Month: June 2021

As we move further down the rabbit hole of exactly what in the devil has been going on in China’s ‘bat labs,’ we now turn our attention to one Zhou Yusen – a Chinese military scientist specializing in coronaviruses who collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman,” Zhengli Shi – with at least one project to geneticially manipulate coronaviruses having been funded by three grants from the National Institutes of Heath (NIH)  – home to Dr. Anthony Fauci – via US universities, according to documents obtained by The Weekend Australian (ostensibly leaked by Aussie intelligence). The previously undisclosed NIH funding of a PLA military scientist is separate from millions in grants awarded EcoHealth alliance, which also collaborated with the WIV.

The revelation shows American money was funding risky ­research on coronaviruses with People’s Liberation Army scientists – including decorated military scientist Zhou Yusen and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman”, Shi Zhengli.

Now we learn that Zhou, 54, is dead – three months after filing a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in Feb. 2020.

According to the report, Zhou’s May 2020 death went largely under the radar, despite the fact that he was an award-winning scientist at the PLA’s Laboratory of Infection and Immunity at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology. “There were no reports paying tribute to his life. His death was only mentioned in passing in a Chinese-media report in July and at the end of a December scientific paper. Both had the word ­“deceased” in brackets after his name.”

And while Zhou’s death may have been suspicious (or he may have simply died of COVID), the revelation that the US government was funding his research with the WIV may provide a clue as to why US officials – Dr. Fauci (backed by the ‘scientific community’ after his lapdog, EcoHelath Alliance’s Peter Daszak, penned a ‘natural origin or you’re a lunatic‘ letter in the Lancet) – peddled the CCP’s ‘natural origin’ theory, while any suggestion that it could have been created in and/or leaked from the very lab which received NIH dollars was strictly verboten. 

Emails released under a Freedom of Information request from Buzzfeed this week showed that, in the early days of the pandemic, Dr Fauci was concerned that US funding had gone towards gain-of-function research in China.

In other emails, scientists wrote to Dr Fauci expressing the preliminary view that the SARS-CoV-2 genome appeared “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory” and that it had some features that “potentially look engineered”. -The Weekend Australian

In short, ‘conflict of interest’ doesn’t even begin to explain what Fauci is now going to have to explain the next time Rand Paul has him in the hot seat.

The revelation shows American money was funding risky ­research on coronaviruses with People’s Liberation Army scientists – including decorated military scientist Zhou Yusen and the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman”, Shi Zhengli.

…

National security sources said the ties between Zhou and Dr Shi ­supported claims by US intelligence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was engaged in “secret military activity.” -The Australian

How long was China sitting on the genetic sequence for SARS-CoV-2?

If we’re considering the timeline and its implications, Zhou died three months after filing a Feb. 24, 2020 patent application for a COVID-19 vaccine. While this could mean that he was working on a COVID-19 vaccine before the virus became public knowledge in December 2019, keep in mind that Moderna was able to design the sequence for their COVID-19 vaccine just two days after Chinese officials released its genetic sequence on Jan. 11, 2020 – filing for their first related patent in March, two months later.

Also note that Zhou had been working on coronavirus vaccines since at least 2006 in response the original SARS-CoV outbreak – authoring a study which found that “the vaccines containing the (receptor-binding domain) of SARS-CoV S protein may induce sufficient neutralising antibodies and long-term ­protective immunity against SARS-CoV challenge in the ­established mouse model.”

So, assuming an expert would need approximately two months to go from genomic sequence to patent application, it implies that China withheld the genetic sequence for a month before its Jan. 11 public release. Or, Zhou may have had more of a ‘head start’ than that. 

“This is something we have never seen achieved before, raising the question of whether this work may have started much ­earlier,” said Nikolai Petrovsky from Flinders University.

(And if one wants to explore the implications assuming SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered, Karl Denninger has some thoughts below)

And while we may never know the full extent of Zhou’s role in all of this, he and ‘bat woman’ Zhengli were working on a COVID vaccine right before the pandemic.

