Month: May 2021

Gigafactories aren’t just for Tesla anymore.

Perhaps a sign of how far the rest of the EV market has come or perhaps just trying to keep up with legacy automakers like Ford (who announced yesterday they were tackling EVs head on), Nissan has announced it is in talks with the U.K. government to build its own Gigafactory in Sunderland.

The new factory would go at the company’s existing site in Sunderland, FT wrote this week, and would be run by Nissan’s Chinese battery supplier Envision AESC. Nissan already makes batteries for its Nissan Leaf at a facility run by Envision near the proposed Sunderland site. 

The purpose of the facility would be to support 200,000 battery cars per year and thousands of jobs. 

A possible announcement for a deal could be scheduled for this summer, the report notes, “ahead of Britain hosting the COP26 climate summit this year.”

Nissan is seeking “tens of millions of pounds” in financial support fort the project. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has called battery investment “essential”. 

Surely, the U.K. will be thinking back to when Tesla passed on the location in favor of Germany to build one of the company’s factories. 

“We are dedicated to securing gigafactories, and continue to work closely with investors and vehicle manufacturers to progress plans to mass produce batteries in the UK,” a spokesperson for the U.K. government’s business department told FT. 

The site would be expected to produce 6 gigawatt hours of battery capacity per year and could open toward the end of 2024. The Sunderland area’s current battery plant has a capacity of 1.9GWh. Nissan has referred to its already-existing facilities in Sunderland as “one of the best plants in the world for Nissan in terms of competitiveness” and that it has “played a pioneering role in developing the electric vehicle market”.

The U.K. is phasing out sales of ICE and diesel models by 2030 and Nissan is seeking to make its Leaf model the predominant EV in the country. 

Authored by June Teufel Dreyer via The Epoch Times,

The answer might be yes… and no. The European Parliament’s May 20 resolution freezing any consideration of a long-awaited Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI) with China, along with advocacy of a strengthened European Union screening regulations on foreign investment and increased cooperation with the United States on a Transatlantic Dialogue on China, certainly seemed to symbolize a changed European attitude toward China.

A container ship from China Shipping Line is loaded at the main container port in Hamburg, Germany, on Aug. 13, 2007. Northern Germany, with its busy ports of Hamburg, Bremerhaven and Kiel, is a hub of international shipping. Hamburg is among Europe’s largest ports. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Undoubtedly, European leaders have become more wary than those who met with members of a visiting U.S. congressional commission two decades ago. Warned by commissioners against lifting an embargo on arms sales that had been passed after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, they replied stoutly and virtually in unison that China “is not the same country that it was in 1989.” They dismissed evidence that, although China was incontestably not the same country that it had been in 1989, it was in fact more repressive than it had been, and was getting more so.

Both Eurocrats and politicians seemed intrigued by the notion of strategic partnerships that China held forth, denying that they had any military implications, even when shown that the ideograph for the first character in strategic 戰略, shows a man holding a spear. Possibly their receptivity had something to do with Beijing’s hints at the prospect of lucrative deals for purchases of the wares of European defense contractors as well as the hordes of Chinese tourists eager to visit the continent’s castles, cathedrals, and department stores. Interestingly, the Western European states who had never lived under communism were the most trusting of Chinese promises whereas the Eastern European states, which had, were far more skeptical.

Fast forward twenty years and the picture changes dramatically. Not overnight, to be sure, but incrementally in rough proportion to increases in Chinese assertiveness. Enthusiasm for lifting the arms embargo waned after China’s National People’s Congress in 2005 passed an anti-secession law formally asserting Beijing’s determination to use non-peaceful means against the separation of Taiwan from China and in any scenario where unification [read: annexation] became otherwise impossible. So as well did China’s moves to enforce its claims to contested areas of the South China and East China seas as seen in its outright rejection of the 2016 ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) that China’s nine-dash line had no basis in international law, and its willingness to use force, as it did against Vietnam in 2020. Revelations about the treatment of Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, and the steady diminution of the rights of residents of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region that had been guaranteed under a 1984 treaty between Great Britain and China made it difficult to believe that Beijing cared about the rights of its peoples and international law. Or that post-1989 China was evolving toward the kind of liberal democratic state that European leaders had seemed so confident of.

An aerial photo taken though a glass window of a Philippine military plane shows the alleged on-going land reclamation by China on Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, west of Palawan, Philippines, on May 11, 2015. (Ritchie B. Tongo/Pool/Reuters)

Reports on the suppression of religion and the persecution of believers were widely reported, but had few policy consequences. It was not so much that Europeans did not care about human rights issues as that they were eclipsed by concerns with the lure of a rapidly expanding Chinese market and their desire to get a larger share of it for themselves and their countries, often in competition with other European states.

There was no lack of awareness that China was negotiating with European countries one deal at a time, skillfully playing one against another, but also no consensus about what to do about it. French President Jacques Chirac declared 2004 the Year of China and bathed the Eiffel Tower in red for visiting counterpart Hu Jintao, with lucrative business deals signed during the latter’s four-day stay. And after German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with the Dalai Lama in 2007, she was criticized for jeopardizing German business opportunities in their rivalry with France.

Most European states welcomed Xi Jinping’s signature “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR, later renamed the “Belt and Road Initiative”) project that would facilitate Sino-European trade. Enthusiasm cooled markedly when it was discovered that too many of the railway cars that brought Chinese goods to Europe were being shipped back empty: a rueful quip was that OBOR should be renamed OBOW: One Belt One Way. In addition, it was noticed that European companies had slipped in global rankings even as Chinese companies like State Grid and Sinopec climbed into Fortune’s top ten.

With its 28, now 27, members, the European Union, finds it difficult to reach an agreement on most issues, let alone ones as contentious as dealing with China. Until the 2021 decision on CAI, the results tended to be tepid. Maritime law expert Peter Dutton deemed the EU statement on the PCA’s decision on the nine-dash line, a “deeply disappointing statement from a government that likes to consider itself one of humanity’s strongest supporters of international law. They could have … and should have … said they support the tribunal’s decision. Period.”

