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Authored by Gordon Change via The Gatestone Institute,

China has been maintaining at least two facilities — one in California and the other in Nevada — that are part of a biological weapons program.

A Declaration of Arrest Report, issued by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in connection with the detention of Ori Solomon on January 31, states that there is a “deeper conspiracy” between an illegal biological lab in Reedley, California and a residence containing apparently dangerous substances in Nevada.

On January 31, Las Vegas SWAT and federal agents raided a home on the eastern outskirts of the city and seized over a thousand vials of an unknown substance or substances. Those vials have been sent to an FBI lab in Maryland for analysis.

A housecleaner tipped off authorities after she and others temporarily residing at the home got “deathly ill.”

Solomon was the property manager of the location.

Jiabei Zhu, a Chinese national also known as Jesse Zhu, Qiang He and David He, is the listed agent of a company, David Destiny Discovery LLC, that is the registered owner of the Las Vegas house along with Zhaoyan Wang, his business partner and the mother of his child.

Zhu will go to trial in April on federal charges for the operation of the lab in Reedley, near Fresno in the Central Valley.

Fortunately, in California, Code Enforcement Officer Jesalyn Harper in December 2022 noticed a garden hose connected to a supposedly abandoned building.

She entered the structure and discovered what appears to have been a secret biological weapons laboratory. Inside, Harper found Chinese nationals working in white coats.

The lab stored nearly a thousand transgenic mice — 773 live and more than 175 dead — “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.”

Authorities also found medical waste and chemical, viral, and biological agents. There were on-site at least 20 potentially infectious pathogens, including those causing coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes.

The lab contained a freezer labeled “Ebola.” The freezer held unlabeled sealed bags used to store high-risk biological materials. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are studying Ebola, which has a natural fatality rate of 50%, undoubtedly to weaponize it.

The Reedley facility was run by Chinese fronting for parties in China. Among the fronts is Zhu.

In 2024, Brandon Weichert, author of Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, in comments to Gatestone, called the Reedley facility a “kamikaze lab,” which was “unsecured, poorly contained, makeshift, containing a couple dozen pathogens near a population center.”

There are reasons to be alarmed.

First, as Weichert noted at the time, the Reedley facility could not be a “one-off.” Now, we know that he was right. There is — at least — a second location, the “deeper conspiracy” as the Las Vegas police termed it.

Moreover, the Chinese regime is behind that conspiracy. Wang fled to China sometime in 2023. While there, she kept tabs on the Las Vegas home by, for instance, monitoring cameras at the location.

Zhu was also a top official at one of China’s state-controlled companies that had links to the People’s Liberation Army. According to recent reporting, he has maintained business relations with parties connected to the Chinese regime.

All this demonstrates that China’s Communist Party, which could have ordered Zhu and Wang to shut down the effort after the discovery of the Reedley lab, allowed it to continue. Among other things, the continuation of the effort suggests there is a broader effort to spread disease in the United States.

Second, Zhu operated the Reedley and Las Vegas facilities with malign intent.

Zhu, according to Canadian court statements, told a co-conspirator in an earlier theft of U.S. intellectual property that these efforts would help “defeat the American aggressor and wild ambitious wolf!” “The law is strong,” he added at the time, “but the outlaws are ten times stronger.”

These statements were included in the Las Vegas Declaration of Arrest Report. As a recent analysis states, “the declaration reveals, for the first time, the full scope of what U.S. investigators believe they are dealing with: not merely a rogue lab operator, but a PRC-trained biologist with state-linked corporate ties, a proven history of stealing American technology for Beijing’s benefit, and language that investigators now treat as evidence of ideological motivation.”

As Weichert said of the Reedley lab two years ago, “It is, I believe, a part of a large Chinese military operation to spread disease throughout the American population.”

He is undoubtedly correct. A quarter century ago, General Chi Haotian, China’s defense minister and vice chairman of the Party’s Central Military Commission, reportedly gave a secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans. “It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans,” he said. “But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the Communist Party leads the world.”

Chi’s plan was to use disease for this purpose.

The FBI now appears to be concerned about the extent of the Chinese effort. It executed a search warrant on the Reedley facility on February 8th.

