California continues to see some of the highest rates of COVID-19 cases out of all the other states. In early November, California saw twice as many new cases as Florida, a state with virtually no restrictions remaining.

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Democratic Senate Bill Allocates $5 Million for ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ at National Science Foundation

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Black scientist with safety goggles and mask on

A Senate bill that ostensibly focuses on strengthening American competition with China includes a provision between the lines that would designate $5 million for funding of a new “chief diversity officer” position at the National Science Foundation (NSF), according to the Washington Free Beacon.

The bill is the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which is supported by Democrats and opposed by Republicans. The bill aims to address the ongoing economic rivalry and supply chain crisis between the United States and China, by increasing domestic manufacturing and tightening supply lines in the United States.

According to the bill, the duties of the NSF’s new “chief diversity officer” would include “establishing a strategic plan for diverse participation” in the foundation’s various programs, as well as collecting information on the demographics of the NSF’s staff and patent applicants, in order to know which demographics to hire to offset alleged “inequity.” The bill would direct states to close such “equity gaps” by giving subgrants to students in computer science education classes who face “systemic barriers.”

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Commentary: Red China Persecutes Tennis Star Peng Shuai

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Peng Shuai with tennis racket in hand

In early November, the Chinese (PRC) tennis star Peng Shuai wrote on her blog that she had been aggressed in 2018 by a Communist Party boss and vice-premier, Zhang Gaoli, who made her his concubine. The blog post, on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, was removed in less time than it takes to play a set, 20 minutes. 

Peng’s glory days as an athlete were in the mid-teens, when she was the first Chinese tennis player to reach a no. 1 ranking; hers was in doubles. In that format she won Wimbledon 2013 and Roland-Garros 2014, partnering with the Taiwan (Free China) player Hsieh Su-wei (at a time when the Chicoms were offering Hsieh big bucks to defect to their side); Peng was also strong in singles, ranked no. 14.  

Peng has not been seen in public or heard from since her blog was censured. 

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Biden Asks Asian Countries to Release Oil Reserves as Administration Scrambles to Combat High Gas Prices: Report

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Joe Biden

The Biden administration asked China, Japan, South Korea and India to tap into their emergency oil reserves as the president continues to grapple with rising gasoline prices, Reuters reported.

The effort to simultaneously release oil reserves represents a rebuke of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the cartel that controls oil production throughout the Middle East, several anonymous sources familiar with the request told Reuters on Wednesday. OPEC has repeatedly rejected requests from President Joe Biden and other top administration officials to increase oil production amid rising gasoline prices.

The four Asian nations the president appealed to represent some of the largest energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters, according to a University of Oxford database.

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Marriott Refused to Host Conference on Uyghur Genocide Because of ‘Political Theme’

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Marriott Marquis Chicago in 2021

The Marriott hotel in Prague refused to host a conference on its premises for activists and leaders fighting for the rights of Uyghurs in China, Axios reported.

In an email sent to the World Uyghur Congress, which has attempted to shine a spotlight on the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China, the hotel cited the need for “political neutrality” as the reason the conference was denied the venue, Axios reported.

“Unfortunately, I have to inform you that we are not able to offer the premises,” the email read, Axios reported. “We consulted the whole matter with our corporate management. For reasons of political neutrality, we cannot offer events of this type with a political theme. Thank you once again for your time and understanding.”

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‘Conquering Latin America with a Smile’: Chinese Influence Met with Inadequate U.S. Resistance

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China’s campaign to grow its presence in Latin America has brought the country’s influence dangerously close to the U.S., but experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation that America’s efforts to combat it fall short.

The communist goliath has become the number one trading partner for several countries in the region, with Cuba becoming the latest country to sign onto Xi Jinping’s Belt And Road Initiative (BRI), a massive global project launched in 2013, in October.

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