Per the Weekend Australian:

Right before the pandemic, Zhou and three other scientists from the PLA-run Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology – Yuehong Chen, Lei He and Shishui Sun – partnered with two Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists – Dr Shi and Jing Chen – and eight Chinese scientists now based in the US at the University of Minnesota and the Lindsley Kimball Research Institute, New York Blood Centre. Their paper, titled Molecular Mechanism for Antibody-­Dependent Enhancement of Coronavirus Entry, was submitted to the Journal of Virology on November 27, 2019, and was published on February 14, 2020.

The research examined MERS and SARS coronaviruses as avenues for antibody-based ­antiviral drug therapy to treat coronaviruses.

Their paper had some positive results: “Taken together, our ­results show that RBD-specific neutralising MAbs bind to the same region on coronavirus spikes as viral receptors do, trigger conformational changes of the spikes as viral receptors do, and mediate ADE through the same pathways as viral-receptor-dependent viral entry.”

They found this “novel molecular mechanism for antibody-enhanced viral entry” could “guide future vaccination and ­antiviral strategies”.

This study was conducted “in vitro”, meaning in a petri dish or test tube, using humanised kidney and lung cells. Their last paragraph indicated the next step in a future paper would be to conduct “in vivo” experiments with ­humanised mice or primates. A paper published in Nature ­Reviews Immunology 18 months later, in April this year, would find that “neutralising monoclonal antibodies” could help the treatment of Covid-19.

Meanwhile, Zhou’s patent application states: “The invention ­relates to the field of biomedicine, and relates to a Covid-19 ­vaccine, preparation methods and applications. The fusion ­protein provided by the invention can be used to develop the Covid-19 protein vaccine and a drug for preventing or treating the Covid-19.”

Yusen Zhou (周育森) (‡)
1. Gain-of-function of viral entry (Shibo Jiang, and Fang Li, search them for more info)
2. Vaccine patent on 2020.02.24 (Wei Chen, Yusen Zhou, Ningyi Jin…)
3. Animal Model (Chuan Qin)
4. The NIH-PLA Network：
left to right = infiltration pathway pic.twitter.com/M5E14ylSM9

— 德意志之鹰 (@dezying) June 4, 2021

What does this all mean now? Karl Denninger has a few thoughts via market-ticker.org, and is notably very suspicious of the patent timing (edited for brevity):

So what do we now know?

• China’s military was in fact involved at the Wuhan lab.  It was not just a civilian operation.  This, by the way, has been repeatedly denied over the last year and change.

• The lab’s scientists knew not only the sequencing of the virus but in addition had a patentable way to create an alleged vaccine before the pandemic was public.  It takes time to draft patents and figure them out.  Quite a lot of time, in fact — not a couple weeks or months.

• It takes time to prove up patent material, including in the case of a vaccine.  To patent something you must be able to demonstrate it; you cannot patent ideas, only embodiments of ideas.  In that case you would have to prove immunogenicity which isn’t instantaneous; it takes weeks or even months to get through original science on this with animals and then humans, which means the date of knowledge was not February 24th it was months or even further before that.
   
• That means they were working on this even before that time because to work on a vaccine you have to know you must or would want to work on it in the first place.  This in turn means they knew damn well there was a virulent virus in the wild prior to that date, or they released it or intended to release it into the wild on purpose.  Nobody comes up with a vaccine for a virus you intend to and have confined entirely within a laboratory in animal or cell culture testing; that’s worthless.  Without an isolate to create a vaccine for and a virus outside of a lab environment where vaccination becomes a “thing” that might be required and thus have value why would you do the work to create one?

What’s the timeline on all this?  Many, many months or even a couple of years.

That means either the virus was “out” for many months to a couple of years before February of 2020 (not a month or two) or the Chinese intended to release it in the fall of 2019.  In either case the evidence is now overwhelming that this was not a virus that “magically appeared” one fine day in late December having come naturally from bats and perhaps pangolins. That is not just improbable anymore — it is now, on the manifest weight of the evidence, impossible.

…

Next up is exactly what sort of vaccine patent we’re talking about here?