Have U.S. authorities now discovered everything? “We need to know if there is a third biological weapons location and maybe a fourth,” Blaine Holt, a retired U.S. Air Force general who now specializes in civil preparedness measures, told Gatestone this month. “We are on notice that the Chinese regime is preparing to spread disease in America. We have been very slow off the mark and have absolutely no time to lose. The Chinese regime could give the go-signal at any moment.”

Meta’s Ray-Bans are seeing growing adoption among everyday consumers, highlighting an affordability sweet spot for AI-powered wearables as Apple is expected to enter the space with its own smart glasses following its failed Vision Pro launch. Yet, as AI-powered glasses gain popularity, they introduce new privacy and security concerns, with one smartphone app emerging as an early countermeasure.

As first reported by tech blog 404 Media, the new smartphone app Nearby Glasses scans the Bluetooth signature emitted by smart glasses and sends a push notification to the user if a device is detected nearby.

“I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech,” the app’s developer, Yves Jeanrenaud, told 404 Media.

The emergence of this app comes as we’ve been highlighting that mass adoption of smart glasses is in its early stages; it is happening now, and we’ve already mapped the supply chain tied to how to profit from the explosion of these glasses (as well as highlighted Meta’s supplier).

But alongside that adoption curve comes a series of risks, from surveillance concerns to child safety issues. Simply put, not everyone wants to be recorded.

“This is a tech solution to a social problem exaggerated by technology. I do not want to promote tech solutionism, nor do I want people to feel falsely secure. It’s still imperfect,” Jeanrenaud said.

Remember when Apple had to start warning everyone about AirTags around them? Well, Tim Cook may eventually have to roll out a similar update for smart glasses if there’s enough public uproar.

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Western globalists won’t last long.

Thirty-five years ago, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama made a name for himself by advancing the proposition that the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union promised the ascendency and universalization of so-called Western liberal democracy.  As a Marxist-Hegelian who saw the progression of history as an evolutionary process with a natural and predetermined conclusion, Fukuyama envisioned Western-styled liberalism as both “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” and “the final form of human government.”  Expecting all human struggles to barrel toward a state of imminent equilibrium and future peace, Fukuyama stated out loud what many other late-twentieth century thinkers also believed: Humanity had reached the end of history.

After the 9/11 Islamic terror attacks in the United States, two decades of the “Global War on Terrorism,” communist China’s expansive “Belt and Road Initiative,” immigration-fueled social strife, the collapse of public trust in government institutions, the prevalence of pre-civil war conditions across Europe, the rise of Indian economic power, the emergence of Donald Trump’s nationalism as a counterbalance to the World Economic Forum’s vaunted globalism, the return of the Russian Federation as a major source of European angst, the growth of “multiculturalism” and its attendant fracturing of national unity, the “great powers” competition for hydrocarbon energies and other natural resources, the new geopolitical race to project strength in the Arctic, and the ever-present discussion of an impending World War III — just to name a few of the numerous global conflicts of the first quarter of the present century — Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument has probably reached the end of its usefulness.

Before the curse of humanity’s short memory stores Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis in the cupboard until it can be retrieved, dusted off, and recycled for practical use next century (just as Fukuyama had done with the historical conceptions of Hegel and Marx), it is worth noting how much of the academic world bought into this argument.  I remember listening to two young political science professors discussing Fukuyama’s work after the 9/11 terror attacks, and even then — in the midst of such a horrific rebuke to the proposition that a globalized form of Western liberalism was preordained — both academics were staunch believers in the “end of history” and disagreed only about whether Professor Fukuyama was worthy of so much praise for having merely stated what was glaringly obvious.

I was around another man at the time named Samuel P. Huntington, and he had written an essay and book that took Fukuyama’s thesis to task.  In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Professor Huntington argued that unbridgeable cultural conflicts would continue to remake the world.  Although critics called him “racist,” “Islamophobic,” “ignorant,” and even “Hitlerian” for dismissing the unifying effects of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” Huntington’s predictions for a volatile twenty-first century were much more accurate than anything coming from the “end of history” camp.  Still, even after death, the man who dispassionately forecasted a civilizational clash and an emerging period of global uncertainty is still maligned as “prejudicial,” “white supremacist,” “bigoted,” and “imperialist.”

