Month: July 2022

Authored by Daniel Greenfield via The Gatestone Institute,

In the fall of 2019, Facebook announced that it would be writing selected media outlets some very big checks. The launch of Facebook News was billed as a way to give consumers more access to information, but it was actually an attempt at appeasing big media companies.

(Photo by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images)

Facebook, with its older and more conservative user base, had become the epicenter of election conspiracies from the Clinton campaign and its media allies. While Hillary Clinton and her associates were eager to shift the blame for her defeat by relaunching their existing Russiagate smears with false claims that Russian Facebook ads had tilted the election to Donald Trump, the media’s obsession with Facebook was even more corruptly self-interested.

About a third of Americans regularly get their news through Facebook. The tech giant’s algorithms had the ability to make or break the news media, and would go on to break the digital media empires of the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and others in the lefty clickbait brigade.

While Hillary wanted someone to blame for her failures, the media wanted leverage over the company that controlled its fate. The invention of a “fake news” or “misinformation” crisis, the term that the media pivoted to once President Trump made “fake news” his own, was used to persuade Big Tech companies to censor conservatives and promote media content.

Facebook News was a walled garden that pushed the content of the major papers behind Russiagate conspiracies and misinformation alarmism while profiting massively from it. The Russiagate Facebook conspiracy theories provided the rationale for censoring conservatives and for rewarding the media outlets spreading them with special promotions and lots of money.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook paid over $20 million to the New York Times and $15 million to the Washington Post in annual fees. Even more valuable than the big checks was Facebook’s ability to push media content to its users. Last year, sources at several publishers were crediting Facebook News with massive traffic surges, but not everyone was equal.

“Many other U.S. news publishers are getting payments from Facebook to have their content featured in its news tab, but they only get a fraction of the sums paid to the Washington Post, the New York Times,” the Wall Street Journal noted.

Facebook and the media had created a cartel in which media sites created paywalls to raise the value of their content and gain better deals with the social media monopoly. Zuckerberg’s company offered its biggest media critics big checks in exchange for exclusive deals. Both sides claimed that they were “fighting misinformation” with what was really a shakedown and a cartel.

Now that the deal between Big Tech and Big Media is set to lapse, there’s panic in the presses.

In 2020, Zuckerberg had cut out the media middleman by influencing the election directly through the hundreds of millions in “Zuckerbucks” that were handed out to local election offices in primarily Democrat areas, effectively “privatizing” a national presidential election.

Rather than continue to hand out tens of millions to top media outlets, Facebook’s CEO had written a much bigger check to atone for 2016 and put the Russia fake news smear to bed.

That’s bad news for the media.

From its “Meta” renaming to the departure of COO Sheryl Sandberg to the algorithm shifts deprioritizing politics, Facebook is trying to leave the 2016 election behind. Zuckerberg is scrambling for a future for the company in virtual reality headsets and the “Metaverse,” and imitating TikTok’s short video clips, away from the former titular company’s core product.

Meanwhile, Facebook has reported its first sizable loss of users ever.

The Facebook News walled garden going away would be bad news for the privileged media outlets who secured it using a shakedown campaign that depends on conspiracy theories involving the 2016 election. And the panic over the end of the dirty deal in media circles also shows how their election lies were incentivized by the need to create this corrupt arrangement.

When the media accused Facebook of spreading conservative misinformation, the only defense was providing special privileges for the media. Despite the fundamental illegality of such cartels, Democrat politicians and the media openly pressured Facebook to promote “responsible” journalism, by which they meant their own political content, at the expense of “misinformation”.

By then the entire debate about misinformation had boiled down to creating a two-tiered content system across Big Tech that would fund and push media content while suppressing rival material. This urgent need for a news cartel was described as the best way to meet the “threat to democracy” posed by the “wild west” of the internet. This cynical rhetoric carefully avoided any discussion about the benefits that would flow to the media from this arrangement.

The ten million dollar checks certainly didn’t hurt.

It’s no coincidence that just as Facebook might stop writing big checks to the media, the media began discovering new content crises at the social media monopoly.

Recent entries from the Washington Post, which was being paid $15 million, include, “Facebook Gives Gun Sellers 10 Strikes Before Ban” and “Facebook Fails Again to Detect Hate Speech in Ads”: both of which went viral.