Specifically how is it that the “stiffened” areas in the viral vector and mRNA shots we’re using in the US came to be known and proved up?  How did Moderna and Pfizer know they needed to do that?  That sort of study takes months if not years too, not days or weeks, to both come up with it and then prove it actually works as expected.

Remember that Covid-19 has a rather-unique site on the spike called the “furin-cleavage” area which it uses to “fold” and get into the cell; the S1 unit attaches, the cleavage area “folds” and then the second part penetrates the cell wall like a spear.  SARS and MERS both lack this structure so there was no “prior art” to use and in the first couple of months the characterizing of all of this was pretty darn new.

Yet the “official story” is that these folks had a proposed candidate configuration, including the replacement of encodings to “stiffen” that area within days of the publication of the viral RNA sequence for Covid-19.

Is the completed work in that area what the Chinese “gave” us complete with that part of the work already done?  That would explain how it happened that quickly, wouldn’t it?  I’d sure like to understand how someone — anyone — does that sort of work complete with the lab verification in cell cultures and animals, reachig those conclusions in days.

What are the connections there?  I’d like a full explanation of that please.

*  *  *

As would we.

Authored by Bryce Coward via Knowledge Leaders Capital blog,

For the second month in a row, the US payroll employment report has come in below expectations. The miss this month was not quite as bad as the miss last month, but was still notable. The market was expecting 675K new jobs, but only 559K were added.

Nearly all of the jobs added were in the leisure & hospitality and education categories. This is unsurprising given re-openings will affect those sectors particularly acutely. But, for the second month in a row we also saw fairly weak numbers out of both construction and manufacturing. Construction jobs fell by 20K while manufacturing jobs only rose by 23K after a 32K decline in April. Furthermore, the labor force participation rate fell by a tenth of a percent to 61.6% when the market expected it to rise to 61.8%.

Granted, the payroll report wasn’t exactly weak. But, but it wasn’t really that strong either. Not only did it miss headline expectations, but it lacked broadness, was outright weak in an important cyclical area (i.e. construction), and people actually dropped out of the labor force at a time when vast job openings and reduced unemployment benefits would have suggested the opposite.

It’s not surprising, then, to hear Cleveland Fed President Mester this morning say things like:

“Fed policy needs to be patient right now”

“Economy has more progress to make on hiring”

“Still have further progress to make on labor market”

All that followed NY Fed President Williams earlier in the day saying:

“I just don’t think the time is now to take any actions”

“The economy has improved and I think it’s on a good trajectory. But to my mind, we’re still quite a ways off from reaching this substantial further progress, you know, we’re really looking for”

The message from the employment report and the Fed speakers is pretty clear: the labor market has not improved to a degree warranting the Fed to begin its tapering process, and the Fed will be patient to wait for such a time.

What does all this mean for Fed policy?

Since the Fed has told market participants it will telegraph the start of tapering by many months, we believe an announcement of tapering is unlikely to come before Jackson Hole in August or at the September FOMC meeting. Since there will be a lag between the announcement of tapering and the start of tapering, actual tapering would start at the beginning of 2022. The tapering process itself would last roughly 12 months, or throughout 2022. Then, the Fed would wait at least two quarters to begin raising rates. This would put the first rate hike in the back half of 2023. We would therefore expect two 0.25% rate hikes in 2023, and certainly no more than three 0.25% rate hikes.

What is the market expecting?

Interestingly, the Fed Funds market is still expecting more rate hikes than our baseline projection, which is based on what the Fed is saying and actual incoming data. The Fed Funds market still expects 0.2% of rate hikes in 2022, or about an 80% chance of a 0.25% rate hike in 2022. We think this expectation is off the mark given the relentlessness of Fed speakers suggesting patience, as well as the probable timeline for tapering. 

The takeaway is that the market still needs to push out in time its expectations for the first rate hike, and that will keep pressure on both the short end of the yield curve as well as the longer end. In essence, don’t expect 2Y or 10Y rates to back up much from here because the market still expects a rate hike in 2022, which is unlikely to materialize.