China was also able to take advantage of economic downturns in the Euro economy to acquire strategically important assets at low prices. China’s State Grid Corporation began acquiring stakes in the power networks of cash-strapped southern European countries, including Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Italy, raising concerns that Beijing might exercise control of their operations. In response to a query by Reuters, a State Grid official replied, “This is not a financial investment, [it’s] more like a strategic investment.”

When chided by the EU for allowing Chinese shipping company COSCO to acquire rights in Piraeus, Greek officials responded angrily that the EU had done little to help their country in its hour of need and that they would welcome more investment from China. COSCO now has a 67 percent stake in Piraeus, one of the largest ports in the Mediterranean and strategically situated close to the Suez Canal. The Chinese-Greek partnership has had consequences for EU decision-making, as when Greece refused to sign an EU letter on the South China Sea and, later, on China’s alleged torture of detained human rights lawyers. Hungary, where China had pledged to spend billions of dollars on a railway project, likewise declined to sign. Concerns grew that China could be targeting smaller countries with weaker economies in order to penetrate the region. And, when in 2012 China set up the 16 (later 17)+1 partnership with central and eastern European states, EU leaders fretted that this was a mechanism to try to divide Europe.

A view of old warehouses in the port of Piraeus which will be transformed to five-star hotels, on Oct. 18, 2018 – Chinese shipping giant Cosco said it has ambitious plans for the Greek port of Piraeus, including a boost on already-bustling container and car piers but also five-star hotel expansion. (Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP via Getty Images)

Chinese interests were not confined to penurious southern and eastern European states. German firms specializing in engineering and technology were prime targets for acquisition. In 2016, news that China’s Midea group planned to acquire cutting-edge robotics firm Kuka raised anxieties about loss of intellectual property. However, Chancellor Merkel declined to intervene, making Kuka essentially a Chinese company despite charges that German engineers were now designing robots for the People’s Liberation Army (Chinese military).

Vigilance, however, had been heightened. Shortly after the Kuka purchase, Germany’s economics ministry withdrew its earlier approval of chipmaker Aixtron by China’s Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund LP, with Chinese officials accusing Germany of protectionism. Although German sources gave as their reason the lack of reciprocity in their dealings with China—which is true—the underlying issue was security. For example, Aixtron’s new, highly efficient semiconductor technology are able to boost the power of military radar transmitters while consuming less electricity. Not all concerns were economic: Berlin-based scholar journalist Didi Kirsten Tatlow’s meticulously documented study of China’s Einheitsfront (united front) operations, concluded that Beijing’s deliberate influencing in an orchestrated manner cannot be ignored, and that most Germans underestimate the CCP’s (Chinese Communist Party) will to power.

Similar revelations occurred in Britain bringing to an end what both sides called the “golden era” of bilateral relations, especially when, shortly after leaving office, former Prime Minister David Cameron accepted the headship of a fund to create new investment links between China and the UK. Security concerns were raised about Chinese participation in the UK’s Hinkley Point nuclear power station. News of the persecution of Uyghurs and the crackdown on pro-democracy Hong Kong residents deepened concerns, with Hong Kong being a particularly sensitive issue in Great Britain since it violated the 1984 treaty under which the UK agreed to return its colony to Chinese jurisdiction. These were exacerbated when the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that the agreement “no longer has any practical significance and is not at all binding for the central government’s management over Hong Kong.”

Civil liberties not only in China but in the UK itself also began to be threatened with incidents such as Chinese students at the London School of Economics, likely acting on suggestions from their embassy, demanding that an LSE globe depicting Taiwan as separate from China be altered. The Chinese Embassy then threatened Oxford University’s Vice-chancellor Louise Richardson with the withdrawal of Chinese students unless she stopped Chancellor Chris Patten from visiting Hong Kong. Both efforts were unsuccessful: LSE’s globe remains unaltered and Richardson refused the embassy’s request. Patten subsequently said that “China had betrayed the people of Hong Kong and the West should cease kowtowing to Beijing for an illusory pot of gold.” And a February 2021 study of academic cooperation with Chinese entities found many UK universities “unintentionally generating research that is sponsored by China’s military conglomerates including those with activities in the production of weapons of mass destruction, intercontinental ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, and other items of massively destabilizing weaponry.”

Oxford University in Oxford, United Kingdom, on Sept. 20, 2016. (Carl Court/Getty Images)

Similarly high-handed statements from Chinese official sources occurred elsewhere. When meeting pushback, they tended to elicit insults. The ambassador to Sweden, reacting to its government’s complaints about the arrest of one of its nationals and, separately, evidence that an incident of Chinese tourists being bullied was fabricated, declared that his country had fine wines for its friends but shotguns for its enemies. Replying to widespread criticism of his words, the ambassador responded that Sweden was “not important enough to threaten.” After a French scholar defended the rights of parliamentarians to visit Taiwan, tweets from the Chinese embassy called him a “little hoodlum,” “ideological troll,” and “mad hyena.” When Lithuanian intelligence services accused China of increasingly aggressive espionage campaigns and the use of tech companies as surveillance assets, the Chinese ambassador countered that his country was being demonized and charged Lithuania with cold war-ism. Eighteen months later, Lithuania’s foreign minister announced his country’s withdrawal from the 17+ 1 organization and called on the other member states to do the same.

The EU’s tepid statement on Beijing’s rejection of the PCA ruling on the South China Sea did not diminish the concerns of nations with major shipping interests in the area. Britain and France announced plans to send naval vessels to emphasize the importance they attached to freedom of navigation in the area. France, which has geographically extensive territories in the South Pacific, was particularly articulate on this issue. After the ruling, then-defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called for joint EU patrols of the maritime areas of Asia and the establishment of a “regular and visible presence there” and, with China clearly in mind, Le Drian argued that if the rule of law and freedom of navigation were not respected in the South China Sea today, they will next be challenged in and around Europe. More surprising than the British and French FONOPs was Germany’s decision, although it has no territories in the area, to send a frigate to the area as part of a newly-adopted Indo-Pacific strategy.

