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Beijing shuts down pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong

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By Jenny Goldsberry

Thursday saw The Apple Daily’s final newspaper in Hong Kong. This comes after Hong Kong officials froze the paper’s assets, raided the newsroom and arrested three editors at the request of Beijing. Its owner, Jimmy Lai, is already in jail and has been since last fall.

Secretary for Security John Lee defended the shutdown in a press conference last week. “The action targets the use of journalistic work as a tool to endanger national security,” Lee said. “Normal journalists are different from these people. Don’t have any relations with them and keep away from them.”

Apple Daily photojournalist and nine year veteran KT agrees: there are no other journalists brave enough to do what they did. Bloomberg News followed KT around for his final days working for the paper. “There will still be newspapers, there will still be press in Hong Kong,” KT told them in an interview. “But no one is daring enough to report political news.”

Read the full article here.

You can follow Jenny Goldsberry on Twitter @jennyjournalism.

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Elections

Report: Beijing’s military hacked U.S. nuclear firm before Hunter Biden aided Chinese bid to acquire it

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A bombshell report by Just the News explains that “U.S. officials were acutely aware that Beijing was trying to obtain America’s premiere nuclear reactor technology, including through illicit hacking, months before Hunter Biden and his business partners sought to arrange a quiet sale of an iconic U.S. reactor company to a Chinese firm, according to court records and national security experts.”

Hunter Biden attempted to assist CEFC China Energy to acquire Westinghouse, one of America’s most famous electricity and appliance brands, as well as its state-the-art AP1000 nuclear reactor.

Hunter began his work with the Chinese company in early 2016 – while Joe Biden was the sitting Vice President – memos show. According to a copy of the indictment, just 20 months earlier, his father’s Justice Department charged five members of a Chinese military hacking unit for breaching the company’s computer systems in search of intellectual property and internal strategy communications.

Just the News reports:

In May 2014, the five operatives of the People’s Liberation Army’s Unit 61398 were charged with hacking into the systems of six U.S.-based companies across different industrial sectors, including Westinghouse Electric Co., SolarWorld, United States Steel Corp., and a union. The attorney general at the time, Eric Holder, called the breach a classic case of “economic espionage.”

One operative gained access to Westinghouse’s computers in 2010 and “stole proprietary and confidential technical and design specifications related to pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing” pertaining to the company’s advanced AP1000 nuclear reactor design, according to an indictment filed by the Department of Justice.

“Among other things, such specifications would enable a competitor to build a plant similar to the AP1000 without incurring significant research and development costs associated with designing similar pipes, pipe supports, and pipe routing systems,” the indictment reads.

Just the News notes that while there is no evidence at the moment that Hunter Biden was aware of or involved in the hacking efforts by the Chinese, documents previously released by Congress in the Biden impeachment inquiry show Hunter Biden wrote in one text message in 2017 that he believed one of the CEFC officials he worked with, Patrick Ho, was the “f—ing spy chief” of China.

Ho was later indicted in the U.S. and charged with corruption. Joe Biden’s brother James told the FBI he believed CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming had a relationship with China’s communist president.

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