Is there any conflict raging in the world today that can’t be described in terms of competing cultural values?  Israel and its Islamic neighbors have been in a perennial state of war for eighty years.  Indian Hindus and Pakistani Muslims remain at each other’s throats.  Christianity and Islam have added fuel to fiery tribal conflicts that continue to rage across the continent of Africa.  Armenia’s Christians and Azerbaijan’s Muslims struggle to maintain peace.  The Balkans remain a potpourri of combative cultures and ethnic groups whose simmering passions can quickly boil over.  Burma, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos fight against each other and themselves as civilizational loyalties turn ancient resentments into recurring bouts of violence.  The War in Ukraine centers around the contested Donbas region whose people more closely align with the language, religion, and culture of Russia than with the historic identity that unites the people living in the western two-thirds of Ukraine.

Everywhere in the world, battle lines are drawn around civilizational identity.  Religious conflict, historic grievance, and cultural incompatibility drive violence around the planet.

Yet Western globalists in Europe and North America pretend not to notice.  They organize annual conventions where members of the World Economic Forum or the Council on Foreign Relations or the Royal Institute of International Affairs can bloviate about “multiculturalism,” “open borders,” “established norms,” and the “rules-based international order.”  They speak about “nationalism” and “patriotism” as if they were diseases requiring quarantine for those showing symptoms.  They like Islam and are willing to imprison anyone seen as violating Sharia Law or causing offense to Muslims.  But they generally despise Christians and Jews and don’t mind when medieval cathedrals mysteriously burn to the ground or Hamas terrorists rape Israeli women and kill Israeli babies.  They pray fanatically at the altar of their “green energy” religion, while replacing entire domestic industries with the coal-powered, slave-labor-produced, government-subsidized exports of the Chinese Communist Party.  White, Western globalists prefer to ignore the threats of Islamic jihad and Chinese totalitarianism, sip from glasses brimming with crisp Sauvignon blanc, and stew in the intoxicating vapors of their own haughty uselessness.

One might think that the last twenty-five years of global volatility would have given globalism’s biggest promoters some measure of pause as the “end of history” arrived and passed.  But Western “elites” generally suffer from cerebral deficiency, shameless incuriosity, and pathological stubbornness.  According to the blue bloods on both sides of the Atlantic — such as Canada’s banker-turned-prime-minister Mark Carney, France’s banker-turned-president Emmanuel Macron, Germany’s BlackRock-board-member-turned-chancellor Friedrich Merz, and the European Commission’s noble-aristocrat-turned-installed-president Ursula von der Leyen — “multiculturalism” is our future, “diversity is our strength,” and “cultural nationalism” is a “terrorist ideology” that breeds “hate.”

Even after President George W. Bush’s failed “nation-building” gambit to bring “democracy” and “women’s rights” to Afghanistan and the Middle East, Western globalists insist that civilizational clashes aren’t real.  Even after the exposure of Muslim “rape gangs” trading local girls as sex slaves in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France, Western globalists insist that “diversity is our strength” and “multiculturalism” is our future.  Even after communist China’s increasingly provocative saber-rattling regarding Taiwan, pervasive espionage and sabotage within the United States, and public promises of world domination, Western globalists insist on transferring huge sums of national wealth to the Chinese Communist Party in exchange for China’s lip service to “international norms.”  What Talleyrand said of the Bourbons applies equally well to the West’s suicidal cult of self-hating globalists: “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

As we enter the second quarter of the twentieth century, the world is about to receive a harsh education in the persistent reality of civilizational conflict.  The “end of history” tripe was always a figment of self-deluding theoreticians who envision themselves as philosopher kings.  In the real world, values matter.  Culture matters.  Religion matters.  The past matters.  Honor matters.  Violent conflict does not disappear in a puff of smoke when Marxist-Hegelians hold up their dog-eared copies of Das Kapital and declare it must be so.  In the real world — where bullets fly faster than words — theories written on scraps of paper are rolled up into cigarettes or left under a rock near the trench latrine.  In the real world, people fight.  Cultures compete.  And civilizations clash.