The former taps into the new mania over gun control to manufacture yet another crisis involving Facebook.

And crises reward the media cartel.

Or they used to.

At the height of the media’s shakedown of Facebook, the fake news business model was troubled while Facebook appeared to be on the rise, but now both are struggling to survive. Investors aren’t buying Facebook’s Metaverse nonsense and TikTok struck a serious blow to the social media monopoly’s control of social spaces. Facebook, like some other FAANG giants like Netflix, no longer seems inevitable. With the company’s stock price down, Zuckerberg may be less willing to spend tens of millions in blackmail money propping up the media’s failing business model.

Parasites eventually kill the host. The media didn’t deal a fatal blow to Facebook, but its drumbeat of attacks certainly didn’t help the company. The media blamed Facebook for dominating digital advertising, but the idea that users and companies would flock back to their sites if Facebook goes the way of Myspace is every bit as delusional as Russiagate.

Facebook’s corporate blackmail payments and Trump conspiracy theories helped prop up the media, but neither of those would ever last. The media’s big bet on using Big Tech to create a cartel overlooked the fragility of the monopolies it was relying on. Despite recent setbacks, companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon still dominate the internet, but investors are beginning to question whether they can continue to endlessly grow and swallow up everything.

The two interlocking cartels, Big Tech and the media, became politically and then economically interdependent in a way that was both illegal and deeply dangerous to a free society.

The lies, the conspiracy theories and the censorship are products of technopolitical collusion between two sets of corrupt companies that have devastated our politics, our culture and our country.

The two cartels set out to control our speech and our politics for their own power and profit.

They did it by manufacturing a crisis and declaring that their abuses were the solution.

Both Big Media and Big Tech cartels need to be broken up before they break our society.

When historians look back on this chaotic and turbulent period, they will find that few individuals inflicted as much damage on the environment and promoted the interests of the “dirty fossil fuel” lobby as Greta Tunberg, who by shaming and forcing “serious” politicians to pivot toward green energy at a time when there was nowhere near enough green capacity to replace existing sources of energy, sparked what may be the most spectacular self-own in history. And today, the WSJ, Bloomberg and Reuters all wrote about it.

We start with the WSJ which concedes what was obvious to most long ago (see “Will ESG Trigger Energy Hyperinflation” from last June), namely that “an energy-starved world is turning to coal as natural-gas and oil shortages exacerbated by Russia’s war against Ukraine lead countries back to the dirtiest fossil fuel.”

Yes, contrary to the intentions of Green fanatics everywhere, their push to accelerate away from “dirty” fossil fuel has not only backfired spectacularly, but also exposed the hypocrisy and empty promises of so many virtue-signalers, as “from the U.S. to Europe to China, many of the world’s largest economies are increasing short-term coal purchases to ensure sufficient supplies of electricity, despite prior pledges by many countries to reduce their coal consumption to combat climate change.”

Adding insult to injury, the global competition for coal which is now also in short supply after years of declining investment in new mines and resources, has driven benchmark prices to new records this year. Spot coal prices at Australia’s Newcastle port, a key supplier to Asia, topped $400 a ton for the first time last month.

Hilariously, the push for coal is being led by Europe, ground zero of the “green movement” which finally realized that one can’t burn fake virtue or melt posing in front of camera in the winter to keep warm, and is boosting coal purchases to ensure it can keep power flowing to homes and factories after Russia cut gas supplies to the continent. Germany, which not long ago promised to eliminate coal as a power source by 2030, is among the nations now importing more. Economy Minister Robert Habeck called the increased reliance on coal bitter but necessary. Spoiler alert: Germany will not eliminate coal as a power source by 2030, if anything it will be more reliant on it than ever unless it also restarts its nuclear power plants which it, idiotically, shut down not long ago.

Never one to admit it was dead wrong, however, Europe has a response to everything: “Right now the sentiment is that more coal is better than more Russia,” said Alex Msimang, a London-based partner at law firm Vinson & Elkins LLP specializing in the energy sector.

Whatever dude.

Propaganda bullshit aside, coal is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which it has not seen since the industrial revolution. In addition to soaring coal power use in the US (after the sector was left nearly for dead under Obama), China, the world’s biggest coal consumer, is expanding production of the fuel and its use in power generation, spooked by shortages last year that caused electricity cuts and outages throughout the country, energy experts say.