What does this mean for markets?

If Fed tapering won’t begin until 2022 and the first rate hike won’t take place until the back half of 2023, then that means there is a long runway for the cyclical/value trade to continue to press ahead. As can be seen in the final chart, over the last 12 years the relative performance of the materials sector vs the tech sector has closely tracked the direction of the 2-year yield, with a 2-year lag. When the 2-year has been rising (blue line on right inverted axis), materials have underperformed tech (red line on the left axis). Now, however, the 2 year yield has been falling for 2 years, and is set to remain near zero for quite a bit longer.

This portends that the rotation into materials/cyclicals/value from tech is set to run for several more years.

A large fire broke out Saturday night at a steel factory in the southeast city of Zarand in Iran. It’s the latest in a mysterious string of blasts and ‘accidental’ blazes at sensitive sites to beset the Islamic Republic, raising questions of possible Israel sabotage akin to what happened a year ago in the summer of 2020. 

“The governor of Zarand told the Iranian Fars News Agency that no injuries were caused in the incident and that the incident was under control,” The Jerusalem Post reports. “The incident was reportedly caused by the sudden overflow of molten material in the blast furnace, with the governor stressing that no explosion occurred.” But some early videos show otherwise. 

🎥 حادثه در کارخانه #فولاد_زرند کرمان

فرماندار شهرستان زرند:

حادثه کارخانه، سرریز شدن مواد مذاب بوده است

این حادثه در حال حاضر مهار شده است

از مردم زرند درخواست داریم به محل کارخانه مراجعه نکنند

تاکنون هیچ تلفات جانی از این حادثه گزارش نشده است pic.twitter.com/C29vHn2Tfa

— خبرگزاری تسنیم 🇮🇷 (@Tasnimnews_Fa) June 6, 2021

Social media videos showed a sizable blaze which appear to have triggered a significant explosion, however, resulting in debris and what looks like molten steel flying into the air. 

Even if Iran suspects that Israel is behind some of these latest incidents over the past month, Tehran officials are likely reluctant to go public with accusations given negotiators are reportedly on the cusp of a nuclear deal in Vienna, and as the country is gearing up to vote for a new president this month. 

Israel has vowed to thwart a deal by any means possible, with embattled PM Netanyahu lately openly verbalizing he’s willing to consider any level of action even if it causes “friction” with the United States.

🎥 فیلم جدید از آتش‌سوزی در کارخانه #فولاد_زرند کرمانhttps://t.co/LmQ4hxbJXr pic.twitter.com/GozHDNb2AX

— خبرگزاری تسنیم 🇮🇷 (@Tasnimnews_Fa) June 6, 2021

And there are further reports of other fires afflicting oil facilities throughout the country, as US-funded VOA News details: “Several oil facility fires have occurred in Iran’s southwestern Ahvaz region during the past 48 hours, Arab media reported Saturday. The reports came on the heels of a massive oil refinery fire this week in the capital, Tehran.”

One Middle East news source reviews the recent string of fires and explosions hitting key Iranian assets as follows:

• Three days earlier, a major fire tore through the Tehran Oil Refining Company in the outskirts of the Iranian capital. 
• Another explosion followed by a fire sank Iran’s largest naval vessel in the Sea of Oman, near it shores, on June 2.
• On May 23, nine people were injured in another blast at a plant producing explosive materials in central Iran...
• three days later, a pipeline explosion at a petrochemical complex near Iran’s Gulf coast left one dead.

🇮🇷🇮🇷 #Video:

👉 The “#Kharg”, #Iran’s Navy largest vessel, on fire this morning in the #Gulf of #Oman. The ship sank later. pic.twitter.com/8EhfNQd0b9

— Dr. Ali BAKIR (علي باكير) (@AliBakeer) June 2, 2021

Below is last week’s massive blaze which engulfed one of Iran’s largest oil refineries just outside Tehran, on the same day the large warship Kharg sank…

Oil Refinery fire in Tehran Iran that started two hours after an Iranian Navy Vessel caught fir and sank off the coast of Oman. #Iran #Oman #oilrefinery #irannavy #venzuela pic.twitter.com/rgmZBlF8Vw

— Disclosure Tv (@DisclosureTv_) June 2, 2021

And there are others which barely made it into international headlines over the past two weeks, as Jerusalem Post notes: 

“At least one fire has been associated with an Iranian military site, with The Guardian reporting that a blast hit the Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industrial Company (HESA), which produces a variety of aircraft, including drones, for Iranian and pro-Iranian forces in Iran’s Isfahan Province.”

