Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

If illegal migrants aren’t content with the conditions on Britain’s new migrant barges, they can “f**k off back to France,” the deputy chairman of the U.K.’s governing Conservative party has claimed.

Lee Anderson, the Conservative MP for Ashfield, made the incendiary remark to the Express newspaper, in which he added: “I think people have just had enough.

“These people come across the Channel in small boats, if they don’t like the conditions they are housed in here then they should go back to France, or better, not come at all in the first place.”

Anderson, who has been a deputy chairman of the governing party since February 2023, was commenting on the ongoing migration crisis on England’s southern border, which resulted in a record 45,755 migrant crossings last year, the majority of whom subsequently claim asylum.

His blunt remark was defended by Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, who admitted that Anderson’s language was “salty” but his point “not unreasonable.”

Note to the Left.

Every illegal migrant that crosses the Channel from France is taking the place of someone genuinely in danger in a refugee camp.

Why can’t you see that these fit healthy young men are actually preventing help reaching those desperate people who really need it? pic.twitter.com/hAtQBlLzT5

— Lee Anderson MP (@LeeAndersonMP_) August 8, 2023

“Lee Anderson expresses the righteous indignation of the British people. He does it in salty terms and that’s his style, but his indignation is well placed,” Chalk told Nick Ferrari on LBC.

“People coming from a safe country… They should claim asylum in the first country (in which they arrive). It shouldn’t be an open shopping list of where you want to go,” he added.

On Anderson’s remarks, the justice secretary said his Conservative colleague “expresses himself in his characteristically robust terms, but there is a lot of sense, in my respectful view, in what he says.”

The Conservative government has been attempting to reduce a considerable backlog to the asylum process and relocate asylum seekers currently residing in hotels, at a cost of around £6 million per day to the British taxpayer, to more cost-effective accommodation including disused army bases and migrant barges.

One such barge has now docked on the tied island of Portland in the southern English county of Dorset, and the first asylum seekers embarked on the vessel on Monday.

They were greeted by a small group of pro-refugee demonstrators at the Portland dock, holding “Welcome” signs and handing out packs of toiletries.

Anderson also took aim at those in support of the migrants, questioning whether they would be “welcome” in their own homes, and calling them hypocrites for supporting the housing needs of illegal migrants but not of homeless Brits across the country.

Illegal Migrants Welcome?

But not in our homes because we are a bunch of hypocrites who have never spoke out about our own homeless seeking housing. pic.twitter.com/ToY6GHi5bc

— Lee Anderson MP (@LeeAndersonMP_) August 7, 2023

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClear Wire,

The wheels of justice often turn slowly, but when it comes to U.S. corporate complicity in China’s record of religious persecution, human rights activists say they are finally picking up speed and moving in the right direction.

Top reformers in Washington, D.C., are heralding a recent twist in a 12-year legal battle that could have far-reaching implications for all U.S. companies that have sold surveillance or tracking technology to China.  

Last month, the U.S. 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lawsuit accusing technology giant Cisco Systems Inc. and two former executives of assisting the Chinese government in identifying and targeting Falun Gong practitioners for arrests, torture, and execution could proceed to trial. The ruling largely reversed a lower district court’s 2014 decision to dismiss the claims against Cisco and John Chambers, its former chief executive officer, and Fredy Cheung, the former vice president of its Chinese operations.

The three-judge appellate panel’s July ruling did not determine the validity of the claims. Instead, it found that the Falun Gong practitioners had presented enough evidence for their case to proceed to trial in California where it was filed.

The legal turn of events is encouraging human rights advocates who have spent decades scrutinizing U.S. corporate involvement in China’s repression of dissidents and religious minorities and its genocide against the Uyghur Muslim population.

“Far too long, many elite leaders of America’s most profitable corporations have aided and abetted the Chinese Communist Party’s heinous human rights abuses, including genocide,” Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, told RealClearPolitics. Smith, who chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, has spent three decades in Washington fighting for human rights.