What does this mean for the future of Sino-European relations? Unquestionably, attitudes in major EU countries have hardened. In Germany, the Green party’s candidate for chancellor, the Greens having a realistic chance to become the ruling party in the country’s September election, has vowed to be tough on China. The smaller Free Democratic Party, which has a reputation of being a kingmaker, has pointedly removed the “one-China” clause from its party platform. Britain has banned Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei from its 5G networks, offered UK passports to British National Overseas residents of Hong Kong, revoked state-owned broadcaster CGTN’s UK broadcast license, and expelled three Chinese for spying. In Czechia, attempts to build influence in politics backfired and there was discontent when a number of promised investments failed to materialize. The Czech senate president visited Taipei in defiance of Chinese orders and declared “I am Taiwanese;” Prague’s mayor publicly refused to accept a “one-China” clause and flies Tibetan flags from city hall.

Prague City Mayor Zdeněk Hřib talks to media about China during his visit to Taiwan on March 29, 2019. (Zdeněk Hřib, Mayor of Prague/Facebook)

Yet it would be foolish to overinterpret these events. China is defiant, with the Global Times editorializing that the conditions imposed for resuming the ratification process are “rough and arrogant,” that the sanctions imposed by China are actually countermeasures against the EU’s sanctions over Chinese officials and entities, and that there is no way that China will lift those sanctions under pressure from the European parliament. EU organizations other than the EP and many more European countries, the paper pointed out, want the CAI to come into force.

Global Times may well be correct. The CAI was, and presumably continues to be, a major priority for Chancellor Merkel because of China’s importance to the German automobile industry: if ratified, it would allow European companies to own majority stakes in their Chinese subsidiaries rather than forcing them to operate though joint venture with Chinese partners and share trade secrets. China is Germany’s largest trading partner.

In less wealthy countries, the lure of Chinese largesse is a powerful force for leaders even where there is opposition from the general public. Czech president Milos Zeman, who has been described as “ostentatiously pro-China,” has vowed to make his country China’s gateway to Europe, even welcoming Xi Jinping with a 21-gun salute—an honor not accorded to any foreign leader for more than fifty years. Most recently, he praised China as “the only country that helped us and sent medical supplies” in the pandemic. In Serbia, although complaints about the environmental and political aspects of Chinese investment grew, its elected leaders, despite their aspiration to join the EU and claims to share its democratic values, lean further toward China, which offers big loans, vaccines, and investments without the constraints that the EU would impose. Mutatis mutandis, there is a similar situation in Montenegro, whose government has asked Brussels for financial assistance to refinance a loan to China for an expensive only partially built highway that, according to European analysts, was a risky proposition to start with. China holds a quarter of Montenegro’s debt; if it defaults, the terms of the contract give China the right to access the country’s land as collateral.

It is also possible that the EU sanctions themselves may end up hurting Western companies as much or more than China. Beijing has imposed boycotts on companies such as Sweden’s H&M, among others, for its “suicidal” remarks on so-called slave labor in Xinjiang, thereby impacting an important market for the apparel maker. A Xinjiang factory manager, admitting an initial downturn in international purchases of cotton, stated that his factory had made up the difference by shifting to domestic orders.

In sum, European strategy toward China has evolved beyond the so-called golden years, and present tensions are unlikely to abate in the foreseeable future. With the emotional naivete of the past now spent, European statespersons would do well to concentrate on the realistic economic and security aspects of the relationship. Given the democratic principles that undergird both Eurogovernance and those of Europe’s component states, Beijing will always have the upper hand in playing one off against another. How long this can continue depends on many factors outside the scope of this study. Meanwhile, however, the EU’s dream of a partnership between a united Europe and a liberalizing China seems to have fallen victim to Xi Jinping’s China Dream.

In the city of Goma in eastern Congo, residents were advised by authorities to pack up their bags and head to the next town as another volcanic eruption by Mount Nyiragongo could be imminent, according to The Guardian. 

“Current data on seismicity and the deformation of the ground indicate the presence of magma under the urban area of Goma, with an extension under Lake Kivu,” the local military governor, Gen Constant Ndima, said in a public address.

“We can’t rule out an eruption on land or under the lake, which could happen very soon and without warning. The situation can change rapidly, and is being constantly monitored.”

An update from our team in #Goma after Sat’s volcanic eruption: the ground is still shaking every few mins, with a magnitude 5.3 quake registered by Rwandan authorities. Cracks are visible in the city splitting roads in two — with some cracks up to 10cm wide. pic.twitter.com/21HQjCMnnq

— Concern Worldwide (@Concern) May 26, 2021

Tens of thousands of people have already fled 12 miles west of Goma to another city called Sake. Thousands of others have already crossed the Rwandan border for refuge. 

A massive evacuation is underway. 

Update: A crowd of Congolese people from #Goma are evacuating to #Sake region in #DRC after #Gvt order of evacuation plan before the threat of #Earthquakes & #EruptionOfNyiragongo is completely eliminated basing on Scientists suggestions. pic.twitter.com/qfMo3JyAsE

— Christophe Uwizeye (@ChristopheUwiz) May 27, 2021

#Evacuation de @Goma vers @Sake @fatshi13 @awdf01 @focusdroits @lebonkasamira @Le_HCR @IfokuMarijo @Evebazaiba à Sake , manque d’eau propre pic.twitter.com/n5m0q4ILAz

— Grâce Peninah (@GracePeninah) May 27, 2021

Les images et Videos de la population a Goma. Une evacuation de peur d’une autre explosion, une autre eruption volcanique ou un tremblement de terre. Que Dieu sõit avec vous 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏 pic.twitter.com/WQSQg7LtTs

— WILLY KALALA (@Willyetaisici) May 27, 2021

#RDC🇨🇩: En union de prière avec nos compatriotes de goma qui sont dans l’obligation de se mettre à l’abri de leur ville pour quelques semaines sur décision du gouvernement congolais.

