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Amid a crazy day of ordered consulate closures, alleged death and bomb threats made against the Chinese Embassy in Washington and diplomatic wrangling, and on threats out of Beijing to “respond” in a devastating way to Trump’s growing pressure campaign and China-related sanctions, Axios is just out with a bombshell late in the day Wednesday that ensures the tit-for-tat will only grow much more intense.

“A researcher who lied about her affiliation with a Chinese military university entered the Chinese consulate in San Francisco after being interviewed by the FBI on June 20 about alleged visa fraud and has remained there, according to an FBI assessment in court filings dated July 20,” Axios writes. 

If accurate, this would give some level of evidence to support Senator Marco Rubio’s earlier charged allegation that “China’s Houston consulate is a massive spy center, forcing it to close is long overdue,” as he tweeted, riling Chinese diplomats and pundits. He called it and others a “spy shop” which is part of the “Communist Party’s vast network of spies & influence operations in the United States.”

Analysts cited in the Axios report say that if the FBI allegations are true of the diplomatic outpost, which enjoys immunity from US law given its special protections under international law as an extension of the main embassy, it would constitute a “highly unusual” and “extraordinary” case given the severe abuse of consular privileges.

“It is highly unusual for a Chinese diplomatic post to associate so closely with a suspect in an intellectual property theft-related case,” New York-based cyber crimes lawyer Minyao Wang told Axios. “Sheltering a defendant in a criminal case by using the diplomatic immunity of a consular building, if true, is really extraordinary.”

Here are the known details, per Axios, related to one Tang Juan – a University of California-Davis researcher previously admitted on a J-1 visa (non-immigrant visa issued to scholars engaged in exchange type programs):

• On her visa application, Tang stated that she did not have any affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the Chinese military.

• But an investigation revealed that she worked at the Air Force Military Medical University (FMMU), a PLA-affiliated university in China, and she is considered to be active military personnel.

• After obtaining a warrant, the FBI searched her home and found evidence of her affiliation with the PLA.

• On June 26, Tang was charged with visa fraud.

At that point Tang reportedly fled to the San Francisco consulate and is believed to have been given “safe harbor” there in order to avoid prosecution. She’s said to still be hiding out their under Chinese diplomatic protection.

#China’s consulate in #Houston is not a diplomatic facility. It is the central node of the Communist Party’s vast network of spies & influence operations in the United States. Now that building must close & the spies have 72 hours to leave or face arrest.

This needed to happen.

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 22, 2020

This comes amid a spate of similar charges against Chinese nationals at research and academic institutions who attempted to conceal their ties with Chinese government entities. However it seems the first such case of an individual hiding out at a consular or embassy compound. 

“At some point following the search and interview of Tang on June 20, 2020, Tang went to the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, where the FBI assesses she has remained,” the court filings say. And further: “As the Tang case demonstrates, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco provides a potential safe harbor for a PLA official intent on avoiding prosecution in the United States.”

Crucially the FBI says it has formally notified Beijing: “We made the Chinese government aware that she is a charged individual, so it unquestionable that they know the defendant is a fugitive from Justice,” an official told Axios.

All of this of course means that as intense as this week has already been, things are about to get a lot hotter between Beijing and Washington now that the case is public knowledge and out in the open. 

As the nationwide coin shortage continues to rage, a southeastern Wisconsin bank is offering above face value for coins. 

Last week, the Community State Bank (CSB) launched a coin buy-back program to assist local businesses affected by the shortage. The bank is offering customers a $5 bonus for every $100 worth of coins turned in at any of its seven locations.

“The response has been tremendous,” CSB President and CEO, Scott Huedepohl, said in a release. 

“We’ve had people contacting us not only from our community but all over the United States. Our goal was to generate enough coin inventory to help our local businesses. We’ve met and far exceeded our goals,” said Huedepohl. 

The program is expected to end Tuesday (July 21), was initiated late last week, and quickly gained national attention.

CSB customers and non-bank customers were able to receive a maximum bonus of $500. That means if someone brought in $200 in coins, that customer would get a $10 bonus.