“This long overdue and wrongly delayed lawsuit underscores the excruciating pain and suffering that corporations like Cisco enable by deliberately cooperating and turning a blind eye to the Chinese Communist Party and its inherent egregious human rights violations and repression in order to make a profit,” Smith added.

Cisco has denied any wrongdoing and has labeled the allegations in the lawsuit baseless. But U.S. Circuit Judge Marsha Berzon, writing for the appellate court, said that the plaintiffs had presented sufficient evidence to proceed to trial and that Cisco’s actions amounted to “aiding and abetting” China’s Falun Gong repression, and had a “substantial effect on the commission of violations of international law, including torture.”

Smith last month held a hearing scrutinizing current U.S. companies’ complicity with China’s forced labor and persecution of many religious and ethnic minorities, as well as dissidents. Testimony from human rights experts highlighted a high-profile case involving forced labor used to make Milwaukee Tool products at Chishan Prison in China. With China’s recent aggression against Taiwan and its military build-up, other witnesses testified about sales by U.S. defense giants, such as Boeing and Raytheon, to the Chinese government.

The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball ties to China also came under scrutiny in the form of testimony from Enes Kanter Freedom, a former NBA player for the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks. Kanter Freedom was dropped from the NBA in early 2022 after speaking out about China’s human rights abuses and for wearing shoes emblazoned with the words “Free Tibet” and “Free the Uyghurs.”

Tencent, a Chinese tech company that partnered with the NBA to live-stream the games, abruptly pulled all Celtics games from the Chinese internet after Kanter Freedom, who played for the Boston team at the time, called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “brutal dictator.” Tencent and the MLB in 2017 announced a wide-ranging partnership that includes live-streaming 125 games, including the All-Star Game and the World Series.

“It’s shocking that some American corporations are leaving ethics behind and adopting CCP values in China,” Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute, told RCP. “That’s what China demands, and too many are willing to comply.”

In 2006, Rep. Smith first started investigating charges from Falun Gong members that Cisco helped construct, operate, and maintain China’s so-called Golden Shield, better known as the Great Firewall of China, an Internet surveillance system put in place by China’s Ministry of Public Security for the surveillance of dissidents, human rights defenders and those practicing banned religions, such as the Falun Gong.

In the late 1990s, the Chinese government labeled the Falun Gong a dangerous cult that threatened Communist control of the country and banned it, setting up an office specifically designed to persecute Falun Gong followers. China then pursued large-scale detentions, torture, forced conversions, and executions of Falun Gong members, which have been well documented by the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, and many other respected organizations around the world. In 2019, the China Tribunal, a government commission in the U.K., found that forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong victims and other prisoners had taken place on a significant scale throughout China for years.

In the current case, brought on behalf of several Falun Gong practitioners by the D.C.-based Human Rights Law Foundation, the plaintiffs argue that Cisco purposefully customized its router technology to allow the Chinese government to identify, track, and detain Falun Gong members. The evidence that Cisco executives specifically helped design the technology to target Falun Gong followers includes Cisco marketing material touting its highly advanced video and image analyzers as the “only product capable of recognizing over 90% of Falun Gong pictorial information.”

The lawsuit also accused Cisco of providing the Chinese government with a library of carefully analyzed patterns of Falun Gong Internet activity, or “signatures,” that enable the Chinese government to identify Falun Gong Internet users; several log/alert systems that provide the Chinese government with real-time monitoring and notification based on Falun Gong Internet traffic patterns; applications for storing data profiles on individual Falun Gong practitioners for use during interrogations and “forced conversions” that included torture; and a nationwide video surveillance system which enabled the Chinese government to identify and detain Falun Gong practitioners.

Cisco was not only aware that its customizations would be used to repress the Falun Gong, but it also geared all of its work to further that goal, the plaintiffs argue. The lawsuit partly stemmed from an internal Cisco document leaked to reporters on the eve of a 2008 U.S. Senate human rights hearing. The 90-page document, an internal Cisco presentation, showed that the company’s engineers regarded the Chinese government’s extensive Internet censorship program as an opportunity to expand its business with the CCP and marketed its routers to China, specifically as a tool of repression.