Nous demandons au gouvernement @LukondeSama de tout mettre en place pour une évacuation digne. pic.twitter.com/jn7cL2wCnx

— Bukasa Emmanuel (@BukasaEmmanuel2) May 27, 2021

Goma, a city of about two million people, is located six miles from Mount Nyiragongo volcano, which erupted last Saturday. Lava flows spilled into Buhene neighborhood, a suburb of the city, destroying hundreds of structures. 

Image of destruction in #DRC #GOMA after #Nyiragongo Volcano Erupts pic.twitter.com/KvnycIKXXO

— Abdallah Nduhirabandi (@ANduhirabandi) May 23, 2021

Saturday’s eruption spared central Goma, but now it appears to be coming under threat as hundreds of aftershocks have been felt across the region, suggesting another eruption could be nearing. 

The displacement of tens of thousands of people in the eastern Congo could develop into a humanitarian crisis. 

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled.”

– Herman Schwartz, The Nation

We’ve all been there before.

You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.

You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.

For better or worse, from the moment you’re pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

This is what I call “blank check policing,” in which the police get to call all of the shots.

So if you’re nervous about traffic stops, you have every reason to be.

Trying to predict the outcome of any encounter with the police is a bit like playing Russian roulette: most of the time you will emerge relatively unscathed, although decidedly poorer and less secure about your rights, but there’s always the chance that an encounter will turn deadly.

Try to assert your right to merely ask a question during a traffic stop and see how far it gets you.

Juanisha Brooks—black, 34 years old and on her way home at 2:20 am—was pulled over, handcuffed, arrested and charged with resisting arrest, eluding the police, reckless driving and failure to use headlights after repeatedly asking police why she had been stopped. When Brooks—a Department of Defense employee—filed a complaint, prosecutors conceded that the traffic stop had been carried out without “proper legal basis” and dropped all charges.

Caron Nazario, a uniformed Army officer returning home from his duty station, was stopped for not having a rear license plate (his temporary plates were taped to the rear window of his new SUV). Nazario, who is Black and Latino, pulled over at a well-lit gas station only to be pepper sprayed, held at gunpoint, beaten and threatened with execution.

Zachary Noel was tasered by police and charged with resisting arrest after he questioned why he was being ordered out of his truck during a traffic stop. “Because I’m telling you to,” the officer replied before repeating his order for Noel to get out of the vehicle and then, without warning, shooting him with a taser through the open window.

Despite complying with all police orders when ordered to show his identification and exit his parked vehicle, Jeriel Edwards was subjected to excessive force and brutality, including being thrown to the ground, tasered, and placed in a chokehold that rendered him unconscious and required his hospitalization for three days. Although dash cam video of the arrest confirms that Edwards was peaceful, did not defy police orders, and did nothing to provoke police, a federal court ruled that Edwards’ trouble understanding police directions during the encounter constituted “resistance” that justified the force used by the four police officers involved in the violent arrest. Edwards is African-American.

Gregory Tucker, also black, was stopped by police for a broken taillight, only to be thrown to the ground, beaten and punched in the face and body more than 20 times, then arrested and hospitalized for severe injuries to his face and arm, all for allegedly “resisting arrest” by driving to a safe, well-lit area in front of his cousin’s house before stopping.

No wonder Americans are afraid of getting pulled over by police.

Mind you, all of these individuals complied with police. They just didn’t do it fast enough to suit their purposes.

At a time when police can do no wrong—at least in the eyes of the courts, police unions and politicians dependent on their votes—and a “fear” for officer safety is used to justify all manner of police misconduct, “we the people” are at a severe disadvantage.

Add a traffic stop to the mix, and that disadvantage increases dramatically.

According to the Justice Department, the most common reason for a citizen to come into contact with the police is being a driver in a traffic stop.

On average, one in 10 Americans gets pulled over by police.

According to data collected under Virginia’s new Community Policing Act, black drivers are almost two times more likely than white drivers to be pulled over by police and three times more likely to have their vehicles searched. As the Washington Post concludes, “‘Driving while black’ is, indeed, a measurable phenomenon.”

Historically, police officers have been given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons.

This free-handed approach to traffic stops has resulted in drivers being stopped for windows that are too heavily tinted, for driving too fast, driving too slow, failing to maintain speed, following too closely, improper lane changes, distracted driving, screeching a car’s tires, and leaving a parked car door open for too long.

Motorists can also be stopped by police for driving near a bar or on a road that has large amounts of drunk driving, driving a certain make of car (Mercedes, Grand Prix and Hummers are among the most ticketed vehicles), having anything dangling from the rearview mirror (air fresheners, handicap parking permits, toll transponders or rosaries), and displaying pro-police bumper stickers.

Incredibly, a federal appeals court actually ruled unanimously in 2014 that acne scars and driving with a stiff upright posture are reasonable grounds for being pulled over. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that driving a vehicle that has a couple air fresheners, rosaries and pro-police bumper stickers at 2 MPH over the speed limit is suspicious, meriting a traffic stop.

Equally appalling, in Heien v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court—which has largely paved the way for the police and other government agents to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance—allowed police officers to stop drivers who appear nervous, provided they provide a palatable pretext for doing so.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the lone objector in the case. Dissenting in Heien, Sotomayor warned, “Giving officers license to effect seizures so long as they can attach to their reasonable view of the facts some reasonable legal interpretation (or misinterpretation) that suggests a law has been violated significantly expands this authority… One wonders how a citizen seeking to be law-abiding and to structure his or her behavior to avoid these invasive, frightening, and humiliating encounters could do so.”

In other words, drivers beware.

Traffic stops aren’t just dangerous. They can be downright deadly.

Remember Walter L. Scott? Reportedly pulled over for a broken taillight, Scott—unarmed—ran away from the police officer, who pursued and shot him from behind, first with a Taser, then with a gun. Scott was struck five times, “three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart.”

Samuel Dubose, also unarmed, was pulled over for a missing front license plate. He was reportedly shot in the head after a brief struggle in which his car began rolling forward.