“We received an abundance of coin in a short amount of time,” said AVP Retail Operations Director, Katie Stolp. “I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re very fortunate that we have the tools and ability to process all of the coins. That coin is now being put to good use and helping local business owners all over Southeast Wisconsin.” 

Huedepohl thanked community members for stepping up to the plate when the local economy needed them the most. 

“Thank you,” said Huedepohl. “Thank you to everyone who came in and dropped off coin. Once again, our local communities delivered, and we’re so grateful.” 

CSB said the program could restart in the future if virus-related lockdowns are seen again. The cause of the shortage was due primarily to business and bank closures during lockdowns, which disrupted the nation’s coin supply chain and normal circulation patterns.

In recent weeks, we have reported Meijer supermarkets, Kroger grocery stores, Walmart stores, and many other retailers informed customers they must use credit or debit cards because of the shortage. 

We also noted this could’ve been a trial run by elites to push a cashless society. 

Authored by Isabel van Brugen via The Epoch Times,

Herd immunity to COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP virus, could be achieved with fewer people being infected than previously estimated, new research suggests.

According to an Oxford University study (pdf), the herd immunity threshold (HIT) may be lower than previous estimates because many people may already be innately immune to COVID-19—without ever having caught the disease.

A team of researchers from the University of Oxford’s Zoology Department, led by Professor Sunetra Gupta, produced a model that suggests as little as 20 percent of the population may need to be resistant to the virus to prevent a resurgence of an epidemic.

The study, which was published on July 16, is yet to be peer-reviewed.

“It is widely believed that the herd immunity threshold required to prevent a resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 is in excess of 50 percent for any epidemiological setting,” the paper says.

The researchers suggest that many people may have already built up some degree of resistance to the virus from exposure to seasonal coronaviruses, such as the common cold.

Herd immunity is achieved when enough people in a population have immunity to an infection to be able to effectively stop that disease from spreading. It lowers the chances of the virus being transmitted from person to person and reaching those who haven’t been infected yet.

Colorized scanning electron micrograph of cell (green) heavily infected with coronavirus particles (purple), commonly known as SARS-CoV-2 or novel CCP virus, isolated from a patient sample, photo published on March 16, 2020. (NIAID)

People can become immune to certain viruses after surviving infection or being vaccinated. Typically, at least 70 percent of a population must be immune to achieve herd immunity. But how long immunity lasts varies depending on the virus.

“Here, we demonstrate that HIT may be greatly reduced if a fraction of the population is unable to transmit the virus due to innate resistance or cross-protection from exposure to seasonal coronaviruses,” wrote study authors Jose Lourenco, Francesco Pinotti, Craig Thompson, and Gupta.

“These results help to explain the large degree of regional variation observed in seroprevalence and cumulative deaths, and suggest that sufficient herd immunity may already be in place to substantially mitigate a potential second wave,” they added.

The researchers said that when people who are resistant to a virus mix with non-resistant people, the HIT drops significantly.

“Given the mounting evidence that exposure to seasonal coronaviruses offers protection against clinical symptoms, it would be reasonable to assume that exposure to SARS-CoV-2 itself would confer a significant degree of clinical immunity,” the researchers suggest.

“Thus, a second peak may result in far fewer deaths, particularly among those with comorbidities in the younger age classes.”

More than 14.7 million people have been reported to be infected by the CCP virus worldwide and at least 610,000 have died, according to a tracking map by Johns Hopkins University, although the figures are believed by some experts to be unreliable owing to inaccurate data from China.

Managing editor, Ed Harrison, hosts Jim Bianco of Bianco Research to discuss the Fed and Judy Shelton’s recent nomination, the significance of flows, and his forward look on markets and the economy. Bianco and Harrison first analyze the extreme opposition of Shelton’s nomination as a Fed Governor and consider how the Fed has been a domineering force in supporting markets for the past few months. Bianco then breaks down the types of retail investors and why their influence can prove to be powerful in driving market movements. They end their discussion by talking about the recent rally in gold and silver, and Bianco’s perspective on the bifurcation of markets and the economy, whether stimulus can be effective forever, and the damaged psyche of consumers. In the intro, Nick Correa gives an overview of the status of the US’s new relief bill and how the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program will end sooner than most Americans believe.