India is also leaning hard on coal as energy demand increases. The nation’s coal-power generation hit a record in April, said Rahul Tongia, a senior fellow at New Delhi-based think tank the Centre for Social and Economic Progress.

Domestic coal production in China and India helped drive a 10% increase in global investment in 2021, the International Energy Agency reported last month. The IEA projects another 10% increase this year as China and India try to stave off shortages.

Coal miners such as Anglo-Swiss giant Glencore are cashing in. Glencore, one of the last major miners still big in coal, said last month that it now expected $3.2 billion in trading profit in the first half of this year, compared with $3.7 billion for all of 2021.

“We expect elevated coal prices to make Glencore one of the leading shareholder-return companies in the market,” Deutsche Bank AG analysts wrote. The company’s already wealthy shareholders can thank idiots like Greta for becoming even richer.

The best part: the global green lobby is about to be silenced forever.

The resurgence of coal, which emits around double the carbon dioxide as burning natural gas, further threatens to set back international efforts to keep global temperatures under 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels, and preferably close to 1.5 degrees, by the end of the century.

That is the goal that more than 190 nations agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris Agreement to avoid the most dangerous potential consequences of global warming. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that emissions, which continue to rise, would need to be drastically reduced by the end of the decade to meet the goal.

Then again, with the west especially skilled at deluding itself, who’s to say the lies won’t continue. Indeed, as the WSJ notes, climate activists and forecasters say they are concerned about a rise in coal use, but see it as a short-term phenomenon in the West and are more worried that the Ukraine war and other geopolitical events are spurring new natural-gas investments that could operate for decades.

“It can be justified but not for long,” said Bill Hare, chief executive of the Berlin-based group Climate Analytics, of the coal surge.

Oh ok, we are confident that Putin will end his military campaign in Ukraine just to keep a bunch of Scandianvian teenagers happy so they can continue spouting nonsense into masked microphones.

Joking aside, what Putin will do is continue selling Russian coal to Europe – yes, the same Europe that pretends to have imposed sanctions on Moscow – because as Reuters writes, “much of the focus on sanctions on Russia’s commodity exports is on crude oil and natural gas, but coal is perhaps the best example of the challenges facing those seeking to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.”

Russia is the world’s fourth-largest coal exporter behind Australia, Indonesia and South Africa, and has the ability to supply both the Atlantic and Pacific basins.

And yes, while Europe – the main buyer of Russian coal –  has proposed a ban on imports it has yet to be even partially implemented, while Japan also plans to end purchases from Russia. Likewise, South Korea has yet to formally sanction imports of Russian energy but is said to be planning for an end to the trade, while China and India, the world’s two biggest coal importers, have no sanctions on Russia and are stepping up imports in order to benefit from steep price discounts, similar to what is taking place in the oil market.

And also similar to oil, where Russian exports have increased since before the war…

… an analysis of Russia’s seaborne exports of coal since the invasion of Ukraine show that it has not only managed to maintain volumes but has actually increased them: while there has been some switching of buyers, the loss of some markets in Europe and Japan has been more than offset by increased buying, especially by India and Turkey.

According to data from Kpler, Russia exported 16.45 million tonnes of coal by sea in June, virtually unchanged from May’s 16.56 million. This level of seaborne exports is an acceleration from the same months in 2021, with June shipments up 3.5% and May up 3.8%. It is also a sharp increase on the three months up to the Feb. 24 attack on Ukraine, when Russia’s seaborne coal exports were 13.43 million tonnes in December, 12.28 million in January and 13.08 million in February.

That said, while Europe has been spouting mostly hot air, Europe’s top buyers of Russian seaborne coal – Germany, the Netherlands and Italy – have started to cut back, with June arrivals at a combined 1.47 million tonnes, down from 2.59 million in May. Yet all that Europe is doing is buying coal from resellers of Russian coal, effectively paying more from the same product. One beneficiary is Turkey. The country which has been supplying Ukraine with military drones, has also ramped up imports of Russian coal, with June arrivals at 1.81 million tonnes, which is the most in any month in Kpler’s records going back to 2017.

Turkey’s imports from Russia were 1.06 million tonnes in May and they have risen every month since February. Much of the excess coal is then resold to Europe at a steep mark up.