I’m already seeing lots of speculation #Israel was behind this—as always. Interestingly the U.S. sanctioned the Zarand Steel Company in 2021. But aging infrastructure plus hot temperatures also increases likelihood of these incidents. #Iran https://t.co/aECzvQSFah

— Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) June 5, 2021

There’s a growing consensus that at least some among the spate of fires are the result of Israeli covert attacks, whether through on the ground sabotage or cyberattacks: “London-based Iran analyst Ali Nourizadeh told VOA that he thought the latest fires in Ahvaz probably weren’t acts of sabotage, because there are oil field fires in Ahvaz every summer. The sinking of the Kharg and the Tehran refinery fire, he argued, probably were sabotage, despite Iranian government denials.”

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The United States gave over $800,000 to the top-level laboratory in China from which some believe the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus escaped, according to newly released documents.

Internal emails from officials with the National Institutes of Health and an office inside the agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), show they discussed in 2020 a question from Republican members of Congress regarding how much the agencies sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The total amount sent between Fiscal Years 2014 and 2019 was $826,777, according to the officials.

The funding went to EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled money to the lab for the purpose of “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence.”

The total amount is different from the amount that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID, told members of Congress the Wuhan lab received from the U.S. government.

“We had a modest collaboration with respectable Chinese scientists who are world experts on coronavirus and we did that through a subgrant from a larger grant to EcoHealth. The subgrant was about $600,000 over a period of five years,” Fauci told members of the House Appropriations Committee during a hearing last month.

NIAID did not respond to a request for information. The agency has not returned repeated requests for comment.

The newly released emails show one chain involving Fauci in April 2020. In it, a top NIAID official, Dr. Emily Erbelding, informed Fauci and others that a new grant to EcoHealth was for $3.6 million. Of that, about $750,000 would go to the Wuhan lab. About $75,000 had already been sent to the lab during year 1 of the grant, she said.

“This is higher but not extraordinarily higher than I originally indicated which was for some earlier work,” Hugh Auchincloss, another agency official, wrote to Fauci, who responded, “Thanks.”

In another message around the same time, Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins were informed by health officials that the White House “has strongly embraced concerns” raised by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) regarding the U.S. funding for the bat coronavirus research in China.

“HEADS UP: Wuhan lab research,” Lawrence Tabak wrote, labeling the email as “high” importance.

Fauci and Collins were told that the multi-country study in question, which included sites in China, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Burma, was given $3.7 million over six years and that the Wuhan lab received approximately $826,300 and would get about $80,000 more per year for the following four years.

“More by phone,” Tabak said.

The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch.

“These new documents show that funding for the Wuhan Institute was greater than the public has been told,” Tom Fitton, president of the watchdog, said in a statement. “That it has taken a year and a federal lawsuit to get this first disclosure on COVID and Wuhan is evidence of cover-up by Fauci’s agency.”

Previously released emails obtained through a separate request showed Fauci and his team scrambled to respond to people wondering whether the CCP virus, which causes COVID-19, escaped from the Wuhan lab.

Fauci has insisted the grant funding went for appropriate research that could only be done properly in China.

“Clearly the bats that have the coronaviruses are in China. They are not in Fairfax County, Virginia, or in New York. That’s where the bats are,” Fauci told Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last month.

Some experts say the funding went to “gain of function” research, or efforts of making coronaviruses more transmissible, but Fauci has said the money did not go towards that work.

Kennedy asked how Fauci was sure that Chinese scientists, often working under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, did not shield their true work.