Levar Jones was stopped for a seatbelt offense, just as he was getting out of his car to enter a convenience store. Directed to show his license, Jones leaned into his car to get his wallet, only to be shot four times by the “fearful” officer. Jones was also unarmed.

Bobby Canipe was pulled over for having an expired registration. When the 70-year-old reached into the back of his truck for his walking cane, the officer fired several shots at him, hitting him once in the abdomen.

Dontrell Stevens was stopped “for not bicycling properly.” The officer pursuing him “thought the way Stephens rode his bike was suspicious. He thought the way Stephens got off his bike was suspicious.” Four seconds later, sheriff’s deputy Adams Lin shot Stephens four times as he pulled out a black object from his waistband. The object was his cell phone. Stephens was unarmed.

Sandra Bland, pulled over for allegedly failing to use her turn signal, was arrested after refusing to comply with the police officer’s order to extinguish her cigarette and exit her vehicle. The encounter escalated, with the officer threatening to “light” Bland up with his taser. Three days later, Bland was found dead in her jail cell. “You’re doing all of this for a failure to signal?” Bland asked as she got out of her car, after having been yelled at and threatened repeatedly.

Keep in mind, from the moment those lights start flashing and that siren goes off, we’re all in the same boat. However, it’s what happens after you’ve been pulled over that’s critical.

Survival is key.

Technically, you have the right to remain silent (beyond the basic requirement to identify yourself and show your registration). You have the right to refuse to have your vehicle searched. You have the right to film your interaction with police. You have the right to ask to leave. You also have the right to resist an unlawful order such as a police officer directing you to extinguish your cigarette, put away your phone or stop recording them.

However, there is a price for asserting one’s rights. That price grows more costly with every passing day.

If you ask cops and their enablers what Americans should do to stay alive during encounters with police, they will tell you to comply, cooperate, obey, not resist, not argue, not make threatening gestures or statements, avoid sudden movements, and submit to a search of their person and belongings. 

Unfortunately, there are no longer any fail-safe rules of engagement for interacting with the police.

In the American police state, compliance is no guarantee that you will survive an encounter with the police with your life and liberties intact.

Every day we hear about situations in which unarmed Americans complied and still died during an encounter with police simply because they appeared to be standing in a “shooting stance” or held a cell phone or a garden hose or carried around a baseball bat or answered the front door or held a spoon in a threatening manner or ran in an aggressive manner holding a tree branch or wandered around naked or hunched over in a defensive posture or made the mistake of wearing the same clothes as a carjacking suspect (dark pants and a basketball jersey) or dared to leave an area at the same time that a police officer showed up or had a car break down by the side of the road or were deaf or homeless or old.

More often than not, it seems as if all you have to do to be shot and killed by police is stand a certain way, or move a certain way, or hold something—anything—that police could misinterpret to be a gun, or ignite some trigger-centric fear in a police officer’s mind that has nothing to do with an actual threat to their safety.

Now you can make all kinds of excuses to justify these shootings, and in fact that’s exactly what you’ll hear from politicians, police unions, law enforcement officials and individuals who are more than happy to march in lockstep with the police.

However, to suggest that a good citizen is a compliant citizen and that obedience will save us from the police state is not only recklessly irresponsible, but it is also deluded and out of touch with reality.

To begin with, and most importantly, Americans need to know their rights when it comes to interactions with the police, bearing in mind that many law enforcement officials are largely ignorant of the law themselves.

A good resource is The Rutherford Institute’s “Constitutional Q&A: Rules of Engagement for Interacting with Police.”

In a nutshell, the following are your basic rights when it comes to interactions with the police as outlined in the Bill of Rights:

You have the right under the First Amendment to ask questions and express yourself. You have the right under the Fourth Amendment to not have your person or your property searched by police or any government agent unless they have a search warrant authorizing them to do so.  You have the right under the Fifth Amendment to remain silent, to not incriminate yourself and to request an attorney. Depending on which state you live in and whether your encounter with police is consensual as opposed to your being temporarily detained or arrested, you may have the right to refuse to identify yourself. Not all states require citizens to show their ID to an officer (although drivers in all states must do so).

As a rule of thumb, you should always be sure to clarify in any police encounter whether or not you are being detained, i.e., whether you have the right to walk away. That holds true whether it’s a casual “show your ID” request on a boardwalk, a stop-and-frisk search on a city street, or a traffic stop for speeding or just to check your insurance. If you feel like you can’t walk away from a police encounter of your own volition—and more often than not you can’t, especially when you’re being confronted by someone armed to the hilt with all manner of militarized weaponry and gear—then for all intents and purposes, you’re essentially under arrest from the moment a cop stops you. Still, it doesn’t hurt to clarify that distinction.

While technology is always going to be a double-edged sword, with the gadgets that are the most useful to us in our daily lives—GPS devices, cell phones, the internet—being the very tools used by the government to track us, monitor our activities, and generally spy on us, cell phones are particularly useful for recording encounters with the police and have proven to be increasingly powerful reminders to police that they are not all powerful.

Knowing your rights is only part of the battle, unfortunately.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the hard part comes in when you have to exercise those rights in order to hold government officials accountable to respecting those rights.

Hours after President Biden promised to release the ‘full report’ from US Intelligence community’s 90-day examination of where COVID-19 originated – unless there’s something he’s unaware of…

…the New York Times reports, there’s things he’s unaware of.

Namely, ‘a raft of still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis that might shed light on the mystery,” according to anonymous senior administration officials.

In other words, the US government has been sitting on a large collection of intelligence in perhaps the most important investigation into an economy-wrecking global pandemic, as China destroyed evidence and has refused to cooperate with international probes. According to the report, Biden’s call for the new investigation was in response to the ‘new’ evidence.

While officials declined to describe the new evidence, they are hoping to apply ‘an extraordinary amount of computer power’ to analyze what the Times speculates may be ‘databases of Chinese communications, the movement of lab workers and the pattern of the outbreak of the disease around the city of Wuhan.”