Western globalists who refuse to learn the basics won’t long last.  From the Arctic to the Antarctic, battle lines are being drawn and redrawn everywhere.  The past informs the present.  The present informs the future.  The rest of history is just now beginning.

Via Middle East Eye

As tensions between Iran and the US-Israeli alliance approach a critical juncture, a question echoes through global capitals, newsrooms and policy circles: will China come to Iran’s rescue? And if so, what would that assistance look like?

The answer defies the binary expectations of traditional military alliances. China is unlikely to dispatch troops or engage directly in any conflict, but to interpret this as passivity would be to misread the nature of 21st-century great power competition. China’s support for Iran is real, multifaceted, and in some ways more sustainable than military intervention; it just operates on a different strategic wavelength.

At the UN Security Council, China has consistently deployed its most potent weapon: the veto-wielding power of principle. In an emergency meeting last month, Chinese Ambassador Sun Lei delivered a stark message to Washington: “The use of force can never solve problems. It will only make them more complex and intractable. Any military adventurism would only push the region toward an unpredictable abyss.”

This is not empty rhetoric. China’s official position explicitly supports “safeguarding Iran’s sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity”, while opposing “the threat or use of force in international relations”. 

By anchoring its stance in the UN Charter and international law, China provides Tehran with something invaluable: legitimacy on the world stage, and a powerful counter-narrative to western pressure.

Strategic alignment

The diplomatic calculus shifted fundamentally when Iran was formally approved in 2021 as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), joining China, Russia and Central Asian nations. This was followed by Tehran’s inclusion in the Brics bloc. 

These are not military pacts, but they create something perhaps more enduring: a framework for permanent consultation and strategic alignment.

Last year, Chinese, Russian and Iranian diplomats met in Beijing and agreed to “strengthen coordination” within international organizations such as Brics and the SCO. This institutional embrace means that any aggression against Iran is now implicitly an issue for the world’s most powerful counterweights to US hegemony. 

While China avoids direct confrontation, it has not shied away from visible military cooperation. Earlier this month, Russia, China and Iran deployed naval vessels for joint security exercises in the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. A Russian presidential aide framed these drills in the context of building a “multipolar world order in the oceans” to counter western hegemony.

More tangibly, news has emerged of significant defense cooperation. Middle East Eye reported last year that Iran had received Chinese-made surface-to-air missile batteries to rebuild its air defense capabilities, part of an oil-for-weapons deal that allowed Tehran to bypass US sanctions. 

Some reports have also suggested that Iran may receive advanced J-20 fifth-generation fighter jets, J-10C aircraft, and HQ-9 air defense systems, although there has been no official confirmation.

The symbolism is as striking as the substance. During Iran’s Air Force Day celebrations this month, a Chinese military attache presented a model of the J-20 stealth fighter to an Iranian air force commander – a gesture widely interpreted as signalling a new chapter in defence engagement between the two nations.

Multipolar age

Perhaps China’s most consequential support remains invisible on the battlefield, but visible in Iran’s national accounts. Despite US sanctions and pressure, China remains Iran’s top energy partner, with approximately 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports now directed to Chinese buyers.

The US has taken notice. The Treasury Department last year imposed sanctions on a Chinese refinery in Shandong province accused of purchasing more than $1bn worth of Iranian oil, with the Trump administration vowing “to drive Iran’s illicit oil exports, including to China, to zero”. China’s embassy in Washington responded by condemning sanctions that “undermine international trade order and rules” and “infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies”.

While the China-Iran economic relationship has faced strains – Chinese state refiners have occasionally suspended purchases to avoid US financial risks – the overall trajectory is clear: China provides the economic oxygen that sustains Iran’s resistance to external pressure. 

So if China is already providing diplomatic cover, institutional support, military cooperation and an economic lifeline, why doesn’t it go further? Why not send warships or explicitly threaten intervention?

The answer lies in strategic prioritization. As is widely understood, Beijing’s most pressing strategic goal is to achieve national reunification and, before this goal is realized, any actions that might unnecessarily and prematurely escalate comprehensive confrontation with the United States must be approached with extreme caution.