“We have seen the results of the research that were done and that were published. And the studies are public, and on public databases now. None of that was gain of function,” Fauci said.

Julian Assange’s father John Shipton begins a month-long, 17-city U.S. tour in Miami as his son languishes in Belmarsh Prison in London awaiting a US appeal against the denial of his extradition.

Organized by Assange Defense, John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian Assange’s father and brother, will begin the #HomeRun4Julian tour in Miami on June 6 via a live-streamed event. The Shiptons are scheduled to make stops on both coasts and the Midwest before concluding the tour in the nation’s capital.

Assange’s family members will meet with activists, press, and policymakers to raise awareness of the importance of protecting whistleblowers and journalists, and to advocate for the release of Julian Assange, whom the United Nations has declared “arbitrarily detained” since 2010. 

“My brother Julian Assange has effectively been a prisoner for over a decade because he published evidence of war crimes,” Gabriel Shipton said in a Thursday statement.

“The U.S. government wants to make an example out of him to deter journalists and whistleblowers,” he added.

And John Shipton, the WikiLeaks founder’s father said, “Gabriel and I are excited to talk to the American public on why protecting journalism and freeing Julian is so important to a free press.”

Watch the kickoff event in Miami here, live at 7pm(Eastern) on Sunday:

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

There is a free speech fight brewing in Scotland where a prominent feminist, Marion Millar, 50, has been charged with the crime of “malicious communication” due to tweets criticizing gender self-identification.  We have previously discussed how feminists are being accused of hate speech and discrimination in these debates.  Indeed, Millar is accused of being a “terf” (a trans-exclusionary radical feminist) by critics due to her opposition to allowing males to declare themselves to be females.  She could now face two years in jail.

We have been discussing the continuing erosion of free speech protections in the United Kingdom (here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. As noted in a prior column, free speech appears to be dying in the West with the increasing criminalization of speech under discrimination, hate, and blasphemy laws.

Scotland has adopted particularly chilling limitations on free speech.  These controversies often involve the criminalization of political or ideological viewpoints.

What is particularly concerning in this case is that Millar was not told which of her tweets were deemed “malicious.” Millar has thousands of tweets and was told that the charge is based on tweets between 2019 and 2020.  She was simply ordered to the police station and told that social workers would be sent to care for her young twin boys, who are autistic.  After she emerged from the station, she quoted the novelist Salman Rushdie:

“Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.”

Millar has been a prominent critic of self-identification as a threat to women and feminist values.  This includes criticism of the Gender Recognition Act and the Hate Crime Bill. New provisions include crimes for “stirring up hatred” in statements about different groups.  Scotland emphasized that it must be intentional but the language was still criticized as a further criminalization of political speech.  The charges against Millar do not appear to have been brought under the new law.

There are believed to be six tweets that were cited in the complaint, including pictures of the green, white and purple suffragette ribbons tied around trees to support Millar’s cause. The accuser reportedly said that the ribbons looked like nooses and were therefore threats.

Such charges are rife with subjectivity. Indeed, the term “terfs” captures the problem in criminalizing such speech. Terfs are being attacked in the media in articles that tend to include anyone who opposes transgender laws. The labeling creates a chilling effect for those who might want to speak out against aspects of these laws or policies. For some feminists, gender self-identification creates dangerous situations for women and negates core elements of feminist values. For others, this opposition is a denial of their identification and characterizes them as dangerous or potentially criminal.

As will come as no surprise to readers on this blog, my default is with free speech. Both sides should be able to address these issues in a public debate.  The effort by some to criminally charge advocates like Millar is to silence rather than to respond to opposing viewpoints. Such speech limitations tend to grow with time. Once groups taste the ability to silence others, it becomes an insatiable appetite for censorship and criminalization of speech.

Among the most horrific massacres in history, but which few in American public schools or the West generally actually learn about, is the Namibian genocide. Often referenced as the Herero and Nama genocide, it was the first such mass killing event of the 20th century, occurring between 1904 and 1908 in German Southwest Africa (today’s Namibia) and taking the lives of an estimated multiple tens of thousands to up to over 100,000 – mostly due to starvation, dehydration, and disease – after a short-lived rebellion saw the imperial German Army drive tribes into the desert en mass, and later into concentration camps.