The Senate hearing also examined the role of other U.S. companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, for cooperating to varying degrees with China’s and other foreign governments’ censorship programs.

The Cisco presentation directly acknowledged that one of Golden Shield’s stated goals was to “combat ‘Falun Gong’ evil religion and other hostiles.” It attributed the quote to Runsen Li, the Chinese government’s then-information technology chief in charge of developing the project.

Mark Chandler, Cisco’s senior vice president of legal services, testified to the Senate that he was “appalled” and “disappointed” when he saw that quote in the presentation.

“It is very regrettable that one of our engineers quoted directly from Mr. Runsen Li, the Chinese government’s head of IT for the Golden Shield project,” Terry Alberstein, a senior director of corporate communications at Cisco, told Wired.com in 2008. “They do not represent Cisco’s views, principles, or its sales and marketing strategy or approach. They were merely inserted in that presentation to capture the goals of the Chinese government in that specific project, which was one of many discussed in that 2002 presentation.”

Cisco acknowledged selling roughly $100,000 worth of routers and switches that became part of the Golden Shield project, according to Alberstein. However, he denied that the company customized them for China’s censorship goals.

Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, chaired that 2008 hearing and argued that U.S. companies have a “moral obligation” to protect freedom of expression.

Terri Marsh, who filed the suit in her capacity as executive director and senior litigation partner of the Human Rights Law Foundation, said unique aspects of the case showed that Cisco was not providing “generic” products to a totalitarian regime. Instead, Cisco created features “to facilitate torture and track the progression of efforts to forcibly convert practitioners.”

“Importantly, the complaint alleges that China could not create similar tools at the time, so the timing of the assistance was significant,” Marsh said in an emailed statement to RCP. And, she said, this is not a case where a tool just happened to be misused.

“Plaintiffs allege that Chinese officials made clear to Cisco that it needed features to further the violent crackdown of Falun Gong believers in China, and Cisco made those features to gain a lucrative foothold in the Chinese market.”

Marsh added that the decision hinges on the specific allegations of conduct that took place in the United States. “The complaint alleges that the heart of the claims – designing the tools, manufacturing components, and providing ongoing assistance – largely took place in California,” she said.

Cisco’s communications team did not respond to RCP’s inquiry. In a statement last month to the Los Angeles Times, a company spokesperson denied that the company customized its products to assist China’s Falun Gong persecution.

“We build our products to global standards, which promote the free flow of information, privacy, and freedom of expression,” the company said. “Cisco has a longstanding commitment to uphold and respect human rights for all people, and we are strongly committed to an open global Internet.”

Smith and other human rights experts point to Cisco’s internal 90-page presentation and other evidence to discount the tech giant’s defense.

“Companies must be exposed and brought to justice if they have blood on their hands from partnerships with businesses and offices controlled by a ruthless ruling party working to crush China’s religious believers, ethnic minorities, and dissidents on their hands,” Nina Shea said. “This case will be important in shining the light on this problem and in deterring others.”

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ White House/national political correspondent.

Earlier in July, a suspicious object washed up on a remote beach in Western Australia. This chunk of golden metal was reported to be a piece of space debris that found its way back to Earth.

And it is not the only one. Today, as Visual Capitalist’s Freny Fernandes details below, thousands of defunct satellites, spent rocket stages, metal shards from collisions, and other remnants of human space exploration are orbiting the Earth at breakneck speeds.

In this graphic, Preyash Shah uses tracking data from the Space-Track.org, maintained by the U.S. Space Force, to help visualize just how much debris is currently orbiting the Earth, while identifying the biggest contributors of this celestial clutter.

Note: Many spent rocket bodies are still actively tracked and controlled by their launch authorities, and the source tracks these separately. Space debris includes spent rocket bodies that are defunct and uncontrolled.