Looks like the USS Delbert D. Black has left the Red Sea and is backing up the Lincoln CSG in the Arabian Sea. After over a month of American saber rattling, it’s probably safe to say that the armada is now fully in position. pic.twitter.com/0JFFYrGm0c

— barry with the NED (@bonzerbarry) February 27, 2026

Moreover, China believes that while significant US military action in Iran could inflict losses, regime change would be difficult to achieve. Under such circumstances, Beijing can adopt a model similar to its approach to the Ukraine conflict: refraining from direct participation while maintaining normal state-to-state relations with the party under attack, providing political and diplomatic support at the UN, and continuing economic engagement that doesn’t violate international law.

What we are witnessing is not traditional alliance politics, but something new: a form of strategic partnership designed for a multipolar age. China offers Iran diplomatic protection, institutional integration, visible military cooperation and an economic boost – all without crossing the line into a direct confrontation that would trigger a wider war.

For those asking whether China will “rescue” Iran, the answer depends on definition. If rescue means troops and battleships, the answer is no. If rescue means ensuring that Iran can survive, resist, and eventually negotiate from strength, the answer is quietly, persistently and strategically yes.

This approach has already proven effective and difficult for adversaries to counter. In the shadow of potential conflict, China has constructed a new kind of shield for its partner: one forged not from steel, but from strategic patience, economic interdependence, and the architecture of a rising multipolar world.

Some analysts fear Israel is testing out a precursor for another multi-front war as the US appears poised to attack Iran. Technically a ceasefire has been in effect in southern Lebanon, but the IDF military has been testing – or more like blowing straight past – these truce barriers.

The Israeli Army carried out at least eight airstrikes in eastern Lebanon on Thursday, focusing on the Baalbek area. Multiple buildings were hit, with casualty figures not initially confirmed.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry at one point specified that a “16-year-old Syrian boy was killed,” according to the National News Agency. There were reports of dozens more wounded and injured.

The deceased was identified as Hussein Mohsen al-Khalaf, who died in a strike on Kfar Dan near Baalbek, L’Orient also reported.

The IDF claimed the targets belonged to Hezbollah’s “elite Radwan Force” and were used for weapons storage and training. But as has been the pattern with these types of sporadic brief attacks, it provided no evidence for the claim.

Israel further said the sites violated the “ceasefire understandings” and posed a threat to Israel, after widespread allegations the fresh attacks constitute a severe breach the ceasefire in force between the two countries.

However, Middle East media reports have cited more than 1,000 strikes inside Lebanon by Israeli forces, killing hundreds, since the ceasefire took effect.

Israel has intensified attacks in recent weeks, citing the prospect of a US-Iran war. Israeli officials have warned Lebanon that civilian sites will be targeted if Hezbollah joins such a conflict. Hezbollah has long been a main proxy arm of Tehran’s, but also acts in its own interests as a guarantor of Lebanon’s Shia population.

So these deadly new assaults do appear to represent a kind of pre-Iran war anti-Hezbollah action. Israel has already over the past two years decimated Hezbollah’s top leadership, and could now be looking for an excuse to finish the job.

All eyes on Iran: Pentagon build-up is the biggest in the region since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq…

Evacuation from Qatar
Evacuation from Iraq
Withdrawal from Syria
Evacuation of the 5th fleet from Bahrain

That’s a bigger sign of war than an aircraft carrier https://t.co/HfvWhCGRGs

— Middle East Observer (@ME_Observer_) February 27, 2026

There’s been no evidence that Hezbollah has fired a single rocket at Israel since the ceasefire began in November 2024, however. The group is very well-armed, but has been on a back foot, also after the West-Gulf axis successfully accomplished regime change in Syria.

Authored by Catherine Yang via The Epoch Times,

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said on Feb. 25 that Google and its cybersecurity partners disrupted a global espionage campaign that the group confirmed had hacked 42 countries and suspects infected at least 20 more.

GTIG has tracked the group as UNC2814/Gallium since 2017 and suspects it to be Chinese.

“This prolific, elusive actor has a long history of targeting international governments and global telecommunications organizations across Africa, Asia, and the Americas,” the report reads.