Overall, what the coal data shows is that Russia has been able to maintain export volumes, even if it has done so by offering discounts. It also shows that it is difficult to both ramp up imports significantly, even if you want to, with both India and China likely to have hit constraints on securing vessels to buy more Russian coal.

And speaking of supply side constraints, we next go to Blooomberg which writes that the hunt by Europe’s coal consumers to replace Russian cargoes with shipments from across the globe has boosted imports to a key hub by more than a third, helping to fill severely depleted stockpiles.

Coal poured into the Antwerp-Rotterdam-Amsterdam region — a huge transport hub for energy and commodities — in the first half of this year, with imports surging 35% to 26.9 million tons compared with the same period last year, according to Kpler. That has helped ARA coal inventories double to almost 6.6 million tons from more than a five-year low in the first quarter. Stockpiles are now close to record levels seen in 2019, according to Kpler. On the downside, the flood of imports is contributing to major congestion at the ports.

Shipments are soaring as the region scrambles to replace missing Russian product amid fears of continued declines in Russian nat gas exports – and a freezing winter- said Matthew Boyle, lead analyst for dry bulks, gas and LNG at Kpler Insight. Helping to fill the gap is more coal from the US, Colombia and Australia — countries that tend to produce better-quality or so-called high-calorific value material that releases more heat and energy when burned. Of course, the high quality product is also priced accordingly, and as shown in the chart above, Australian coal just hit a record high price, something which has led to Europe’s record 29.1% PPI.

Australian exporters including Sydney-based Whitehaven Coal have had supply requests from European nations, including Poland, and the firm previously offered 70,000 tons of coal in a government aid package sent to Ukraine. Soaring differentials between European and Australian prices have made it viable for traders to send cargoes from the Asia-Pacific region, even after taking into account the high shipping cost for the longer journey. Some low-quality Indonesian coal has also made its way into Europe, although Kpler said they were likely blended with US material with higher calorific value.

Meanwhile, in the latest slap on the face of environmentalists and petulant Scandinavian teenagers everywhere, the competition for a fuel many want to consign to history is escalating as power generators across Asia and Europe seek to secure additional shipments amid an energy crunch. Germany and Austria are reviving idled coal power plants in response to Russian gas supply curbs, while Japan and South Korea are stockpiling the fuel ahead of hotter summer weather.

And in the latest example of chaos theory butterflies and unintended side-effects, the heavy inflow of coal shipments is exacerbating gridlock at the ports.

“We are seeing very high congestion for the main European ports,” said Abhinav Gupta, a drybulk shipping analyst at Braemar. There were 71 drybulk ships waiting at anchor at the area off Antwerp, Rotterdam and Amsterdam as of June 29, triple the five-year average of 24 ships for this time of the year.

Current waiting time for coal vessels amounts to about 10 days, according to Kpler, who said low river levels on the Rhine also contributed to delays. It expects that will improve to about eight days by mid-July.

Coal terminals are currently at full storage capacity, and transporting large volumes of the fuel inland “has become a challenge over the past few weeks,” the Rotterdam port said. The situation has been complicated by a shortage of barges, it said, as many vessels are tied up with Ukrainian iron ore and grain exports.

In short: total chaos, courtesy of years of catastrophic policies at the behest of the green lobby.

As for the discredited ideologue Greta, fear not: she still has a podium where more than 5 million followers lap up each of her carefully scripted and produced tweets:

Tomorrow the European Parliament will decide whether fossil gas and nuclear will be considered “sustainable” in the EU taxonomy. But no amount of lobbyism and greenwashing will ever make it “green”.
We desperately need real renewable energy, not false solutions. #NotMyTaxonomy

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) July 5, 2022

It almost makes one wonder: just how much is Putin paying her? Either that, or as Adam Taggart put it…

This is easily one of the clearest signs our “leaders” are clueless

The West makes de-carbonization a top priority and what’s the result?

A world burning near record amounts of coal and paying record prices for it…

— Adam Taggart (@menlobear) July 6, 2022

Authored by Enrico Trigoso via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a Nobel prize-nominated physician who famously discovered and used an early treatment for COVID, dubbed the “Zelenko Protocol,” passed on June 30, 2022, at the age of 48 after a long battle with pulmonary artery sarcoma, a rare form of cancer.

He was born in 1973, in Kyiv, Ukraine, and came to Brooklyn, New York, in 1977 with his family.