Biden’s call was also meant to spur American allies and intelligence agencies to scour their own evidence, such as “intercepts, witnesses or biological evidence — as well as hunt for new intelligence,” to assess whether the Chinese government covered up what happened.

Astute readers will note that the NYT substitutes its own facts, framing any lab release as of course “accidental,” and suggesting that Biden only dismissed the lab origin theory “until the Chinese government this week rejected allowing further investigation by the World Health Organization.”

In reality, plenty of evidence existed which the entire leftist establishment and their media surrogates flatly branded a ‘debunked conspiracy theory’ after then-President Trump promoted it, while the World Health Organization (WHO) and US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) parroted CCP propaganda that the virus could have only emerged via ‘natural origin’ (as opposed to the Chinese lab manipulating bat coronaviruses in the same city that the pandemic started).

Meanwhile, China isn’t playing ball.

So far, the effort to glean evidence from intercepted communications within China, a notoriously hard target to penetrate, has yielded little. Current and former intelligence officials say they strongly doubt anyone will find an email or a text message or a document that shows evidence of a lab accident.

One allied nation passed on information that three workers in the Wuhan virological laboratory were hospitalized with serious flulike symptoms in the autumn of 2019. The information about the sickened workers is considered important, but officials cautioned that it did not constitute evidence that they caught the virus at the laboratory — they may have brought it there.

The White House is hoping that allies and partners can tap their networks of human sources to find additional information about what happened inside the laboratory. While the United States has been rebuilding its own sources in China, it has still not fully recovered from the elimination of its network inside the country a decade ago. As a result, having allies press their informants about what went on inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology will be a key part of the intelligence push ahead.

The inquiry has not reached a dead end, a senior Biden administration official said. Officials would not describe the kind of computational analysis they want to do.

According to the Times, both scientists and spies will be working to unravel how the pandemic started, as “Senior officials have told the spy agencies that their science-oriented divisions, which have been working on the issue for months, will play a prominent role in the revitalized inquiry.“

Will the Five Eyes rally around the lab leak?

According to the report, US allies have been providing evidence since the beginning of the pandemic. Australia, a member of the so-called Five Eyes partnership which also includes Britain, Canada and New Zealand, has strongly promoted the lab-leak theory. And while US intelligence agencies are reportedly coming together “around the two likely scenarios,” a former State Department official says the evidence to support the natural origin theory is virtually non-existent.

“We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci’s NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19,” said former State Department official David Asher in a statement to Fox News. “The data disproportionately stacked up as we investigated that it was coming out of a lab or some supernatural source.“

Asher, the lead contractor on the subject, said the team investigated the two chief hypotheses for the virus’ origins, the other being the lab-leak theory that has gained credence after widespread media dismissal over the past year.

…

Asher has a history of investigative work tracking money for the AQ Khan network, North Korea’s nuclear program, and top Al Qaeda leaders, but has fallen under scrutiny from former State Department officials.

Asher was critical Thursday of former Assistant Secretary of State Chris Ford, who expressed reservations about the investigation’s findings and cautioned against the lab theory. Ford told Fox News that the AVC probe had been kept secret from him and bypassed department and intelligence community biological experts, although adding the lab origin theory was “very possible.” –Fox News

“That was the epicenter of synthetic biology in the People’s Republic of China, and they were up to some very hairy stuff with synthetic biology and so-called gain-of-function techniques,” said Asher, adding that the odds of natural origin were ‘extremely long.’

“To say this came out of a zoonotic situation, it’s ridiculous,” he concluded.

This week war-torn Syria took to the voting polls and as expected the result was a landslide victory for Syrian President Bashar Assad, ushering in a fourth seven-year term after he came to power in the year 2000 after the death of his father Hafez, who had been the Syrian Arab Republic’s first strongman Baath ruler going back to 1971.

The results were announced from Damascus early Thursday (local time), making it official that Assad is to rule Syria through at least 2028 – having received 95% of the vote in an election widely denounced as a sham and ‘illegitimate’ by Western leaders, as well the anti-Assad jihadist groups in control of Idlib.

Out of 18 million eligible voters (in government areas), a little over 14 million participated (78% participation according to Syrian government figures). While the Syrian state urged the participation of the over five million refugees currently outside the country, it appears this only happened on any significant scale in neighboring Lebanon. 

Alongside the armed insurgent jihadist groups obviously boycotting the election, the US-backed Kurdish areas of the oil-rich northeast which are still under American troop occupation also banned the election.

Overnight upon the election results being announced, celebrations broke out in Damascus and other cities with strong loyalist support like Tartus, with fireworks being seen over the Syrian capital and guns being fired into the air. 

ساحة الأمويين بدمشق… من احتفالات السوريين بفوز الدكتور #بشار_الأسد بمنصب رئيس الجمهورية العربية السورية#سورية_تنتخب_2021#الانتخابات_الرئاسية_26_أيار_2021 pic.twitter.com/o6yzY9P6ql

— سانا عاجل (@SanaAjel) May 27, 2021

Perhaps the most interesting line of commentary and reporting came via an AFP journalist on hand during the Syrian election:

Syria’s Bashar al-Assad said Western criticism of Wednesday’s presidential election has “zero value” as he cast his ballot in a Damascus suburb.

Commenting on US and EU criticism branding the vote “neither free nor fair,” Assad said: “Your opinions have zero value”, an AFP journalist reported.

The US and EU had on Tuesday issued a joint statement saying, “This fraudulent election does not represent any progress towards a political settlement.”

Rally in Tartous in support of president Assad short time before elections results are announced. #Syria prevails! 🇸🇾 https://t.co/0f9Edquv5E

— Sara_Haj 🇱🇧 (@Sara_Haj) May 27, 2021

While the Assad victory was fully expected, the once in seven year voting process within the context of the war which raged since 2011 has fundamentally become a moment where Syrians in government areas (now the majority of the country) take to the streets en masse to show support for the state, and simultaneously their “defiance” to West-backed regime change efforts which sought to overthrow Assad. 