The campaign is characterized by stealth tactics and the targeting of cloud-hosted products to disguise its traffic. The group stated that this campaign is distinct and separate from Salt Typhoon, a major Chinese regime-backed cyberespionage campaign.

“This was a vast surveillance apparatus used to spy on people and organizations throughout the world,” GTIG Chief Analyst John Hultquist said.

GTIG said its disruption efforts have terminated the group’s access to a backdoor, disabled its infrastructure, and revoked its accounts and access to relevant Google products.

The campaign came on the heels of the discovery of a novel backdoor the group used that Google tracks as Gridtide, “a sophisticated C-based backdoor with the ability to execute arbitrary shell commands, upload files, and download files.”

Charley Snyder, GTIG senior manager, said the backdoor was installed on a system that had access to phone numbers, dates and places of birth, voter IDs, and national ID numbers.

The group’s recent activity has targeted telecommunication providers and government organizations, according to the report.

“This prolific scope is likely the result of a decade of concentrated effort,” the report reads.

Google recently warned that foreign adversaries are targeting the U.S. defense industrial base in cyberspace. In a Feb. 10 report, it said that groups in Russia, North Korea, and primarily China have carried out sustained cyberattacks in recent months, the most active ever observed and posing “significant risk to the defense and aerospace sector.”

In both reports, Google found that edge devices were being exploited, highlighting the trend of malicious cyberactors targeting hardware such as routers, controllers, sensors, and smart devices that don’t have the same level of security as devices at the center of a network.

There are many times more edge devices than people on the planet, providing hackers with endless targeting options, and the majority of enterprise data is generated or processed on these devices.

“In modern warfare, the front lines are no longer confined to the battlefield; they extend directly into the servers and supply chains of the industry that safeguards the nation,” the GTIG’s Feb. 10 report reads, noting compromises up and down the supply chain and hiring processes.

Cybersecurity agencies around the world have increasingly sounded the alarm on Chinese state-backed cyberespionage, and in 2025, a joint advisory cosigned by more than a dozen nations was published with the aim of exposing the Salt Typhoon campaign.

Submitted by The Bureau’s Sam Cooper,

An elite Montreal-based narco network allegedly exported carfentanil and next-generation synthetic opioids 100 times deadlier than fentanyl to American consumers via the dark web, leading to the arrest of four yesterday, after 13 months of joint surveillance by U.S. federal agencies and Quebec police, and a seizure of more than 600,000 tablets of synthetic drugs in December.

The four suspects charged are reportedly connected, through their alleged street gang affiliate, to the Wolfpack Alliance — a network tied by DEA sources to a British Columbia fentanyl superlab, and by Canadian law enforcement and expert sources to Canadian outlaw motorcycle gangs, Iranian organized crime, and the Sinaloa Cartel.

On Wednesday, Quebec’s ENRCO — the unit mandated specifically to target organized crime leadership — arrested four residents of Montreal’s South Shore suburbs on charges connected to a network that had been, for more than a year, allegedly manufacturing and exporting carfentanil and industrial quantities of substances newer and deadlier than fentanyl to consumers in the United States. The investigation was conducted jointly with U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The four suspects are: Darren McAlpine, of Delson; Geneva Fournier, of Châteauguay; and Wanya Nathan Ellis and Cheyanne Buchanan-Dennis, both of Sainte-Catherine. All four municipalities sit in the region directly south of the Montreal Island. They appeared by videoconference before a judge at the Longueuil courthouse and face charges of possession for the purpose of trafficking, drug trafficking, and possession of a prohibited weapon.

The arrests followed searches executed on December 17, 2025, at addresses in Châteauguay and Sainte-Catherine. No U.S. federal charges have been publicly announced.

The December searches produced a seizure that reads like an inventory of the post-fentanyl synthetic opioid market.

Quebec police pointed to more than 600,000 tablets — comprising 288,000 metonitazene tablets, 128,000 methamphetamine tablets, 180,000 benzodiazepine tablets, and 10,000 MDMA tablets — alongside 81 litres of protonitazene in liquid form, cannabis, cocaine, dark web trafficking equipment, a loaded 9mm firearm, and 9mm ammunition.