Late last month, over a century later, the German government for the first time ever issued a formal apology amid a push for reparations. Berlin followed with a pledge of 1.1 billion euros (almost $1.3BN) toward infrastructure development for Namibia. However, it stopped short of offering direct reparations. 

Namibia’s leaders have called the offer which would be paid out over three decades “not enough”, but have also conceded it’s “a step in the right direction”. 

“Germany has, historically, refused to acknowledge its role in the ethnic cleansing, which decimated two marginalized ethnic groups in the South African country. But last week, more than 100 years after the violence occurred, the European country finally acknowledged that its actions constituted genocide,” Smithsonian Magazine writes. “As Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a May 28 statement, Germany plans to pay $1.35 billion (€1.1 billion) toward infrastructure development in Namibia over the next three decades.”

Namibian Vice President Nangolo Mbumba issued a statement on Friday, saying “No amount of money in any currency can truly compensate the life of a human being.”

“We need to recognize that the amount of 1.1 billion euros agreed upon between the two governments is not enough and does not adequately address the initial quantum of reparations initially submitted to the German Government,” he added.

This came after the top leader of the Herero people, chief Vekuii Rukoro, dismissed the whole German overture as an “insult” due to its stopping short of reparations, also amid allegations that the main ethnic groups impacted were not consulted during “closed door” talks with the German government. 

“According to the chiefs, descendants of the Ovaherero and Nama victims were not consulted during the talks, which took place behind closed doors.” https://t.co/QRSUmAdZUT

— IB Nyei (@Ibnyei) June 1, 2021

Other leaders called it “disrespectful”. Reuters recorded of a press briefing the week prior:

“These are historic choices we have to make, very difficult as they are. If there were other opportunities to squeeze money out of the Germans, we could have done it,” Mbumba said at the briefing.

“I don’t think that any Namibian would think that the money is enough to compensate for all that happened – to be killed, to be chased out of your country; no amount of money can do that,” he said.

A number of other European former colonial powers at the time of the late 19th into early 20th century “Scramble for Africa” have long sought to downplay or hide their dark pasts. Germany likely fears that moving forward with reparations as a major precedent would set off a domino effect demanding other claims and large government payouts over past events.

Belgium in particular has faced increasing scrutiny over the past two decades as more of its own suppressed history and documentation of mass death in Belgian Congo emerges under the time of King Leopold II.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

While G7, NATO and US-EU summits – all platforms for US power projection – will highlight European irrelevance…

It’s impossible to understand the finer points of what’s happening on the ground in Russia and across Eurasia, business-wise, without following the annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

So let’s cut to the chase, and offer a few choice examples of what is discussed on top panels.

The Russian Far East – Here’s a discussion on the – largely successful – strategies boosting productive investment in industry and infrastructure across the Russian Far East. Manufacturing in Russia grew by 12.2% between 2015 and 2020; in the Far East it was almost double, 23.1%. And from 2018 to 2020, per capita investment in fixed capital was 40% higher than the national average. The next steps center on improving infrastructure; opening global markets to Russian companies; and most of all, finding the necessary funds (China? South Korea?) for advanced tech.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – As I’ve seen for myself in previous editions of the forum, there’s nothing remotely similar in the West in terms of seriously discussing an organization like the SCO – which has progressively evolved from its initial security focus towards a wide-ranging politico-economic role.

Russia presided the SCO in 2019-2020, when foreign policy got a fresh impetus and the socioeconomic consequences of Covid-19 were seriously addressed. Now the collective emphasis should be on how to turn these member nations – especially the Central Asian “stans” – more attractive for global investors. Panelists include former SCO secretary-general Rashid Alimov, and the current one, Vladimir Norov.