Zelenko earned a B.S. in chemistry with high honors at Hofstra University and then earned an M.D. at the Buffalo School of Medicine in 2000.

He had been practicing in Monroe, New York, in 2020 during the outbreak of COVID-19, and is credited with having treated about 7,500 patients with his method.

The doctor, who could not sit back and wait for politicians and health officials to agree on prescribed treatments, came up with the “Zelenko Protocol”—a combination of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), zinc, azithromycin, and other drugs, including steroids.

He credited divine intervention for the discovery of the abovementioned treatment.

Several experts and doctors who knew him personally expressed their condolences and praised his achievements.

“Dr. Zelenko was not just our hero, he was a man of God,” Kevin Jenkins, co-chair of the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, told The Epoch Times.

“Two years ago, he stepped into the fire to save humanity. The world is better off today because of his God Courage. Our prayers and love go out to Zev’s friends and family. At the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, his dream for the world will never be forgotten. We will work tirelessly to further his legacy and encourage everyone who is worried about the growing menace of medical tyranny to stand with us and make a positive change,” Jenkins added.

The other co-chair of the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, Ann Vandersteel, told The Epoch Times: “Dr. Zelenko was a course correction for humanity. As a man of God, his faith gave him the strength to stand in the breach and deliver his life saving Zelenko Protocol when the medical community faltered. His Protocol saved millions of lives worldwide and is a standard of care for physicians who honor their Hippocratic oath.”

Zelenko, also known as “Zev,” had sent a letter to then-President Donald Trump about hydroxychloroquine.

“I recall hearing President Trump during a March 2020 press conference talk about a letter he received from a country doctor in upstate NY. That letter that saved millions of lives. Zev had discovered that hydroxychloroquine was, in fact, an efficacious treatment for coronavirus. I believe that was the beginning of the end of big pharma, and with the public’s support, we will continue Zev’s fight through the Zelenko Freedom Foundation,” Vandersteel said.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has been traveling among Middle East capitals of late trying to get both sides back the negotiating table surrounding the Iran nuclear deal, and he says time is running out as the window of opportunity is closing.

“If we want to conclude an agreement, decisions are needed now. This is still possible, but the political space to revive the JCPOA may narrow soon,” he tweeted to start out the week. He’s recently been in Tehran as well as Doha, Qatar – talking to both sides as each blames the other for stalled negotiations.

The UN nuclear weapons watchdog IAEA is also issuing fresh warnings of tensions at a boiling point between Iran and Israel, which can potentially be quickly allayed if a way forward is found on the nuclear deal.

IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi warned that a Middle East region arms race could break out if the Islamic Republic gets closer to nuclear weapons capability – though Tehran has long insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes.

“We are now in a situation where Iran’s neighbors could start to fear the worst and plan accordingly. There are countries in the region today looking very carefully at what is happening with Iran, and tensions in the region are rising,” Grossi said in Tuesday remarks cited in Bloomberg. “Political leaders have on occasionally openly stated they would actively seek nuclear weapons if Iran were to pose a nuclear threat.”

As for Israel, while it does not ‘officially’ have declared nuclear weapons, it is widely known that it long ago achieved nuclear weapons status.

Nearly a month ago, Grossi warned that a potential deal would suffer a “fatal blow” if direct talks are not restored in under four weeks. Given the ongoing Ukraine war and resulting anti-Russia energy sanctions by the US and EU, the West is badly in need of restoring Iranian oil to the global market, also as Washington even looks to such “rogue” states as Venezuela.

French President Emmanuel Macron in particular is lobbying hard for a deal to succeed, which is instead hanging by a thread.

He said on Tuesday upon meeting with Israel’s new prime minister that it must succeed:

“We have to defend this (nuclear) deal (with Iran). And take in account the interests of our friends in the area, primarily Israel,” Macron told reporters during a joint press conference with the Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

Israel has long been against it, seeing in any resurrected deal an opportunity the Iranians will use to cover up a nuclear weapons development program. The Israelis have for well over a year sought to thwart it, but have also said that it there is a deal it must be very strong, and include imposed limitations on Iranian long-range missiles as well.

Authored by Kelly Song via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Despite measures to limit U.S. technology exports to the Chinese military, chips designed by U.S. companies still end up in the hands of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), according to a report by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University.