The 81 litres of liquid protonitazene is an industrial-scale volume of a still-emerging synthetic opioid. The DEA permanently placed protonitazene in Schedule I in 2024; on February 11, 2026, it separately finalized Schedule I status for variants of metonitazene and protonitazene.

“Metonitazene and Protonitazene are substances not widely known to the public at present, but they are considered more potent than fentanyl,” Quebec police said yesterday.

In a previous interview, retired acting DEA chief Derek Maltz told The Bureau that chemicals like nitazenes are amplifying the existing threat from Chinese-supplied fentanyl — which he and many U.S. experts view as an intentional, war-like attack from Chinese state-linked networks aligned with Latin cartels.

“We’re getting crushed with carfentanil, xylazine, etizolam, isotonitazene — all those different new psychoactive substances which are coming out of China. So it’s just another phase of the attack,” Maltz said.

Six weeks before the Quebec arrests, on February 10, 2026, Montreal’s regional public health directorate had already issued a public warning about protonitazene’s effects — suggesting that product from this network, or a network supplying the same substances, was already circulating in Montreal’s drug supply while the police operation was still running.

Carfentanil was developed to tranquilize elephants.

According to the DEA, it is 100 times more potent than fentanyl — which itself is lethal at the 2-milligram range — and 10,000 times more potent than morphine. Russian special forces deployed an aerosolized version against Chechen hostage-takers in a Moscow theatre in 2002. More than 120 hostages died. The DEA reported in 2025 that it had tested more than 100 kilograms of carfentanil mixed with other drugs in 2024 alone — more than the previous three years combined — and that the substance is now predominantly appearing in pill form, pressed to resemble prescription medications.

Targeting America: The Montreal Network Exporting Carfentanil — 100 Times Stronger Than Fentanyl — Into the United States https://t.co/9FFnY4KPrU

— Sam Cooper (@scoopercooper) February 26, 2026

The network now charged in Montreal was allegedly supplying fentanyl southbound into the United States — a politically sensitive finding given that the Trump administration has partly justified tariffs against Canada on the allegation that Chinese Communist Party and Mexican cartel networks have increasingly leveraged Canada for fentanyl production, particularly via Vancouver, and shipment to the U.S. This new case adds Montreal as a major alleged node, one already associated with Mexican cartel human trafficking networks moving South American nationals from Montreal into New York State.

Evidence from the Canada Border Services Agency has identified China and Hong Kong as import sources for earlier nitazene variants. The seizure in this case — 288,000 metonitazene tablets and 81 litres of liquid protonitazene — represents the largest documented seizure of these substances in Canada on the public record.

Radio-Canada reported that the network is connected to Zone 43 — a Montreal street gang originating in the Montréal-Nord neighbourhood, Crips-affiliated, and engaged in a violent conflict with a rival Blood-affiliated group called the Profit Boys.

Vancouver Police arrested five Zone 43 members in June 2024 and seized more than 24 kilograms of drugs following a 14-month investigation into the gang’s expansion into British Columbia. VPD Organized Crime Section head Inspector Phil Heard described Zone 43 as posing “a very significant risk to the public,” noting the gang had been operating in Vancouver for several years and was actively seeking to take over drug lines and territory.

In B.C., Zone 43 reportedly operates in affiliation with the Wolfpack Alliance.

The Wolfpack is where the Mexican transnational architecture emerges and intersects with Ryan Wedding’s Sinaloa Cartel networks, a U.S. government source told The Bureau.

NEW: Ex-Olympian Ryan Wedding, accused of running a transnational cocaine trafficking operation, is escorted in handcuffs in Ontario, California. pic.twitter.com/S8yX96HAmm

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 23, 2026

The source linked the Wolfpack and Wedding associates to what investigators have called the Falkland superlab, a large-scale drug production operation in British Columbia’s interior. Canadian law enforcement and expert sources have separately identified connections between the Wolfpack network and Canadian outlaw motorcycle gangs, Iranian organized crime, and the Sinaloa Cartel.