Eurasian partnership – This discussion involves what should be one of the key nodes of the Eurasian Century: the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC). An important historical precedent apply: the 8th-9th centuries Volga trade route that connected Western Europe to Persia – and could now be extended, in a variation of the Maritime Silk Road, all the way to ports in India. That raises a number of questions, ranging from the development of trade and technology to the harmonic implementation of digital platforms. Here one finds panelists from Russia, India, Iran, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

The Greater Eurasian partnership – Greater Eurasia is the overarching Russian concept applied to the consolidation of the Eurasian Century. This discussion is largely focused on Big Tech, including full digitalization, automated managing systems and Green growth. The question is how a radical tech transition could work for pan-Eurasia interests.

And that’s where the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) comes in: how the EAEU’s drive for a Greater Eurasian Partnership should work in practice. Panelists include the chairman of the board of the Eurasian Economic Commission, Mikhail Myasnikovich, and a relic from the Yeltsin past: Anatoliy Chubais, who is now Putin’s special representative for “relations with international organizations to achieve sustainable development goals.”

Gotta ditch all those greenbacks

Arguably the most eye-catching panel on SPIEF was on the post-Covid-19 “new normal” (or abnormal), and how economics will be reshaped. An important sub-section is how Russia can possibly capitalize on it, in terms of productive growth. That was a unique opportunity to see IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, Russian Central Bank governor Elvira Nabiullina and Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov debating on the same table.

It was Siluanov who in fact commanded all the SPIEF-related headlines when he announced that Russia will totally ditch the US dollar in the structure of the National Wealth Fund (NWF) – the de facto Russian sovereign wealth fund – as well as reduce the share of the British pound. The NWF will have more euros and yuan, more gold, and the yen’s share remains stable.

This ongoing de-dollarization process has been more than predictable. In May, for the first time, less than 50% of Russian exports were denominated in US dollars.

Siluanov explained that the sales of roughly $119 billion in liquid assets will go through the Russian Central Bank, and not through financial markets. In practice, that will be a simple technical transfer of euros to the NWF. The Central Bank after all has been steadily getting rid of the US dollars for years now.

Sooner or later, China will follow. In parallel, some nations across Eurasia, in an extremely discreet manner, are also bypassing what is de facto the currency of a debt-based economy – to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars, as Michael Hudson has been explaining in detail. Not to mention that transacting US dollars exposes whole nations to an extra-territorial, extortionary judicial machine.

On the all-important Chinese-Russian front, permeating all the discussions at SPIEF, is the fact that a pool of Chinese technical knowhow and Russian energy is more than able to solidify a massive pan-Eurasian market capable of dwarfing the West. History tells us that in 1400, India and China were responsible for half of the world’s GDP.

As the West wallows in a self-induced Build Back Better collapse, the Eurasian caravan seems unstoppable. But then, there are those pesky US sanctions.

The Valdai Discussion Club Session dug deeper into the hysteria: sanctions serving a political agenda are threatening vast swathes of the world economic and financial infrastructure. So we’re back once again to the inescapable syndrome of the weaponized US dollar – deployed against India buying Iranian oil and Russian military hardware, or against Chinese tech companies.

Panelists including Russian Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Kolychev and the UN Special Rapporteur on the “Negative Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures on the Enjoyment of Human Rights”, Alena Douhan, debated the inevitable new escalation of anti-Russian sanctions.

Another running theme underneath the SPIEF debates is that, whatever happens on the sanctions front, Russia already has an alternative to SWIFT, and so does China. Both systems are compatible with SWIFT in software, so other nations may also be able use it.

No less than 30% of SWIFT’s traffic involves Russia. If that “nuclear “option” would ever come to pass, nations trading with Russia would almost certainly ditch SWIFT. On top of it, Russia, China and Iran – the “threat” trio to the Hegemon – have currency swap agreements, bilaterally and with other nations.

SPIEF this year has taken place only a few days before the G7, NATO and US-EU summits – which will graphically highlight European geopolitical irrelevancy, reduced to the status of a platform for US power projection.

And taking place less than two weeks before the Putin-Biden summit in Geneva, SPIEF most of all performed a public service for those who care to notice, charting some of the most important practical contours of the Eurasian Century.