Ranked: Countries Responsible for the Most Space Debris

According to the data, there are roughly 14,000 small, medium, and large debris objects floating about in low Earth orbit as of May 2023. And this is not counting the millions of tiny debris fragments that are too small to be tracked.

Although space debris is a global problem, certain countries have played a larger role in contributing to the clutter. In the 1950s, the U.S. and Russia (formerly USSR) led the space race with the highest number of launched space objects. In the 1970s, they were joined by China, and objects from all three countries account for the vast majority of today’s space debris:

*China-Brazil space debris originates from various cooperational space programs over the years

The debris count of Russia—including former launches by the Soviet Union—currently stands at 4,521. But the U.S. and China are not far behind with more than 4,000 each. And though many of these are accumulated over time, thousands of debris are created in single catastrophic moments.

China’s anti-satellite test in 2007 destroyed its own weather satellite, creating 3,500 space debris pieces. Likewise, the 2009 collision between inactive Russian satellite Cosmos-2251 and operational U.S. communications satellite Iridium 33 created over 2,000 pieces of debris.

Moving at high speeds, even tiny fragments of debris can cause catastrophic collisions. And with companies like SpaceX launching expansive satellite networks, these numbers are bound to grow.

Clearer Skies on the Horizon?

Addressing the space debris issue requires a multi-faceted approach involving international cooperation, advanced technology, and responsible space practices.

Scientists and engineers are actively exploring methods to clean up debris, including concepts like space-based debris removal systems and novel deorbiting techniques.

Some space agencies like the European Space Agency are also making plans to ensure their space technology is designed with safe disposal plans to significantly reduce the accumulation of space junk.

Authored by Jacob Howland via UnHerd,

“Every nation gets the government it deserves,” wrote the philosopher Joseph de Maistre, and some are getting it good and hard right now. De Maistre’s moral interpretation of politics admits of exceptions, but the United States in 2023 is not one of them. A wasting tide of bad education and corruption is rotting the cultural and constitutional piers that, since the Civil War, have kept the US above the waters of chaos.

The American regime has become a tawdry theatrocracy in which political actors, hypokritai in Greek, play stock characters in a loathsome farce. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, Donald Trump stars as the persecuted saviour, and Joe Biden the righteous defender, of the American republic. Never mind that Trump is self-absorbed and impulsive to the point of criminal stupidity, that Biden is senile and evidently corrupt, and that both of these braying, boorish old men are fraudsters and fabulists. These vices do not matter to their furious followers, who love their man precisely because he is not the hated other. Trump and Biden cannot, and will not, be separated; each needs his opponent as the hammer needs the nail. And above the wretched spectacle sit a click-hungry media, feeding on riot and picking favourites like vulturous pagan gods.

This drama of political decadence defies easy categorisation. Aristotle wrote that tragedy depicts people who are better, and comedy worse, than us spectators. Biden and Trump are certainly worse than those who voted them into office, but they are not remotely funny. Their antics are repellent and their goofiness unlovable. Observing them and the choral leaders that follow in their train — jerky puppets like Rudy Giuliani sweating hair-dye, or Anthony Fauci claiming to be science itself — Americans feel only shame and dread, without the cathartic release of laughter or tears.

These trapped emotions spring from the same source. They are visceral responses to the approaching death by senescence of the American experiment in ordered liberty. The problem goes well beyond presidential dementia. The US Senate (from the Latin senex, “old”) looks more like the waiting room of a geriatric neurologist than a council of wise elders. There’s Mitch McConnell, prone to falls and freeze-ups; wheelchair-bound and confused Dianne Feinstein; and John Fetterman, who at only 53 is less fit for public service than any other member of that formerly august body. It’s as if C-SPAN, a network that televises congressional hearings, decided instead to air absurdist, post-apocalyptic horror films.

The zombification of the Capitol — not to mention our city streets, which have become permanent encampments of the dazed and disturbed — is merely a symptom of the underlying disease. Like all institutions, politics falls apart without regular infusions of constructive energy. A modern democracy is healthy only if its major parties grow organically from their voters, representing their interests by habit and inclination even more than conscious effort.