China braces for another dangerous flood season with 97 rivers already exceeding warning levels as of Thursday, according to Chinese state media Global Times. Major floods are expected this summer, and Western media will soon be drumming up headlines about how confidence in China’s flood control capabilities is faltering. 

Water levels along the Yangtze River basin and its tributaries are expected to increase over the next week, the Ministry of Water Resources said, adding that major floods are possible throughout the country from June to August. 

Wang Wei, an official with the flood and drought disaster prevention office of the Ministry of Water Resources, told state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) that total flood control capacity is approximately 69.5 billion cubic meters – most of the reservoirs have been discharged to full levels. He said the water level of the Three Gorges Reservoir is about 150.83 meters as of Wednesday and will decline through June 10. 

Sun Chunpeng, director of the hydrological information and forecast center under the water resources ministry, told CCTV rivers of southern China are experiencing record-high levels. More precipitation is expected in the weeks ahead and could push river levels to even higher dangerous levels. 

The country’s largest freshwater lake, called Poyang Lake, located in Jiangxi Province, could have water above warning levels by the end of the week. 

“This year’s rainy season has come earlier than usual, but it is still within the normal range. Last year, China recorded record heavy rainfall, so the chance of this year being the same is low, but extreme weather is unpredictable due to the impact of global warming,” Cheng Xiaotao, the former head for the Institute of Flood Control and Disaster Reduction, with the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, told the Global Times. 

QingMa Investment, a hedge fund based in Shanghai China, shows flooding risks are climbing for China. 

Last summer’s rainy season was the second-highest level since 1961, which triggered massive flooding and fears of the giant Three Gorges Dam failure that circulated across Western media. 

It’s about that time Western media becomes obsessed with China flooding stories and persuades the world that China’s flood control capabilities are lacking. 

Authored by Brittany Bernstein via National Review (emphasis ours),

Lockheed Martin, the nation’s largest defense contractor, put top executives through a three-day training to deconstruct their “white male culture” and unlearn their “white male privilege,” according to a new report.

Thirteen employees, including a former three-star general and the vice president of production for the $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program, attended a program on Zoom last year led by the consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, according to City Journal’s Christopher Rufo. The firm works to help white men “awaken together.”

The program was led by the consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males “awaken together.” The participants included a former three-star general and the vice president of production for the $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. pic.twitter.com/x5YU2bBNbn

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 26, 2021

The training began with a “free association” exercise which asked the Lockheed executives to list words associated with “white men.” The trainers listed “old, racist, privileged, anti-women, angry, Aryan Nation, KKK, Founding fathers, guns, guilty, can’t jump,” according to Rufo.

The diversity trainers posed the question, “What’s in it for white men?” A list of responses included, “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner,” “[I will] improve the brand, image, reputation of white men,” and “I [will] have less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.”

The consulting firm claims that the “roots of white male culture” include traits such as “rugged individualism,” “a can-do attitude,” “hard work,” “operating from principles,” and “striving towards success” – which are “devastating” to women and minorities.

The employees were also asked to recite and internalize 50 “white privilege statements,” including:

“My culture teaches me to minimize the perspectives and powers of people of other races”;

“I can commit acts of terrorism, violence or crime and not have it attributed to my race.”

After the participants finished their white privilege statements, they were asked to recite and internalize 59 “male privilege statements,” including: “My earning potential is 15-33% higher than a woman’s”; “My reproductive organs are not seen as the property of other men, the government, and/or even strangers because of my gender.”

For the final step, the employees recited and internalized 59 “heterosexual privilege statements,” including:

“I am not asked to think about why I am straight”;

“I can have friendships with or work around children without being accused of recruiting or molesting them.”

The training concluded by asking the participants to read a list of “I’m tired” statements attributed to fictitious people of color and woman, such as “I’m tired of being Black”; “I’m tired of Black boys/girls being murdered”; “I’m tired of … the concept that we should be ‘colorblind.’”

“This is pure neoracism from a company that receives billions of taxpayer dollars every year,” Rufo said in a tweet thread sharing his reporting.

“I call on the United States Senate to launch an immediate inquiry into the racist practices at @LockheedMartin. We must shut this down before it endangers our national security.”

*  *  *

Meanwhile, never mincing words is Paul Joseph Watson of Summit News:

Currently the sole US aircraft carrier based out of the Asian-Pacific, specifically with a home port in Yokosuka, Japan, is the USS Ronald Reagan – but it’s now set to depart the region for the first time in years in preparation for the complete withdrawal of US troops in Afghanistan. 

Pentagon officials told The Wall Street Journal the new carrier mission will see the Reagan depart Asian-Pacific waters this summer in support of ensuring a safe US troop exit from Afghanistan by the time of Biden’s Sept. 11 deadline. There’s growing concern that given Americans are now staying well past the previously agreed upon May 1st exit (based on the prior deal under the Trump White House), departing soldiers could face severe Taliban attacks, a scenario which is more likely the longer they stay. But now Congressional hawks worry about the glaring “gap” to be created should ongoing tensions with China escalate. 

The carrier presence is expected to assist in thwarting any such attacks via air operations or other missions which require calling in major firepower. 

Lack of a carrier presence near the South and East China seas could (perhaps as an inadvertent byproduct ) actually help to cool continually rising tensions with China – hawks inevitably sounding the “alarm” notwithstanding – following over a dozen contentious sail-throughs of warships in the Taiwan Strait and waters claimed by Beijing, such as the recent Paracel island incident.

“While it is away, the Navy will go without an aircraft carrier presence in the Asia-Pacific region for at least part of that time, the officials said,” WSJ describes. This strongly suggests another carrier may be later called upon to enter the waters.

“The U.S. Seventh Fleet, based in Japan, has dozens of other ships and aircraft, but the redeployment of its only available aircraft carrier represents a significant diversion away from Asia, which President Biden has called a priority for the military,” WSJ continues. The current carrier operating in the Middle East, which has been active in the north Arabian sea since last month, is the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower – but it’s scheduled to return to port in Virginia in July.