90 people in the state of Connecticut were found to actually have been negative for coronavirus after receiving positive tests, MSN reported on Tuesday.

The state’s Department of Public Health said that its state laboratory found a “flaw” in one of its testing systems and that 90 of 144 people who were tested for the virus between June 15 and June 17 received false positive tests. 161 specimens were collected and a total of 91 of those showed false positives. 

Many of those who received the false tests were nursing home residents.

The state said that it reported the flaw to the test manufacturer and the FDA. It has taken “immediate steps” to make sure patients have been notified – hopefully more than just forwarding them a copy of this article. 

Even more alarming, the State Department of Health said the flawed numbers came “from a widely-used laboratory testing platform that the state laboratory started using on June 15.”

Acting Commissioner Deidre S. Gifford said: “We have notified the healthcare facilities for everyone who received a false positive test result from our state laboratory. Accurate and timely testing for the novel coronavirus is one of the pillars supporting effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Adjustments have been made to ensure the accuracy of future tests, she said. Additionally, she said all positive tests will be further reviewed by “multiple laboratory scientists” and retested using another method. 

We wonder how many other states are administering tests from the same “widely-used” platform…

Submitted by CoinTelegraph,

Per a July 22 announcement shared with Cointelegraph, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is granting permission to federally chartered banks to custody cryptocurrency.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

The future of banking with crypto on board

This issue has seen much skepticism, given that crypto wallets do not resemble the custody requirements of other sorts of assets. Nonetheless, in its interpretive letter on the subject, the OCC wrote: 

“The OCC recognizes that, as the financial markets become increasingly technological, there will likely be increasing need for banks and other service providers to leverage new technology and innovative ways to provide traditional services on behalf of customers.”

In the words of the announcement, the new opinion “applies to national banks and federal savings associations of all sizes.”

Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks similarly saw the development as part of modernizing banking in the U.S., saying “From safe-deposit boxes to virtual vaults, we must ensure banks can meet the financial services needs of their customers today,”

The OCC’s letter further specifies that bank “custody” of crypto assets is dependent on their access to the keys to the crypto wallets rather than any sort of physical requirement — a confirmation of Andreas Antonopoulos’ famous line of “not your keys, not your coins.” the OCC specifies:

“That national banks may escrow encryption keys used in connection with digital certificates because a key escrow service is a functional equivalent to physical safekeeping.”

OCC’s heightened crypto engagement under Brooks

Coming from Coinbase’s legal team, Brian Brook’s tenure as Acting Comptroller has seen accelerated onboarding of crypto capabilities in the U.S. financial system. Speaking with Cointelegraph in early June, Brooks hinted at his interest in expanding the right to custody crypto.

This follows an international trend of banks looking to incorporate the crypto asset class.

The pistol Patricia McCloskey waved at protesters who broke down a gate to trespass on their private street was a non-operable ‘prop’ used during a lawsuit they were involved in, so a member of Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner’s staff ordered the crime lab to disassemble and reassemble the gun – allowing them to classify it as “capable of lethal use” in charging documents filed Monday, according to KSDK5.

In Missouri, police and prosecutors must prove that a weapon is “readily” capable of lethal use when it is used in the type of crime with which the McCloskeys have been charged.

Assistant Circuit Attorney Chris Hinckley ordered crime lab staff members to field strip the handgun and found it had been assembled incorrectly. Specifically, the firing pin spring was put in front of the firing pin, which was backward, and made the gun incapable of firing, according to documents obtained by 5 On Your Side.

Firearms experts then put the gun back together in the correct order and test-fired it, finding that it worked, according to the documents. –KSDK5

According to the report, crime lab workers photographed the disassembly and reassembly of the pistol.

The McCloskeys attorney, Joel Schwartz, told KSDK that the St. Louis couple intentionally misplaced the firing pin on the gun, rendering it inoperable. They turned the pistol in to their former attorney Al Watkins following the incident last month.

“It’s disheartening to learn that a law enforcement agency altered evidence in order to prosecute an innocent member of the community,” said Schwartz.