But the grassroots politics Tocqueville admired when he visited the US in the 1830s gave way long ago to the top-down astroturfing of technocratic managerialism. Our governing elites represent no one but themselves and their cronies, and they don’t welcome shocks to the system. Insurgent candidates such as Robert Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy, whose public elevation of the concerns of many Americans aims to revitalise national politics, are censored and met with active resistance, even by their own parties.

It’s not just in politics that the wellsprings of individual and social vitality have dried up. Americans are marrying less and later, and having too few children, to reproduce themselves and the families that nurtured them. What is more, our public schools have largely ceased to transmit the accumulated knowledge and civilisational wisdom of the past to the children we do have. A taste for historical repudiation has taken hold across the culture, leading curators to “contextualise” art, city governments to take down statues, colleges to rename buildings, and publishers to censor or rewrite books. But creativity withers when it ceases to be nourished by the oxygenated blood of the tradition. Little wonder that Hollywood increasingly cannibalises its legacy by pouring old films into new plastic scripts.

Technology has exacerbated our national enervation. We have become charging-stations for our smartphones, which drain psychic energy with insistent distractions and overloads of information-babble. Video calls and work-from-home limit in-person interactions with actual existing individuals, who would otherwise be together for most of their weekly waking hours. Targeted advertising, fine-tuned algorithms, and politically stratified social media sharply decrease our exposure to new ideas. We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.

AI language-learning models offer a cautionary parable of these larger cultural developments. Programs such as ChatGPT, whose writing remains formulaic and prone to errors, learn by sifting through a sea of digitalised text, a growing share of which consists of AI-generated content. The predictable result of this feedback loop is the kind of levelling we’ve seen across our institutions. Like newspapers that drink their own ink — and which ones don’t, these days? — their product can only get worse.

Cultural exhaustion, social withdrawal, and the general enfeeblement of life forces are the practical expression of a will to nothing. There is a name for this spiritual and intellectual condition, and it is nihilism. Nihilism is demonic to the extent that the will to nothing is still a will, a life force. That it is only a negative one is by no means reassuring, because it is easier and more economical to tear down than to build up. Destruction is dramatic and accomplishes the illusion of vitality with relatively little energy. And who in this apocalyptic time, including the nihilist, doesn’t want to feel even a little alive?

After Victoria Nuland’s Monday visit to Niger didn’t bear much fruit, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has accused Wagner group of seeking to take advantage of the instability in the West African country to spread its and Russia’s influence.

“I think what happened, and what continues to happen in Niger was not instigated by Russia or by Wagner, but… they tried to take advantage of it,” he told BBC Tuesday.

“Every single place that this Wagner group has gone, death, destruction and exploitation have followed,” Blinken added. “Insecurity has gone up, not down”.

As we detailed earlier, Acting Deputy Secretary of State Nuland attempted to warn Niger’s junta leaders not to cooperate with Wagner for the same reasons. 

Blinken further stressed that the instability in Niger and the region is a “repeat of what’s happened in other countries, where they brought nothing but bad things in their wake.”

The comments come after multiple international reports said that Niger’s coup leaders are in talks with Wagner, amid fears that a Western-friendly African bloc of neighboring countries (ECOWAS) could intervene militarily to restore ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, who is currently under house arrest.

According to a recent CFR briefing, Wagner has an extensive presence across Africa, helping various governments chiefly with security and counter-terrorism operations and training:

The Wagner Group has established operations in several African countries, where many of its operations focus on security issues. It has often provided security services and paramilitary assistance and launched disinformation campaigns for troubled regimes in exchange for resource concessions and diplomatic support. Wagner is most active in the Central African Republic (CAR), Libya, Mali, and Sudan, all of which have a tenuous relationship with the West due to colonial legacies and inherent political differences.