For the report, researchers combed through over 66,000 publicly available PLA purchase records during the eight-month period from April to November 2020 and identified 97 unique, high-end artificial intelligence (AI) chips ordered by the PLA. Nearly all of them were designed by U.S. firms Nvidia, Xilinx (now AMD), Intel, and Microsemi.

The CSET report, released last month, also noted that the researchers couldn’t find any public records of the PLA purchasing the high-end AI chips from any Chinese companies, including HiSilicon (Huawei), Sugon, Sunway, Hygon, and Phytium.

These AI chips are critical components to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for the “intelligentization” (the addition of artificial intelligence to a system, according to Kaikki.org) of its military and to the regime’s goal to gain dominance over the global AI design and manufacturing market.

Even though the CCP has poured tens of billions of dollars into its own semiconductor industry, Chinese companies, lacking “intrinsic knowledge and highly specialized equipment,” still can’t catch up to U.S. design firms, while “South Korea’s Samsung and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company … remain the titans of global semiconductor fabrication,” the report says.

To obtain the U.S.-designed AI chips, the CCP has been bypassing the limitations imposed by recent U.S. export controls.

Dodging Export Controls

The Biden administration has maintained Trump-era controls designed to curtail technology exports to military end users in China. These controls, however, don’t apply to items made outside the United States. Since most AI chips are made in South Korea and Taiwan, the end-user controls have very little power to limit purchases from Chinese entities, the report indicates.

Moreover, the Department of Commerce maintains an entity list through which the U.S. government can deny orders placed by hostile entities. About 500 Chinese firms are on the entity list. However, none of the seven Chinese intermediary suppliers (for the PLA) who ordered the 97 high-end AI chips found by the CSET researchers are on the list. And based on prior CSET research, a fraction of the PLA’s AI vendors are named in key U.S. export control and sanctions lists.

The seven intermediary suppliers are based in Beijing, Tianjin, Zhengzhou, Hangzhou, and Xi’an, and they are affiliated with the Chinese military through organizations including the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, PLA’s Strategic Support Force, and others.

Meanwhile, some of these Chinese intermediary suppliers for the PLA are licensed distributors of U.S. chips.

The CSET report gives the example of Tianjin-based Sitonholy (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., which is listed as a partner on Nvidia’s website. It won a contract to supply Nvidia-designed Titan V graphics processing units to the PLA’s Academy of Military Sciences in April 2020. On its website, Sitonholy claims to be an “elite-level partner of Nvidia” and an “officially authorized distributor of Nvidia products” in China. In addition to the Chinese military, Sitonholy’s clients include 80 percent of universities in China working on AI.

CCP’s Military–Civil Fusion Strategy

Prior CSET research has highlighted that, nationwide, Chinese consumers import the majority of the country’s AI chips overwhelmingly from the United States, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

The CCP’s military–civil fusion strategy is making it almost impossible for U.S. regulators to distinguish between military and nonmilitary end users in China, which is the basis of the majority of U.S. export controls. The fusion model allows the Chinese military to bypass U.S. export controls and have covert access to U.S. technology and equipment through its civil counterparts.

The authors propose that the United States expand its collection of open-source intelligence and adopt new export control measures based on features specific to high-end chips.

The researchers also found that the PLA uses front companies to get what it needs. For example, in August 2020, Beijing Hengsheng Technology Co. Ltd., which specializes in smart processors and high-performance computing, won a contract to supply Nvidia TX1 and Xilinx Virtex-7 processors to a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.

The two email addresses listed as points of contact for Beijing Hengsheng Technology in public financial records are registered for dozens of other technology consulting companies based in Beijing.

“The Chinese market accounts for 25 percent of global AI chip consumption,” the report says, “with AI chips sold to China in 2021 amounting to an estimated value between $2.5 billion and $5 billion.”

For major U.S. chip companies, more than a quarter of their revenues derived from China in 2021, as shown in the table below.

Curtailing the CCP’s access to U.S. technology has associated political and economic costs, the researchers point out. Another challenge would be whether, or how, to compensate for the loss of Chinese market access.

“One solution,” the report says, “could be to provide U.S. companies with viable alternatives to the Chinese market. The CHIPS for America Act of 2022 offers significant incentives for semiconductor companies to build fabrication facilities in the United States.”