As reported previously by The Bureau, starting in the fall of 2022, pressure at the U.S. southern border began pushing Mexican nationals — and, by inference, cartel operatives — northward into the Canadian pipeline. From January to mid-October 2022, 7,698 Mexican asylum seekers took direct flights from Mexico City to Montreal, according to The Canadian Press. Nonprofit refugee assistance officials said most flew to Canada because they had learned of the Trudeau government’s visa-free policy and the availability of financial assistance while refugee claims were processed.

In their 2021 book The Wolfpack: The Millennial Mobsters Who Brought Chaos and the Cartels to the Canadian Underworld, journalists Peter Edwards and Luis Nájera established that the Sinaloa Cartel had developed solid control of cocaine shipments in and out of Canada, that the Arellano Félix organization held a foothold in western Canada — particularly Vancouver and Alberta — and that the Zetas were present in Canada through networks involving temporary migrant workers.

Asked in 2023 whether Canada’s importance to Mexican organized crime had increased in recent years, Nájera was direct: “I would say it has increased since criminal cells moved up north to settle and expand operations here. It is also strategic to have groups operating north of the U.S. border, close to key places such as Chicago and New York, and without the scrutiny of the DEA and rival groups.”

Don Im, a former senior agent in the DEA’s Special Operations Division, told The Bureau the Montreal seizure fits a pattern his unit began tracking at the end of 2019, when small clusters of nitazene overdose deaths began appearing in northern U.S. states — likely, he said, sourced from Canada but manufactured with Chinese precursor chemicals. The pattern intensified through the COVID years before a gradual decline, which Im attributes to cheaper Mexican-produced fentanyl flooding the market and displacing the Canadian supply.

That displacement, Im argues, may now be reversing.

With Mexican cartels disrupted by a wave of extraditions and leadership deaths, the fentanyl supply from the south is under pressure — and demand in the United States hasn’t gone anywhere. “Non-Mexican drug trafficking organizations in Canada are very likely picking up the slack and fulfilling the demand in the U.S. as addicts and local distributors in the U.S. are looking online,” Im said.

On the Chinese supply chain behind the nitazenes, Im was precise: Chinese companies have been designing and manufacturing synthetic drugs and precursor chemicals for at least 25 years, directed by the Chinese Communist Party to reduce dependency on Western pharmaceutical companies and incentivized by provincial governments to innovate and export. The result, in his assessment, was a perfect storm — Chinese synthetic precursors, Mexican cartel distribution networks, dark web and social media sales channels, and decades of indifferent Western drug policy — that produced what he called “the most deadly form of slow-motion weapon of mass destruction.”

Lululemon Athletica founder Chip Wilson blasted the board in a fiery message to shareholders earlier and ramped up calls for activism as the athletic apparel retailer is set for a lost year, lagging behind competitors, losing market share, and entangled in multiple see-through-leggings quality-control controversies with customers.

The nearly 70% collapse in Lululemon’s market capitalization from its late-2023 peak of $511 per share to the current $186 level, compounded by 1.5 months of quality-control issues involving see-through leggings making headlines, has compelled Wilson to publish yet another update for shareholders, urging much-needed change at the board level.

“In support of all shareholders, I am pursuing a campaign to catalyze a quantum of change that is sorely needed at Lululemon. To effect that change, I have pursued private, constructive dialogues with the Lululemon Board of Directors (the “Board”) for the past few months. My attempts toward a sensible solution have not been reciprocated,” Chip wrote in a message to shareholders on Friday.

Chip’s core issue with the board is the lack of brand, creative, and marketing expertise, creating a disconnect between the yoga-maker’s product and brand strengths and the board’s ability to translate those into durable margins and long-term shareholder value.

He noted that the board ignored a reform framework in December that included three independent director candidates, adding that when the board finally responded more than 70 days later, the “response was weak and insufficient.”

Chip continued, “While we have proposed changing three directors, our strong feeling is that more than three directors should be replaced.”

In the third week of January, Chip blasted the board in a social media post over its “operational failure” involving the “Get Low” line, which was pulled from the e-commerce website for several days due to see-through quality issues before being brought back online. He said at the time that this came months after the failed launch of the “Breezethrough” leggings.

At the start of the year, UBS analysts led by Jay Sole warned that 2026 was shaping up to be a lost year for Lululemon.