Demonstrators in favor of the coup in Niger have of late been frequently seen waving Russian flags, as an indicator of deep anti-Western sentiment.

Map of African countries that have signed military agreements with Russia pic.twitter.com/CKlAC9zePv

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) August 3, 2023

Alarmingly, while both French and American troops are in the region, Wagner mercenaries are just next door from Niger in Mali. Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin had positively celebrated the coup and blasted past French and Western colonialism in Africa:

In a long message posted to social media, Prigozhin blamed the situation in Niger on the legacy of colonialism and alleged, without evidence, that Western nations were sponsoring terrorist groups in the country. Niger was once a French colony and, before this week’s putsch, it had been one of the few democracies in the region.

From the West’s perspective, looming large in the background is expanding Russian influence in Africa.

But those African leaders who are currently standing with Niger’s coup leaders warn of NATO influence instead, remembering the disastrous legacy of US-NATO intervention in Libya in 2011…

In every public statement, the coup leaders of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger say that NATO sponsorship of terrorists in Libya destroyed their countries.

Unfortunately, correspondents for AP, Reuters, AFP, and BBC are a little hard of hearing and never report this. pic.twitter.com/6zZd7kXggj

— Seth Harp (@sethharpesq) August 8, 2023

There have recently been hyped headlines claiming Putin is eyeing extending his influence to Niger and across West Africa. But the reality also is that US AFRICOM has long had a significant military presence in the form of drone and special operations bases across the continent.

Authored by Richard Benedetto via RealClear Wire,

The Washington Post has a Donald Trump obsession. Some might call it a vendetta.

Richard Benedetto is a retired USA Today White House correspondent and columnist. He has taught politics and journalism at American, Georgetown, and George Mason Universities for 17 years.

Not only is China ravenously buying up all the physical gold it can get its hands on – something it has been doing pretty much non stop since 2009, for the most part covertly with occasional periods of public disclosure meant to achieve specific political goals – more importantly, it is letting the world know it is buying up all the physical gold it can get its hands on.

On Monday, the Chinese central bank revealed that in July it increased its gold reserves for a ninth straight month as central bank purchases – in big part out of China – continue to underpin the price of the precious metal, offset selling by ETFs.

The bullion held by the People’s Bank of China rose by 740,000 troy ounces, or about 23 tons, bringing the country’s total stockpile to a record 2,137 tons, with around 188 tons added in a run of purchases that began in November. What China’s true purchases are, however, remains a mystery and will be revealed only when Beijing is ready with whatever it has in mind next for its currency.

As we reported previously, China has led central bank buying of gold in 2023 as it continues to diversify its reserves away from the weaponized US dollar. That’s helped keep prices buoyant despite rising interest rates around the world, which typically sap demand for non-interest bearing bullion. One can only imagine what will happen once rates start diving and when the exponential increase in US debt forces the Fed to resume monetizing it.

Official purchases are key to the outlook for prices this year, according to the World Gold Council. The industry body expects central banks to keep adding to their holdings, although at a slower pace than last year when demand surged in the hunt for alternatives to the dollar after the US sanctioned Russia’s reserves following its invasion of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the PBOC also reported that China’s total foreign currency reserves rose by $11.3 billion to $3.204 trillion in July, up 3.2% on the year and 0.4% on the prior month, and higher than the $3.193 trillion consensus estimate.

China has found itself in a bit of a quandary: on one hand, as we reported moments ago, in its zeal to portray the economy as the second coming of that brilliant vision and magnificent execution of economic utopia that is “Bidenomics”, Beijing barred not only all bearish commentary in financial and economic circles, but also any mention of “deflation”; on the other hand China is – well – deflating: stuck between a collapsing property sector, deleveraging consumers, crashing stock market, slumping exports, and accelerating deglobalization, the only place where Chinese prices can go up is the same imaginary socialist utopia where Bidenomics is actually something different than a drunken sailor’s deficit-busting spending spree.

Then things got especially complicated because just days after China banned the use of deflation, it was set to report its latest July CPI and PPI… which it did moments ago.