Already on Thursday this is sparking controversy over the largest navy in the world “not having enough ships”…

Senate Armed Services Comm top Republican @JimInhofe worries abt reported redeployment of #USSRonaldReagan from @INDOPACOM to help w/ #Afghanistan withdrawal@SecDef “should not have to choose btw providing force protection & keeping an aircraft carrier in the priority theater” pic.twitter.com/BaDhAApCxe

— Jeff Seldin (@jseldin) May 27, 2021

This appears part of US Central Command commander Gen. Kenneth McKenzie’s promise to the Senate Armed Services Committee made last month wherein he stated, “We will bring additional resources in [to the region] in order to protect the force as it comes out” of Afghanistan, which is by far America’s longest running war. “That’s normal in any kind of disengagement operation, and I don’t want to go into the detail of those operations right now, but we will have additional capabilities and I’m confident that we and our coalition partners will be able to extract ourselves,” McKenzie said.

And Rabobank comments on the matter: “…at a time of heightened tensions around the South China Sea, due to the US leaving Afghanistan in July–opening up USD1-3trn in mineral resources for anyone brave enough to dive in–the US Navy is shifting the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan to help with the logistics. For the first time in a long time, the US has no aircraft carrier in the Pacific. The symbolism is clear: and it leaves some wondering what might happen if push comes to shove.”

The US has further of late reportedly beefed up its bomber presence in the Gulf region, also as the major logistical feet of pulling out a 20-year build-up of equipment and military hardware continues. 

Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog,

Valve, the company behind Life and Counter-Strike, has just announced that the video games giant is ushering humanity into a Brave New World. How so? By merely including new technologies called brain-computer interfaces in its games.

BCIs will work on our feelings by adjusting the game accordingly

The head of Valve, Gabe Newell, has stated that the future of video games will involve “Brain-computer interfaces.” Newell added that BCIs would soon create superior experiences to those we currently perceive through our eyes and ears. 

Newell said he envisions the gaming devices detecting a gamer’s emotions and then adjusting the settings to modify the player’s mood. For example, increasing the difficulty level when the player is getting bored.

Valve is currently developing its own BCIs and working on “modified VR head straps” that developers can use to experiment with signals coming from the brain. “If you’re a software developer in 2022 who doesn’t have one of these in your test lab, you’re making a silly mistake,” Newell said.

VR headsets will collect data by reading our brain signals

Valve is working with OpenBCI headsets. OpenBCI unveiled a headset design back in November that it calls Galea. It is designed to work alongside VR headsets like Valve’s Index.

“We’re working on an open-source project so that everybody can have high-resolution [brain signal] read technologies built into headsets, in a bunch of different modalities,” Newell added.

“Software developers for interactive experience[s] — you’ll be absolutely using one of these modified VR head straps to be doing that routinely — simply because there’s too much useful data,” said Newell.

The data collected by the head straps would consist of readings from the players’ brains and bodies. The data would essentially tell if the player is excited, surprised, bored, sad, afraid, or amused and other emotions. The modified head strap will then use the information to improve “immersion and personalize what happens during games.”

The world will seem flat and colorless in comparison to the one created in your mind

Newell also discussed taking the brain-reading technology a step further and creating a situation to send signals to people’s minds. (Such as changing their feelings and delivering better visuals during games.)

“You’re used to experiencing the world through eyes,” Newell said, “but eyes were created by this low-cost bidder that didn’t care about failure rates and RMAs, and if it got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively, which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is not at all reflective of consumer preferences.”

“So the visual experience, the visual fidelity we’ll be able to create — the real world will stop being the metric that we apply to the best possible visual fidelity.

“Where it gets weird is when who you are becomes editable through a BCI.” ~ Gabe Newell

Typically your average human accepts their feelings to be how they truly feel. Newell claims that BCIs will allow for an edit of these feelings digitally.

“One of the early applications I expect we’ll see is improved sleep — sleep will become an app that you run where you say, ‘Oh, I need this much sleep, I need this much REM,’” he said.

Newell also claims that another benefit could be the reduction or complete removal of unwanted feelings or brain conditions.

Doesn’t something good come from this technology?

Newell and Valve are working on something beyond merely the improvement of the video game experience. There is now a significant bleed over in the research conducted by Newell’s team and the prosthetics and neuroscience industries.

Valve is trading research for expertise, contributing to projects developing synthetic body parts.

“This is what we’re contributing to this particular research project,” he said, “and because of that, we get access to leaders in the neuroscience field who teach us a lot about the neuroscience side.”

Are we equipped to experience things we have never experienced?

Newell briefly mentioned some potential negatives to the technology. For example, he said how BCIs could cause people to experience physical pain, even pain beyond their physical body.

“You could make people think they [are] hurt by injuring their tool, which is a complicated topic in and of itself,” he said.

From the TVNZ article:

Game developers might harness that function to make a player feel the pain of the character they are playing as when they are injured — perhaps to a lesser degree.

Like any other form of technology, Newell says there’s a degree of trust in using it and that not everyone will feel comfortable with connecting their brain to a computer.

He says no one will be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, and that people will likely follow others if they have good experiences, likening BCI technology to cellular phones.

“People are going to decide for themselves if they want to do it. Nobody makes people use a phone,” Newell said.

“I’m not saying that everybody is going to love and insist that they have a brain-computer interface. I’m just saying each person is going to decide for themselves whether or not there’s an interesting combination of feature, functionality, and price.”

But Newell warned that BCIs come with one other significant risk. He says, “Nobody wants to say, ‘Remember Bob? Remember when Bob got hacked by the Russian malware? Yeah, that sucked. Is he still running naked through the forests?’”

Is this just another step in separating us from ourselves?

The truth is we will continue to be told to ignore the implications for this type of technology and the direction in which we are heading. Because, of course, they ARE developing prosthetics, and this is an advance in scientific discovery. Still, one step forward by an agenda and a plan created long ago only brings us that much closer to losing our ability to remember.