In an announcement timed to receive minimal coverage, the State Department on July 4th said that a U.S. review of the shooting of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh concluded the fatal bullet likely came from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). However, in what critics are calling a baseless whitewashing of the incident that ignores key facts of the case, the U.S. government said there’s “no reason to believe” it was intentional. 

The U.S. announcement came 10 days before President Biden is slated to visit Israel on July 14 and 15. The trip will also take him to Saudi Arabia. With the kingdom having slaughtered Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi, both hosts will have the shadow of a slain journalist hanging over them. 

Abu Akleh, a star reporter for al Jazeera, was shot in the head on May 11 in the West Bank town of Jenin, as she and her crew reported on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp. In the immediate aftermath, the Israeli government rushed to blame “Palestinian terrorists firing indiscriminately,” while witnesses said an IDF unit was the clear culprit.   

In a three-paragraph statement, State Department spokeman Ned Price said, “After an extremely detailed forensic analysis, independent third-party examiners, as part of a process overseen by the U.S. Security Coordinator (USSC), could not reach a definitive conclusion regarding the origin of the bullet” as “ballistic experts determined the bullet was badly damaged, which prevented a clear conclusion.”

However, Price said that, after reviewing both the IDF and Palestinian Authority investigations, 

“The USSC concluded that gunfire from IDF positions was likely responsible for the death of Shireen Abu Akleh. The USSC found no reason to believe that this was intentional but rather the result of tragic circumstances during an IDF-led military operation against factions of Palestinian Islamic Jihad on May 11, 2022, in Jenin, which followed a series of terrorist attacks in Israel.”  

It would be one thing for the State Department to say it could not determine whether the killing was intentional; it’s another altogether to declare there’s “no reason” whatsoever to think so. 

Indeed, a weapons expert consulted by CNN noted the tight shot group on the tree where Akleh stood is consistent with carefully aimed fire—and Abu Akleh and her crew were wearing blue helmets and matching vests marked “PRESS.” 

CNN’s investigation by 10 journalists, which drew on 11 videos, eight eyewitness accounts and consultations with weapons and forensic audio experts, concluded Abu Akleh was “shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.” (The video version of the report is embedded below.)  

We should emphasize that CNN isn’t known for routinely casting a critical eye on the Israeli government. Here, as with Khashoggi, mainstream U.S. media outlets seemed more motivated to uncover unflattering facts about a supposed “ally” in a situation where the victim was one of their own. 

While the State Department vaguely attributed the death to “tragic circumstances” during an IDF operation against Palestinian militants, independent investigations found no indication that militants were anywhere near the IDF rifleman’s direction of fire. Video shows a relaxed scene moments before gunfire erupted. Jenin residents smile, make small talk and smoke cigarettes as they watch the al Jazeera crew led by the star reporter Abu Akleh.

According to Reporters Without Borders, Israel has killed at least 30 journalists since 2000, including two Palestinians shot by IDF snipers while reporting on protests near the Gaza-Israel border in 2018.

In the wake of the killing of the Palestinian-American citizen Abu Akleh, members of Congress urged Biden to launch an FBI investigation of the murder—but to no avail.

The State Department’s July 4 statement closes with a perfunctory call for “cooperation between Israel and the PA in this important case” and a vow that the U.S. government “will remain engaged with Israel and the PA on next steps and urge accountability.” Neither cooperation nor meaningful accountability are likely. 

The Palestinian Authority said it “rejects the [U.S.] dismissal of the Israeli occupying forces’ intentional targeting of Palestinian journalists…as mere ‘tragic circumstances’ and not an intentional war crime…this whitewashing will only further institutionalize Israel’s entrenched impunity.” 

In its own statement, the IDF said its investigation “conclusively determined that no IDF soldier deliberately fired at Ms. Abu Akleh” but that it will continue to investigate the incident. 

Abu Akleh’s family released a statement saying they were “incredulous” and that: 

“The conclusory [U.S.] pronouncement that the killing was not intentional…is frankly insulting to Shireen’s memory and ignores the history and context of the brutal and violent nature of what is now the longest military occupation in modern history.”  

For Americans who treasure George Washington’s counsel against “passionate attachments” to foreign governments and Thomas Jefferson’s admonition against “entangling alliances,” the timing of the announcement is an additional affront—the American government chose “Independence Day” for the latest demonstration of its slavish devotion to a faraway state that’s a moral, financial and strategic liability.