And as a reminder, in our preview of today’s CPI print we said that “odds are that CPI will come in just barely positive and all shall be well… or else we are about to see a whole lot of imprisoned Chinese economists, analysts and strategists.”

Well, we can now say that we were half right. Yes, on one hand, China has no choice but to admit deflation, pardon disinflation (we don’t want the Chinese secret police knocking on our door at 3am) had arrived, and sure enough the National Bureau of Statistics, the greatest congregation of goalseek scientists ever gathered, just announced that in July CPI dipped -0.3% Y/Y, down from June’s unchanged print but just slightly stronger than the -0.4% Y/Y estimate. At the same time PPI also dropped for the 10th consecutive month, but it appears to have finally hit a bottom and after sliding -5.4% Y/Y in June it dropped ever so slightly less, or -4.4%.

In other words, this was the first time since Nov 2020 that both Chinese CPI and PPI printed negative.

But wait, there’s more. Because while China did indeed enter deflation, pardon, disinflation on an annual basis, the sequential number is where the real goalseeking action was: with consensus expecting a drop of -0.1% which would have marked the sixth consecutive monthly decline and the longest stretch on record, after last month’s 0.2% decline, Beijing reported that for the first time since February, China experienced sequential inflation of 0.2%.

Still, that would hardly quiet the inflation hawks and Beijing had to engage in aggressive damage control; sure enough, statistics bureau attributed the decline in consumers prices to the high base of comparison with last year, saying the contraction is likely to be temporary and consumer demand continued to improve in July.

“With the impact of a high base from last year gradually fading, the CPI is likely to rebound gradually,” Dong Lijuan, chief statistician at the NBS, said in rare additional comments to accompany the official data. Needless to say, he didn’t use the dreaded D-word which would have bought him an immediate one way ticket to deflation-reeducation camp.

There was better news in the latest core inflation print, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, and which doubled to 0.8% from 0.4%, a sign of “underlying, although subdued, demand in the economy” according to Bloomberg.

Similar to the US, a breakdown of the consumer inflation figures showed prices for household goods, food and transport contracted, while prices of services spending, like recreation and education, climbing.

Of course, all of the above “data” is just theatrics as everyone knows the true plight of China’s economy. Using the GDP deflator — a measure of economy-wide prices — China was in deflation in the first half of the year. The International Monetary Fund defines deflation as “a sustained decline in an aggregate measure of prices,” such as the CPI or the GDP deflator.

And while deflation boosts the case for more monetary and fiscal stimulus, the central bank is facing several constraints that’s making it cautious, including a weaker yuan and record debt levels in the economy. Analysts expect the PBOC to take moderate steps to ease monetary policy for the rest of this year. It is unclear what incremental fiscal stimulus measures Beijing will undertake, but one thing is clear: it has to do something or else that record youth unemployment rate will soon transform into the one thing every Chinese leader fears the most: a middle-class insurrection.

The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index trimmed an earlier loss of as much as 0.9% to trade 0.3% lower as of 9:50 a.m., while the onshore benchmark CSI 300 Index of stocks traded little changed.

Authored by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Independent journalist Steve Baker says he was served a subpoena signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Anita Eve, demanding all of the video he shot at and near the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He said the subpoena likely means the DOJ is investigating him for alleged felony crimes.

“They want to silence me,” Mr. Baker said during an Aug. 7 Spaces broadcast on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Mr. Baker said he was told to show up in Washington on Aug. 16 to turn over his material. He was given an alternative: to surrender his video to the FBI in his home state of North Carolina. He told The Epoch Times that he plans to appear in person in Washington.

Mr. Baker said he believes his work covering Jan. 6 unrest at the Capitol is protected by the First Amendment. He said he didn’t damage property, encourage anyone to enter the building, or participate in chants or actions by protesters.

It’s the second time in 2023 that Mr. Baker has called for public attention to what he believes could be DOJ prosecution of him for his work on Jan. 6, 2021.

In March, he said a high-profile journalist called him at 6:30 a.m. one day with a warning from a DOJ insider. “‘Your friend in Raleigh, tell him to be careful,’” the message said. “‘He has awakened a couple of people’s attention to his work, and they’re not happy about it at all.’”

Mr. Baker has been a frequent, vocal critic on social media regarding the DOJ’s handling of Jan. 6 cases, citing his observations of the events on Jan. 6, 2021. He has criticized Congress for not aggressively investigating the issues ignored by the original anti-Trump Jan. 6 Select Committee.

It’s the second time since Jan. 6, 2021, that Mr. Baker has been in the crosshairs of the FBI and DOJ. He said he was threatened in 2021 with a charge of interstate racketeering for licensing his Jan. 6 video footage to HBO and other media outlets.

Mr. Baker showed up for an interview with the FBI in August 2021, but that meeting was delayed because of a federal rule that requires the attorney general to sign off on interviewing any member of the press, he said. In November 2021, Mr. Baker was told he would be charged “within the week.”

“The interstate racketeering charge was just absurd on its face,” Mr. Baker said.

The 2021 investigation hasn’t resulted in charges.

“We never heard from them again for over 20 months, until Friday,” Mr. Baker said.

Mr. Baker said he believes what triggered the current DOJ investigation was a story about the U.S. Capitol Police that he has been developing for 10 months. That story is close to fruition but still requires more video research in Washington, he said.

“Fact is … ‘they’ know the story I’ve been working on for ten months and am about to drop,” Mr. Baker wrote on X. “They are not going to stop it from coming out. Their timing for this action is fully transparent.

“I will not go gentle into that good night.”

He declined to share more details on the Capitol Police story.

Mr. Baker also published a recent story on social media about U.S. Army special forces at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. A special unit from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, had soldiers on Capitol grounds that day for as yet undefined purposes, he wrote.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the DOJ for comment.

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH) undersea volcano eruption in January 2022 was larger than any nuclear blast conducted by the US, and the shockwave was felt worldwide. A new study reveals the eruption, which injected large amounts of water vapor into the stratosphere in an unprecedented way in our lifetime, might cause global temperatures to warm temporarily. 

“The amount of water vapor injected into the stratosphere after the eruption of HTHH was unprecedented, and it is, therefore, unclear what it might mean for surface climate. We use climate model simulations to assess the long-term surface impacts of stratospheric water vapor (SWV) anomalies caused by volcanic eruptions. The simulations show that the SWV anomalies lead to strong and persistent warming of Northern Hemisphere landmasses in boreal winter, and austral winter cooling over Australia,” wrote Martin Jucker, the leader researcher on the study from the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre. 

Titled “Long-term surface impact of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai-like stratospheric water vapor injection,” the paper examines the aftermath of the eruption “and reveals that surface temperatures across large regions of the world increase by over 1.5°C for several years, although some areas experience cooling close to 1°C. Additionally, the research suggests a potential connection between the eruption and sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.” 

Large volcanic eruptions cause the climate to cool because sulfur dioxide is typically emitted into the atmosphere. But Tonga is different because the underwater caldera shot 146 metric megatons of water into the stratosphere, potentially contributing to atmospheric warming over the next five years. 

Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist, added his perspective and tweeted, “This new Hunga Tonga research study (in peer review) is revelatory. Seriously, we need to consider the volcano as an unexpected, decade-long, natural warming spike.” 

This new Hunga Tonga 🌋 research study (in peer review) is revelatory. Seriously, we need to consider the volcano as an unexpected, decade-long, natural warming spike.

The greenhouse warming effect of 40 trillion gallons of water vapor in the stratosphere may have just kicked… https://t.co/4PtlRa0Shl pic.twitter.com/0EbQV7LLNe

— Ryan Maue (@RyanMaue) August 8, 2023

Don’t worry. We’re sure the climate alarmists in the White House have a solution to all of this: stop driving automobiles, eat insects, and own nothing.